This one’s for JusticeforPorygon!
A lion sized ant would asphyxiate rather quickly. Breathing through spiracles/tracheae doesn’t scale well.
And the lions would quickly get too cold by having way too much surface area.
Scientific accuracy is no fun for shrinking and growing things.
The smallest mammal (Etruscan shrew) is about the same size as the largest ant (Driver ant Queen). You probably need to speed up the tiny-lion metabolism, but in general the mammal body plan can work around that size.
On the other hand, to scale up insects to the size of a lion, you would need to completly redesign the respiratory at least and the entire exoskeleton construct will also be pushed to it’s structural limits.
Downscaling mammals is much more realistic then upscaling arthropods.
But there were giant ants during the Eocene
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanomyrma
For the sake of argument, let’s assume a hyper-rich oxygen environment.
Yeah well… “giant” ants still aren’t lion sized. Or even cat size. Perhaps “oh wow that’s a big ant” big, but not actually that… big.
The fossils indicate that the males grew up to 3 centimetres (1.2 in) and the queens grew to 7 centimetres (2.8 in). It had a wingspan of about 16 centimetres (6.3 in).[7][8]
But quickly enough to prevent it from biting you in half?
I would pat a cat-sized plush antlion instead.
Fight? I’m sure you meant “keep as a pet”. And obviously the microlions. I’d feed them ground beef and try to maintain a breeding population, eventually sell them as pets.
Yeah. This is the only correct answer. I just wanted to keep with the Lion Fighting theme that popped up last night.
I’ve played “it came from the desert”. I’ll take the tiny lions any day.
Just toss a bucket of water at them or adopt them and keep them in a terrarium.
1k ant-sized lions, easy. just run over them while high-stepping. how is this a question?
Yeah. I didn’t really balance it, I just mashed the recent lions vs ants/bees/blobfish(?) posts with the classic AMA question from Reddit.
Could an ant sized lion actually hurt you? Their teeth are built to wrap around and grip thinner pieces of the body. If they are shrunk down, I don’t know how efficiently they could work their way through skin. It’d be like trying to bite a wall or something.
Don’t know about that, but think how strong ants arenin proportion to their weight. If that carried through, it could probably just batter you with its legs/head.
Ant size lions are too small. Can I have 50 tennis ball sized lions instead, please? (And utter chaos would ensue…)
It’s be a racket.
