Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi, I'm brain with today's question, how do flies and other insects for that matter, breathe? Insects breathe in a way that's very different from us. Instead of having a central place to gather oxygen like human lungs and a transport system like our heart and blood to deliver the oxygen to all of the cells of the body, insects have a system of fine branching tubes called a
tracheal system that's spread all over their bodies. Imagine that you are an oxygen molecule in the atmosphere and you're about to be breathed by an insect. You enter a tiny hole on the insects thorax or abdomen, called a spirical. The spircle is the opening of a long tube called a trachea. You proceed down this tube, which is long, air filled and branching. You continue to move through the branches until you reach a tiny fluid filled dead end
called a tracheole. You dissolve into the fluid, and from the fluid you diffuse or move across the wall of the tracheol into an insects cell such as a muscle cell. The movement of air through the tracheal system of most insects relies solely on diffusion. Because most insects rely on diffusion, which occurs best over small distances, they cannot get very large. You'll not see huge ants as biggest buildings like in the movie Them, because enough air could not diffuse that
far into their bodies to keep their cells alive. However, some larger insects can use their abdominal muscles to force air in and out of the tracheal system in a limited way. So with this system in mind, it would be difficult to stray angle a bug. However, if the tracheal system fills with water, it takes much longer for air to diffuse through the system. Therefore, an insect can drown fairly easily for more illness and thousands of other topics.
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