How come there have never been any subterranean megafauna or

food sources.

animals get as big as their diet allows.

because moles are what happens with subterranean fauna

>>8300258
wombats

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>>8300263
What if it's diet is tons of extremophiles bacteria that live off volcanic energy. Like an underground whale fueled by the heat of the core.

Seems like it would be a hinderence to weigh more than half a ton, blind, burried underground and nearly immobile.

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>>8300342
There is a lot of geothermal energy, but there is no way to make use of it.

If a steam engine is as hot as its surroundings the steam will not leave. In a similar way if an organism can't easily dispose of waste products they will build up, limiting how much useful energy it can use. A solid environment also limits the flow of nutrients.

>>8300258
Reason:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law

>>8300258
>badgers are not larger than moles
GTFO fgt pls

>>8300258
Energy. Digging takes a lot of energy. Why do you think digging tunnels is so expensive?

>>8300811
thats not the reason

>>8300428
>that gif
nggggggh

>>8300342
An underground whale wouldn't work, for a few reasons.

An animal has to expend much more energy to move through dirt than it does water, because dirt is so much denser. Whales also float, but you can't float in dirt.

As someone else said, you are limited by diet. There literally just aren't enough extremophiles to support any kind of large animal, as well as you have to be really small to actually feed off of bacteria. Krill are small, about two inches, but still macroscopic. Something has to have microscopic filtering mechanisms to feed on microscopic organisms.

The last issue is that the underground ecosystem doesn't extend very far down. Topsoil contains like 90% (don't know exact statistics but its a significant majority) of organic matter, and only a few feet down the amount of usable nutrients drops to almost nothing. If such an underground whale existed, it would have to live entirely in the first ~10-20 feet of soil, which limits its size significantly.

The biggest issue is diet, though. Other concerns are minor in comparison. There simply isn't enough food to sustain something big.

>>8301622
Yep, it is. When you're twice as long, high and wide and weigh eight times as much the earth you need to move also weighs eight times as much. But you don't have eight times the strength.

>>8301664
Nigga, I know what the scl is. It doesnt apply here.

>>8301693
Second time just claiming without any backup and no rebuttal of what I wrote. Bad form, Peter. Bad form indeed.

>>8301732
I just cant see how it would make this rather unspecified hypothetical creature impossible. We have/had lots of megafauna that function perfectly well even with a 1t+ body weight. You can only apply the s-cl- this broadly when you would simply scale something up.

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>>8301641
What about a humongous semi intelligent slime mold? It could form a symbiotic relationship with extremophile bacteria by transporting them to locations that that'll support them while harvesting them latter for food. It could easily move through the Earth. If it has enough surface area it could even function in a heat engine capacity.

>>8301823
The largest organism is a fungus. It is huge. However neither it nor other subterranean organisms have much need for intelligence, they just eat. And it moves by extending mycelia through the soil rather than moving arms and legs.

A slime mold does not lend itself to intelligence since it neither has specialised cells nor have the structural integrity needed to form stable connections needed for intelligence the way we know it today.