What happened to the giant bugs?

Once upon a time (around 300 million years ago), Earth was home to massive dragonfly-like insects and two meter long millipede-like creatures. Why did they die off? Guests: Ned Snelling, professor of experimental physiology at the University of Pretoria; Jon Harrison, professor of environmental physiology at Arizona State University For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 0:36Speaker 01

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• 1:17Speaker 02

  Hello, Noam.

• 1:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hello, Bird.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  I have a question for you.

• 1:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, hit me.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Which is, when it comes to pre-human times, what would you say is the most exciting pre-human time?

• 1:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, I'm a dinosaur guy.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  That is fair. But I would like to make the case, if you'll allow it, for the Carboniferous instead.

• 1:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 1:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  Can you remind me what the Carboniferous is and when it is?

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Sure. So the age of the dinosaurs is the Mesozoic Era. So mezo, meaning middle.

• 1:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  And then the Carboniferous is in the Paleozoic, so the old era.

• 1:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  Got it.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Carboniferous ends around 300 million years ago, so 50 million years before the dinosaurs really kick off. And you can imagine it having these huge swampy forests. So flowers haven't evolved yet, there are no flowers, but there are tree-sized ferns. If you've ever seen the plant called horsetail, which is this sort of segmented, weird-looking plant, there are massive versions of those. There are club mosses. And things are, again, just very swampy.

• 2:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Very swampy, okay.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  But the thing that I think is really amazing about this predinosaur time is that there were giant bugs.

• 2:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  So we have fossils of huge dragonfly-like bugs.

• 2:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  Wait, how huge are we talking here?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  So we're talking 70-centimeter wingspan.

• 2:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  Give me inches.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  The height of a medium suitcase.

• 2:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  A dragonfly? Like a carrion dragonfly?

• 3:02Speaker 02

  You actually can't carry on a medium suitcase. So its wingspan is bigger than a carrion. And they're carnivorous, by the way. So these are flying, carnivorous-

• 3:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, no.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  -suitcase-sized dragonflies. There are two-meter-long millipede-like bugs. So that's more than six foot, longer than I am tall, millipede-type things.

• 3:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  I'm just imagining, like, my wife yelling from the other room and being like, "You gotta get this millipede, it's huge." And I'm like, "How big?" And she's like, "Two meters."

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's very hard for me to imagine why this is not as exciting to people as dinosaurs.

• 3:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  It seems scarier. Like, they should do Jurassic Park with two-meter-long millipedes.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Again, a lot of these big bug fossils come from the Carboniferous. That's sort of the heyday of these guys. And then there are some from the Permian, but by the end of the Permian, the really giant ones seem to be dunzo. And so, you know, this is unexplainable. And today on the show, I want to ask, what happened to them?

• 4:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  What happened to the bugs?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  The really big bugs.

• 4:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  This is a big mystery.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  This is a bug mystery.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  So I actually thought that I knew the answer to this question because I had learned that it basically had to do with oxygen.

• 4:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  So people have kind of debated aspects of this a bit over the decades, but the thought is that in the Carboniferous, in this world full of plants, oxygen levels might have been higher than they are today. So we are at 21% oxygen. They think the Carboniferous was more like 30% to 35% oxygen.

• 5:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  And that's the thing that allows for the big bugs? Like, more oxygen means bigger bugs?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  I do feel like I've heard this, like, somewhere in the back of my mind. Like, oxygen equals bug size, but I have no idea why.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  So I was talking to a few researchers who've sort of looked into this, thought about this, including this guy named Ned Snelling at the University of Pretoria. So he's like an experimental physiologist. He studies how living things work. His main focus is energy. And he was like, "I study metabolism."

• 5:43Speaker 03

  And metabolism, it defines life. In a way, by studying metabolism and the ability of animals to get oxygen and fuel to cells, I'm actually studying the meaning of life. And what better pursuit is that?

• 6:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, Ned.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  So he was walking me through sort of some of the basics here and the sort of relationship between oxygen and bugs.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  So maybe we should start with how insects breathe. Insects are quite different to humans.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  So you and I, pretty active breathers. Let's take a breath.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Thank you. We're kind of like vacuuming air with oxygen into our lungs right now, right?

• 6:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  That oxygen sort of diffuses into our blood, but then our blood carries it all around the body, and then it diffuses into the cells of our tissues, like our muscles, our organs, et cetera. Insects do things pretty differently.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  So if you look on the side of the body of an insect, if you look very closely, if you have very good eyesight, you might see that there are little ports on the sides of the insect, little valves. These are called spiracles. They have many pairs of them distributed along the abdomen and thorax. And these, yeah, these opening ports then give way to hollow tubes.

• 7:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  So they're like breathing all over their body at the same time, not like through their face like we are?

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 7:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  And so that air, you know, it goes through those holes into the big tubes. And then the tubes, as they go deeper into the body, they split up into lots and lots of smaller tubes, until eventually you get these really small tubes in their tissues known as tracheals.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  And they are responsible for transferring the oxygen from the air in the tracheal system to the cells of the body.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  And the kind of classic explanation here is that the process for insects is just less active than our process. So they can pump oxygen around their tissues. They have these air sac-type things, or almost bellows in parts of their system, that can push oxygen to their really important muscles.

• 8:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  I see.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  But the understanding has been that they seem to have a lot more moments where they're just letting oxygen seep into the tubes. Hopefully, it gets to the end and their cells get oxygen.

• 8:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  So I guess if there's like more oxygen in the atmosphere, it's like they're just in more oxygen and more oxygen will passively diffuse into their body and let them get bigger, right?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  The idea is the bigger you get, the sort of further oxygen would need to go. And so if you're too big, the idea is that maybe oxygen wouldn't get to your really, really internal bits.

• 8:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  But if there's a lot of oxygen? Yeah, okay.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Right. Maybe it's just, it's more likely some oxygen gets all the way down in the tube and so you can grow bigger.

• 8:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  That makes sense.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  You're gonna tell me that that's wrong?

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Well, so like, this idea that tubes limit insect body size, it goes back a long ways, right? 1995, there's a pretty important hypothesis that's published in the journal Nature around this. It points to some research suggesting there was lots of oxygen in the Carboniferous, right? And talks about how that oxygen might have affected life forms at the time. And in the paper, they talk specifically about, like, the big dragonfly guys. And they're like, "Flight requires so much energy, so much oxygen in order for flight to be possible in big insects. They just need more oxygen in the air. Even if they have air pumps, whatever, in a system that relies on diffusion, just need more oxygen. Less oxygen, no big bugs." That's the explanation. I was taught a version of it.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  It sounds super plausible. But Ned just did a bunch of research and published a paper in Nature arguing that it might not be right after all.

• 9:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  Huh. And why?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  I'll tell you what we know.

• 10:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  No, no, no, don't tell me after the break.

• 10:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. Hey, Sonos, give me some music. All right, one of life's great mysteries. You're listening to music in the living room. You gotta grab something from the kitchen. You don't want to take the speaker with you, but you also don't want to miss that beat drop. And this is where I introduce you to the magic of Sonos. Sonos sent me a couple of speakers to try out, so I've got to move two here in the living room. And then I walk down the hall. I get in here to the kitchen, and I got a brand new Sonos Play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer.

• 11:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  And yeah, I didn't miss a second. And I can make each speaker louder or softer in the Sonos app, or if I'm using AirPlay, so I can make it louder in the kitchen without blasting whoever is still in the living room. It's all just easy, and it sounds amazing. These speakers are crisp. They've got great bass. And I'm especially impressed with the new Sonos Play. It packs this truly awesome sound in a much smaller size. So I don't know, if I want to

• 11:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  head outside for a minute. It's super easy and yeah, pretty nice out. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

• 11:54Speaker 02

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• 13:17Speaker 04

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• 13:51Speaker 05

  We have some bugs for you. That show, man. Quiet. Tim, we are the bugs.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Ned says he actually started to question things years ago when he was looking at the oxygen architecture of bugs, essentially. So these tubes and their evolution and their design.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  One of the experiments I did was I flew locusts in a mini-flight chamber to measure their oxygen consumption rate.

• 14:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hold on, before you explain this experiment, what is a mini-flight chamber?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  Do you know what this looks like?

• 14:29Speaker 02

  It's like a tiny wind tunnel.

• 14:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  So I was picturing an F1 wind tunnel.

• 14:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Of course.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  And he basically said, no.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  I probably wouldn't describe my flight chamber as Formula One. It was a bit more rudimentary, but thanks for the compliment.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  He told me to picture a little cylinder with air flowing through it and then a locust flying inside it.

• 14:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  I'm imagining like an air treadmill? Like air blowing one way and the locust kind of flying against it? So it's just sort of flying in place while the air is?

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I'm picturing.

• 15:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's just crazy.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  He was able to like measure the air on the backend also, or like properties of the air on the backend. And what surprised him in this research was that the locust did not seem winded by the... no pun intended. But like, the locust didn't seem winded by their exercise.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  So if humans went for a run, especially if that run was quite energy-intensive, say we were sprinting for a period of time, after we finished exercising, our oxygen consumption rate would remain elevated.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  We would pant. We stop running and we're just go like...

• 15:49Speaker 02

  And by we, I mean me.

• 15:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sam.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  No, Birdman, I run a mile. I don't pant at all. But so his locusts, they did not seem to do like the locust version of panting.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  They recovered from exercise immediately. And so what that told me, or at least indicated to me, made me suspicious, was that, hey, this insect has no problem getting oxygen to its cells. It's so good at getting oxygen to its cells that even after flight, which is the most energy-intensive form of exercise, even after that, it recovers almost immediately.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  And so he was like, that's weird. The whole basis for sort of thinking that oxygen levels killed off massive dragonflies was insects supposedly are less efficient at getting oxygen to parts of their body than we are. They need more oxygen in the atmosphere in order to get big because they have this passive breathing or whatever. But if in this experiment, the insect had no issues getting oxygen to its cells, right? If it's not even panting after exercise.

• 17:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  It does raise the question of, are they actually inefficient at getting oxygen?

• 17:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  So to investigate this a little bit more, Ned wound up cutting up locust flight muscles to just look at them more closely.

• 17:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  Like in the wings?

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Uh, yes. So the muscles that power the wings. Imagine a muscle like this is like a city, right? Every day, that city sort of needs to be supplied with food. It's like the muscle needs oxygen. So the city has trains coming in to deliver supplies. And if the trains are really fast and can just carry huge amounts of supplies, right? If they're true freight trains and this is a really efficient system, maybe you can have just one track come into the city and that'll supply the city with everything that it needs, right?

• 18:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  High-speed rail.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  But if your trains are not great at carrying supplies, they're just kind of slow, low-passy.

• 18:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  More of the choo-choo variety.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're choo-choo trains. Maybe you need a lot of train tracks coming in to make sure that you have enough supplies for the city, right? Maybe you need actually a pretty big percentage of your city just to be given over to trains and train tracks.

• 18:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  So basically, looking at these flight muscles, Ned wanted to see how much space in the muscle was given over to train tracks coming in, to sort of these oxygen tubes bringing in oxygen.

• 18:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Got it.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  And for comparison, our hearts, they have pretty active muscles because they're beating all the time. And there's some different numbers here, but Ned was telling me that something like 10% of the space in our heart muscles is just blood vessels, just trains carrying in supplies. When he looked at the locust flight muscles, he found that less than 1% of the flight muscles were given over to, in their case, oxygen supply tubes.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  It's a very small percentage of the flight muscle dedicated to these oxygen supply structures.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  So yeah, you would think that locusts would require lots of train tracks to supply the city with oxygen, that they would not be so efficient. But that's not the case.

• 19:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  That being said, this is just one bug, right? Who knows if it's going to hold up for other bugs? Ned knows.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Because several years later, he, you know, he was still intrigued by this idea. And he wanted to look at several insects, but specifically, he wanted to look at the flight muscles of really small flying insects and the flight muscles of really big flying insects and everything in between to see, as you go up in size, does something change?

• 20:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  Like even if bugs are very efficient, it still could be, at a, at a larger size, this still could be the reason why they're struggling.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 20:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  So he works at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. There are lots of big bugs around, apparently, like the goliath beetle, which, as you can imagine from its name, is big.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  It's not quite the size of a baseball. And if I placed one on the palm of your hand, you wouldn't be able to see the palm of your hand.

• 20:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, God, that's...

• 20:48Speaker 02

  So it's big.

• 20:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  Really big. I just like, don't, I don't love bugs.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Okay, well, you've come to the wrong place.

• 20:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, I do want to know. I want to know what happened to the bugs.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  So basically, he's running around his campus. He's trying to catch insects of different sizes.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  To say that caused some interest in colleagues and students would be an understatement. I had students directing me to different vegetation where I could find different types of insects, particularly large species of insect. So that was a big help.

• 21:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  I just, just imagining this, this professor running around just trying to catch bugs. I love it.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Um, and he was, you know, he was just trying to get as much sort of diversity in sizes as possible. And so in the end, he got 44 kinds of insects, a whole range of sizes, dissected them to get their, their flight muscles, did a comparison and basically wanted to see like, was there a relationship between how big the insect was and sort of how much of its flight muscles were devoted to oxygen delivery? Were these cities overrun with train tracks as, as the insects went up in size? Or did the number of train tracks remain relatively consistent?

• 22:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  Did it just stay as like one high-speed rail going into the city?

• 22:10Speaker 02

  And the answer was that, yes, bigger bugs did need a little more space for oxygen tubes.

• 22:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  But not dramatically more space. A bug could actually be 10,000 times bigger than another bug and only need sort of a tiny bit more oxygen tube space in its flight muscles.

• 22:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  Why? So, so it really might not be the oxygen, then?

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Well, that's why Ned is sort of skeptical.

• 22:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  He thinks this study shows that, that we need to find a, a different explanation for what killed them off. I did talk to a researcher who suggested that it could have been an environmental issue. So as you're transitioning from the Carboniferous into the Permian, the world is just changing a lot. Things got hotter, drier on Earth. And with that just comes size reduction in animals.

• 23:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  We're seeing that with the, um, you know, shrinking birds and climate change.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then another guy said, you know, big animals in general, uh, there are just fewer of them. They're, they're rarer. And so it's, it's easier to kill all of them off. It's just less likely that at least one of them survives. And then a study from 2012 looked at a later moment when there was actually a lot of oxygen in the air, but other things had evolved to fly around. So this was this sort of later in dinosaur times. And it showed that insects actually got smaller then, which suggests that, uh, maybe insects have a hard time being big when they're just sort of other things in the air to take them out.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  So that might be the thing that's more affecting their body size is if there are things that can hunt you, that can also fly, and you're bigger, you're just easier to hunt.

• 24:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, it feels easier to catch a suitcase-sized dragonfly than a tiny little one zipping around.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Sure. But all of that being said, there is also still the possibility that we should not throw the oxygen idea out entirely. So as he was doing all this work, Ned ended up connecting with this environmental physiologist whose whole focus is insects. His name is John Harrison. And he has actually been skeptical of the, the too little oxygen killed off the big bugs hypothesis since at least the 90s.

• 24:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  An OG oxygen skeptic.

• 24:53Speaker 07

  I thought, well, that would probably just take a year or two to disprove.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  30 years later, he is still not sure that they have all the evidence they need to declare it wrong necessarily. So he ended up working with Ned so much on all of this that he was listed as a co-author on this paper.

• 25:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  But he's cautious still because he thinks that stuff like molting might be affected by oxygen levels. And he also thinks that, like, in this paper, they, they've shown that flight muscles don't depend on this oxygen stuff so much, but other tissues that are further off in the body or, or less well-supplied, he thinks those tissues might still have an issue.

• 25:36Speaker 07

  You know, the legs, the, the muscles in the legs may be harder to ventilate than the flight muscles, which can be, maybe really easily ventilated. So that's a possibility.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  He and Ned don't totally agree on this point. Ned feels like they've addressed this in the paper, but John does not think that they have a final answer yet.

• 25:55Speaker 07

  I do think we've made a lot of progress, but, um, yeah, I don't think it's definitive yet in my own mind.

• 26:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  The murderer is still at large.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  I will say, though, that, uh, one thing Ned and John agreed on is that it's just hard to understand bugs in general. John was telling me that there are still questions about their breathing, for example. And then Ned was talking about the questions we have about the insect die-offs we're currently seeing. So we did an episode a while back where we talked about how we are losing a lot of insects, but people are struggling to work out, you know, how many insects we're losing, why that's happening. And this is currently, you know, not 300 million years ago, but in the 21st century. And we still have a lot of questions around it.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Perhaps if we are able to work out what's caused a decline in the size of insects prehistorically, it also might help us to try and work out what is causing insects to decline currently. Because at the moment, we really don't have a good idea of really what's, what's causing that. You know, if we understand what happened prehistorically, it might actually help us to try and tease apart and work out what's happening or what's not happening at the moment.

• 27:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, that's so interesting.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Okay, bug time is over.

• 27:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  Thank you. No more imagining headfuls of beetles.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by me, Byrd Pinkerton. It was edited by Joanna Solotaroff and Meredith Hoddinott. Meredith runs the show and Joanna is editorial director. Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design. Melissa Hirsch checked the facts. Noam Hassenfeld does our music. Valerie Schenkman, Jake Reynolds, and Kareem Kareya are the fact that house flies do something like tasting with their feet. And thank you always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Noam. Huge thanks also to John and Ned for being so generous with their time and to Conrad Lavandera for talking me through questions of insect gigantism. If you have thoughts about bugs or honestly, thoughts about anything at all,

• 28:23Speaker 02

  please reach out at [email protected]. We love to hear from researchers about what they're working on, from people who have questions they'd like us to unexplain. [email protected]. If you would like to support the show, I cannot tell you how much it would mean to us if you would become a member of Vox. It is very easy to do. Just go to vox.com/members and you'll get access to all of Vox's journalism, but you'll also know that you are supporting all of Vox's journalism. And for those of you who have emailed us to let us know that you signed up because of Unexplainable, you're the best and you're right up there with the people who also have left us nice reviews or, uh, the people who have told people

• 29:08Speaker 02

  in their life about the show. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and we will be back very soon with another episode about everything that we do not know.

• 29:33Speaker 08

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• 30:03Speaker 09

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.