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Monster Giant Dragonflies Coming To Kill Us
“As you become a larger insect, more of your body is taken up by tracheal tubes. Eventually you reach a limit to how big you can be. The more oxygen that is available, the smaller that system needs to be and the bigger you can grow.”
—I'm a little offended by Arizona State University paleobiologist John VandenBrooks' use of the second person here. But I'm much more concerned about the fact that he and his team of scientists have been breeding giant dragonflies in oxygen-rich apocalypse chambers. 50 percent more oxygen = 15 percent larger dragonflies. So you figure if a normal dragonfly can sew a human mouth shut so we starve to death, these new ones ought to be able to bite off our arms and stitch them onto our foreheads.
You just scared me through the internets.
They'll sew baby's arms ALL OVER YOUR BODY. AGH.
something something Human Centipede joke
Hilarious. Dragonflies are one of the most harmless insects (to humans, anyway) out there. They make life terrible for mosquitoes, which = F___ YEAH.
When I was a kid, I used to collect dragonflies, that I spent painstaking hours trying to catch with butterfly nets. Everyone thought I was nuts.
Downside of dead specimens was that they do not keep their vivid colors postmortem :(. I had a glass case for them and everything, but eventually they got eaten by weevils and disintegrated.
They are maybe my number one favorite insect. (Those crazy-horned stag beetles are pretty cool, too. And water skimmers, I like watching them.) But dragonflies are so beautiful, and the way they weave when they fly. And, yes, anything that eats mosquitos gets like a plus a million.
Um, don't forget the larvae. A large dragonfly means a large dragonfly larva. And those things are basically moving mouth parts designed to eat things big.
Dragonfly larvae eat mosquito larvae, which, you know, double win.
I always dreamed of having a pet dragonfly that would sit on my shoulder and keep mosquitos away, so maybe that dream will come true finally!
Of course I'd have to train it first not to rip off my arms, but hey…
in the coming war between machines and the primates i will side with the insects
don't be offended. he's just anticipating our impending metamorphoses.