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Hamstersbane
Acolyte



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  		   Posted 12/14/2007 9:27 AM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
This is a question about fire ants (Solenopsis invicta). The fire ant latches on with its jaws and stings, injecting a necrotizing alkaloid known as piperidine. In people, this causes the well-known itching and white pustules.
 
What would be the effect of, say, a fire ant about 2.5 to 3 feet long (76.2 cm to 91.4 cm) stinging a person, assuming the thing didn't simply rip your leg off when it bit down? That's a great deal more of the poison.
 
Also, assuming all things are proportional, how much weight could this thing lift/carry/move? We always hear about how strong ants are relative to their size...I'm wondering how that would translate to the larger size.
 
Thanks!

Jeff Parish
Jennings Grove, an online horror serial novel
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Dragon Angel
Lord Dragon



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  		   Posted 12/14/2007 11:32 AM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
As ants grow, they actually become weaker. An ant that is 3 feet long would be curshed under its own weight and be unable to move. Check out Aliens and Alien Societies by Ben Bova for a description of why. As I recall it is because their exoskeleton is proportional to their surface area instead of their volume. Their weight (volume) goes up as a cube of their dimensions, while their surface area (exoskeleton) only goes up as the square. That's why you never see large insects.

There's also the fact that they have no lungs, so they wouldn't be able tro get enough oxygen to survive.

To answer your question, if this large ant tried to bite you, it would break itself on your skin.

read free fiction and poetry at http://www.geocities.com/davidolson22/index.html
 
Part dark, part light. And gooey in the middle.

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tchernabyelo
Acolyte

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  		   Posted 12/14/2007 11:40 AM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Large insects can exist - there were very large dragonflies in prehistoric times. However they aren't very efficient, and so got predated out of existence once there was something to predate them.

Giant insects on alien planets are perfectly plausible, but will be extremely slow and, by mammalian terms, feeble, though doubtless poison might remain a threat (but why would a three-foot ant have evolved poison?).

Brian Dolton
 
Yi Qin stories:
"The Box Of Beautiful Things" - IGMS#3
"The Man Who Was Never Afraid" - Abyss and Apex #20
"Where No Wind Blows" - Staffs & Starships #2 (forthcoming)
"What The Sea Refuses" - Black Gate (forthcoming)
"At Blue Crane Falls" - Abyss and Apex (forthcoming)
"What The Heart Bears" - Black Gate (forthcoming)
 
Other Land Of Wind And Ghosts stories:
"The Dragon Path" - Fictitious Force (forthcoming)
"Three Out Of Four" - Sorcerous Signals (forthcoming)
 
Stories in other settings:
"The Unicorn Hunter" - OG's Speculative Fiction #8
"When Winter Came" - ASIM#32 (forthcoming)
"Cold Fire" - Flashing Swords (forthcoming)
"Call Centre" - Necrotic Tissue (forthcoming)

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Hamstersbane
Acolyte



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  		   Posted 12/14/2007 12:03 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
OK...need just a little bit less reality. This is actually for an anthology based on giant creature features like "Them!" or "Eight Legged Freaks" (or even Food of the Gods).

I'm trying to figure the above out with the assumption that the ants could grow that large without any detrimental side effects.

Jeff Parish
Jennings Grove, an online horror serial novel
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T A Markitan
aka Wicked



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  		   Posted 12/14/2007 12:07 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Bugs! Yay!

I am afraid I can't help you out specifically with ants, tarantulas are my specialty. There are plenty of giant bugs now, I don't see to many obstacles in creating mutant ants. Actually, I can't think of anything scarier than ants, even at slightly larger sizes. They are very structured creatures.

I believe one of the working theories as to why, in part, insects reached some staggering sizes in prehistoric times was attributed in a rise in oxygen concentration, at about 35%

I think the sky is the limit as for the venom thing. Venom varies from species to species. For example, a Sydney funnel web spider has the potential to be deadly to humans, but an Arizona Blond tarantula (Aphonopelma chalcodes) of larger size is no more harmful than a bee sting.

I do horrible things to punctuation.

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T A Markitan
aka Wicked



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  		   Posted 12/14/2007 1:32 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Hamstersbane said...
OK...need just a little bit less reality. This is actually for an anthology based on giant creature features like "Them!" or "Eight Legged Freaks" (or even Food of the Gods).

I'm trying to figure the above out with the assumption that the ants could grow that large without any detrimental side effects.


Oops. Sorry, I guess we posted at the same time.
If you're talking B movie rules, I would just figure out how much a three foot fire ant weighs (don't ask me, I can't do math to save my life).
I think it is said the average ant can lift five times its own weight and pull fifty times its own weight.
The venom has all sorts of possibilities. Sounds like a relatively slow, horrible death, as your tissue dies and dissolves.

I do horrible things to punctuation.

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Dragon Angel
Lord Dragon



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  		   Posted 12/14/2007 1:36 PM (GMT -5)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
There'd probably be about 1000 or 10000 times more venom than for a regular ant. I'm sure we can't get any test subjects for tha kind of injection, but it would not be pretty.

read free fiction and poetry at http://www.geocities.com/davidolson22/index.html
 
Part dark, part light. And gooey in the middle.

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