I COULD USE YOUR HELP TIP JAR TARANTULA MOVIE REVIEW THEM MOVIE REVIEW TINY VARMINTS THAT GROW INTO GIANTS - 1950s through early 1960s movies

VARMINTS MADE HUGE BY
RADIATION!

TARANTULA!

SCIENCE MOMENT BY E.C.MCMULLEN JR.

It doesn't matter how nutrutious Professor Gerald Deemer secret nutrient is, that by itself can't make giant varmints.

For the varmints to grow they need more than nutrients. In the case of mammals and arthropods, they need protein, which is the main building block of mass in nearly all multicellular animals.

Yet with that said, you will notice that all varmints grow to a certain, "adult" size. There are variations to be sure, even extremes of variation. Unfortunately, the more extreme those variations get, the more physically painful life is for those people.

But let's say that Dr. Deemer's secret radioactive nutrient is just so damn amazing that it somehow rewires the digestive system - a machine of many different moving parts - to all work in harmony with one another to create 100% efficiency. Then it miraculously goes beyond that to rewire the entire body to use that 100% efficiency.

It still can't work for a few reasons and all of those reasons are interlocked with each other. That is, like a Fire Triangle, if you remove just one thing it stops everything else.

Caloric Intake
It'd be a miracle (supernatural) to get an entire living body functioning at 100% efficiency from "nutrient" injections. In addition to what the body would set aside for, in the case of this movie, growth (mass), there are also calories. That significant part of the digested food that goes to supplying energy to the body for movement throughout - including that hyper-revved up metabolism!

Finding enough food for a creature that genetically tops out at a few ounces, rewired to support an exoskeleton weighing thousands of tons, all in a single generation, is an impossible feat if it lived in an aboreal landscape where living food is plentiful. This tarantula is growing up in the scrub of a desert where life forms - predator and prey - are built for speed and ambush - hiding in nooks and crannies that are too small for a giant spider to get at. And that prey is getting smaller all the time (in relation to how big the tarantual is getting. Rabbits and coyotes are going to be like baby cockroaches to a four story tall tarantula, and nowhere near as plentiful in the desert.). Spiders including tarantulas are ambush predators, but this one is burning tons of calaories hauling ass all over the desert and getting bigger every time we see it.

The metabolic energy we get from food provides calories for function (hearing, seeing, thinking, moving, digestions, etc.). It also provides maintenance (healing and repairing tissue) for function and that takes calories as well. Just growth (building muscle mass or, in this case, muscle mass plus growth) alone uses up a staggering amount of calories and this spider is a tarantuala. Unlike a mammal's endoskeleton (interior) an arthropod like a tarantula's exoskeleton (exterior) can't grow and, in this movie, Spidey significantly grows several times a day. That means its shedding a fully formed exoskeleton several times a day - virtually an entire body. There should be a trail of giant tarantula exoskeletons - each bigger than the last - all over the damn desert in just the first 24 hours.

All that from a serum that is only supposed to make creatures healthy?

Yeah. Not happening. Now let's talk about why TARANTULA!'s size, or the size of any varmint, can't grow to massive proportions like we see here.

SCIENCE MOMENT BY KELLY PARKS

THEM

Living things are built for their size. Just making something bigger usually doesn't work.
For example, the 50 foot woman in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. If you take a 5 foot tall woman who weighs 100 lbs and somehow make her ten times her size, how much will she weigh? 1000 lbs? No, because weight is a function of volume, which increases as the cube increases (this is the square-cube law). Thus if you're ten times bigger, you have 10³ or 1000 times the volume, so she now weighs 100,000 lbs (50 tons!).

However -

But how much stress your bones can stand is a function of their cross-sectional area, which increases as the square (not the cube). So her bones are 100 times stronger but she weighs 1000 times as much, 10 times more than her bones can stand. She crumbles.

That's just one example - and only the beginnings of her problems, or the problems of ants made 250 times bigger than normal.

This science moment originally created and copyright in 2007 with updates copyright 2022 by E.C.McMullen Jr.

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