Brush, Bugs and Beasties
Feb. 16th, 2004 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
herewiss13Because this got a _lot_ longer than anticipated:
Darwin is starting to give me a headache. In terms of the actual storyline I've got a good number of incidents involving the local wildlife which will (hopefully) be entertaining.
The problem is what the wildlife is doing when not interacting with the protagonist.
The whole purpose of Darwin (well, one of the big purposes) is to put the old Golden-Age Venusian Jungle Planet into a modern ecological and evolutionary context. In order to make it "exciting", I've ramped up energy being taken in by the biosphere at least threefold*. So there's more biomass, things grow faster and, in general, the megafauna or, at least, macrofauna is packed in pretty tightly.
Why have I done this? Because the Amazon is actually a pretty boring place, unless you like bugs. It's empty, quiet (mostly), and the only birds and animals you see tend to be either very far away, very high up, or both. And what's on the ground isn't too impressive. The largest things get are peccaries (pigs) and jaguars. Now jaguars aren't to be sneezed at, but it's not like you find one around every other tree.
It's easy to just use the stereotype image of a jungle, the kind you find on illustrated posters of the rainforest, but there are problems with that too. Even if there's enough energy into the system to support high numbers of animals in that tight, diverse, cluster, they're still rubbing shoulders in fairly unnatural ways.
If, for example, a large predator's range only needs to be about 5 square miles, that still means there's an _awfully_ crowded mess of prey species...and you've usually got several layers of predation to consider as well. And with 5 square mile ranges, it's a lot easier for one large predator, patrolling its borders, to stumble into another large predator patrolling its borders. This is not a scenario you encounter very often with predators, like tigers, which have exclusive home ranges of hundreds of miles or more. It happens occasionally, but with a 5 mile range it'd practically be a daily occurence! So how do you cope with that? How do the predators cope with that? What would selection pressures do to alter their behavior toward an optimum?
Typing this all out, I'm tempted to chuck territoriality out the window all together. When prey is that tightly packed, over a large area, why even bother staking out a range? Just browse the smorgasbord as you see fit, and try not to rub elbows with your neighbors.
The other stereotype that I'm finding easy to fall prey too is "Dinosaur Planet." This is especially tricky because I do want some aspects of the Mesozoic. Gigantic predators and herbivores are cool. In this model, you don't have territorial problems because just about everything migrates continually. Even the fastest growing set of plants are going to be hoovered up by a large herd of pseudo-sauropods. And it also helps in terms of the human economy. If a small group of hunters, with, essentially, a large razor-edged boomerang, can take down Apatosaurus...that's a lot of meat for the tribe/clan/whatever. That's an image I want.
It's actually one I need because the whole reason for the plot is that the protagonist's lander gets accidentally flattened under a dying Giant Beast of some sort (in a darkly humorous scenario) and he's stranded and has to trek all the way from the equator to Landfall because that's the only place with equipment he can use to contact his ship. That's the story. He's going to traverse a continent with stalwart companions (who keep him from getting killed). I'm going throw in some local politics too, but that's not my specialty (if I can be said to have one), so the details remain quite nebulous.
The problem with Dinosaur Planet is two-fold:
1) While small dinosaurs existed, you only really think about those larger than your car. Lovely for some encounters, but you want human-scale animals too...not just something that might step on you.
2) I'm a tremendous fan of covergent evolution...and Darwin's comparative zoology isn't going to be too sophisticated ("Fins, gills: we'll call it a fish."), but you still can't pull species directly out of the Jurrasic. It may be that there are optimum feeding strategies for multi-ton animals, the same way that there are optimum bodies for ant and termite eaters, but writing about T. Rex and Diplodocus with funny colors and different names just won't cut it. So you've got to be extremely vigilant when brainstorming/daydreaming these guy to stay away from fossil archetypes, if possible.
The balance I'm trying to strike is somewhere between "Crowded Rainforest" and "Dinosaur Planet". But the dynamics remain slippery. Our Hero runs into a fierce dog-bear and must escape. Nice, dramatic, etc. But what is this dog-bear doing when he _isn't_ part of the plot? What are his prey species doing when not escaping from him? If the landscape is as crowded (compared to our own) as I'm making out; how do animals sleep without being bumped into by something which might consider them edible? You've got to come up with different survival strategies, tweak the population densities, alter behavior and defenses to compensate. But then all those tweaks have their own ramifications that need to be followed through, because they're sure to lead right back into factors you already thought of as "fixed".
This is the problem of going at ecology piecemeal. I think up a critter, say "that'd be cool", and then whip out some evolutionary history and a few ecological specs. But I do each one of these in a vacuum and then try to put the puzzle pieces together at a later date. If there's a way to invent/outline/diagram the whole thing at once, I don't know what it is. Even with a food web or something, each species gets invented out of whole cloth one at a time.
Heck, the minute you set down a predator/prey relationship, they start changing right before your eyes! If the prey has a clever defense strategem, it can't be _too_ clever, because they still get eaten occasionally. And if the predator has a particular attack strategy, shouldn't the prey have evolved to compensate for it already? The Red Queen in action and in maintaining relative position, nothing stays the same. The application of rational thought causes animals to blur.
_______
That actually wasn't even the problem I'd intended to rant about tonight, but it serves as a nice intro.
The real problem is describing the microecology. If the large-scale world is extremely energetic and competitive, how does that reflect on the local bacteria? This is more important than you might realize, because if Darwinian Germs are as fierce and diverse as their larger counterparts, Humanity is toast the moment they breathe the air. The only salvation would be some sort of massive biochemical incompatibility, but that would seem to put the kibosh on a lot of large-scale interactions. If you and the germ aren't speaking the same language, are you going to be able to digest the plant or the meat?
I'm _tempted_ to stipulate that bacteria are already faster and more fecund than the macro-ecology, here on Earth. So, having reached its theoretical limit, Darwinian germs aren't a _great_ deal more competitive than our own. What they're likely to do is to highly specialize, since rainforests are home to tremendous diversity. "A place for every parasite and every parasite in its place." The last chapters of "Yellow Fever, Black Goddess" talk about an intriguing concept called "genetic herd immunity". The entire population doesn't have to be immune from something in order to be safe. Just _enough_ individuals have to be resistant to keep it from spreading, breaking the chain of contagion short. Ranchers apparently take advantage of this, only vaccinating some of their cattle. This has interesting implications for tree diversity and dispersal in the rainforest too. You don't want to be too close to the next member of your own species because if it gets infected by a dedicated, specialized infection, you'd be likely to be susceptible too...so everyone keep their distance. There are enough different types of trees in the rainforest for them all to do this and still have a crowded jumble of trunks.
So anyway, I've handwaved away the threat of continual superplagues rendering my Darwinians extinct. But that still leaves the "virgin field" problem. _Initial_ biochemical incompatibility is ok. Darwinian flus don't understand our cell receptors, etc. and our flu doesn't understand theirs. But that's not going to be the case forever, and once that first flu bug gets a clue, the Darwinians would have _no_ prior immunological experience with it.
Turns out, if you make Darwinian germs just a _tad_ more efficient than our own, the problem solves itself. Every once in a great while, a Darwinian Germ learns to infect people. It does so very successfully. In fact, once the initial hurdle of trans-species contagion is cleared, it does so too successfully. Time between infection and death is too quick to be sustainable, especially since people on Darwin are dispersed into small, basically isolated, pockets.
The Darwinians would call these things Flash Plagues. All of a sudden, within 2-3 days, or even quicker, an entire Clave drops out of the global communication net. This sort of event would be random...and relatively rare, like earthquakes or other natural disasters. The entire Clave drops dead almost in unison and the disease disappears. Most of the time, it'd just go completely extinct, but there's always the danger of spores or some such, so the Clave would have to be torched from a distance before anyone attempted to repopulate. It's not quite as drastic as it sounds because the Clave (as I'll get around to explaining 4-5 more history chapters down the road), is essentially shaped like a stone stadium where everyone lives in homes inset into the bleachers. You could coat the structure with oil and set it alight, then just wait for the stones to cool and move into the freshly ashy, but unharmed, superstructure with little trouble.
So that's one problem solved. Germs are taken care of. The interface between them and larger Darwinian life is a little trickier, but I can probably ignore it with little problem. Sufficed to say that the slightly better immune strategies of Darwinian plants and animals ought to shrug off human contamination without too much trouble...no rinderpest epidemics, and just might offer some highly effective medicinal materials of their own.
...but predators and prey are _still_ giving me a headache...a headache multiplied by each biome under consideration (i.e. how can I "soup up" a river-system plausibly. Can I do it in a manner consistent with the land ecology and still allow for relatively safe boat travel? Do rivers operate under different constraints than land? Can such a narrow environment support really large animals, or are rare river dolphins and bull(?) sharks the best even a Darwinian river could support?)
grrr...see how it all snowballs?
* I was shocked to learn, upon researching it, that Terran plants are only 1-3% efficient when photosynthesizing. That's an _awful_ lot of wasted sunlight. Darwin does better.;-)
Darwin is starting to give me a headache. In terms of the actual storyline I've got a good number of incidents involving the local wildlife which will (hopefully) be entertaining.
The problem is what the wildlife is doing when not interacting with the protagonist.
The whole purpose of Darwin (well, one of the big purposes) is to put the old Golden-Age Venusian Jungle Planet into a modern ecological and evolutionary context. In order to make it "exciting", I've ramped up energy being taken in by the biosphere at least threefold*. So there's more biomass, things grow faster and, in general, the megafauna or, at least, macrofauna is packed in pretty tightly.
Why have I done this? Because the Amazon is actually a pretty boring place, unless you like bugs. It's empty, quiet (mostly), and the only birds and animals you see tend to be either very far away, very high up, or both. And what's on the ground isn't too impressive. The largest things get are peccaries (pigs) and jaguars. Now jaguars aren't to be sneezed at, but it's not like you find one around every other tree.
It's easy to just use the stereotype image of a jungle, the kind you find on illustrated posters of the rainforest, but there are problems with that too. Even if there's enough energy into the system to support high numbers of animals in that tight, diverse, cluster, they're still rubbing shoulders in fairly unnatural ways.
If, for example, a large predator's range only needs to be about 5 square miles, that still means there's an _awfully_ crowded mess of prey species...and you've usually got several layers of predation to consider as well. And with 5 square mile ranges, it's a lot easier for one large predator, patrolling its borders, to stumble into another large predator patrolling its borders. This is not a scenario you encounter very often with predators, like tigers, which have exclusive home ranges of hundreds of miles or more. It happens occasionally, but with a 5 mile range it'd practically be a daily occurence! So how do you cope with that? How do the predators cope with that? What would selection pressures do to alter their behavior toward an optimum?
Typing this all out, I'm tempted to chuck territoriality out the window all together. When prey is that tightly packed, over a large area, why even bother staking out a range? Just browse the smorgasbord as you see fit, and try not to rub elbows with your neighbors.
The other stereotype that I'm finding easy to fall prey too is "Dinosaur Planet." This is especially tricky because I do want some aspects of the Mesozoic. Gigantic predators and herbivores are cool. In this model, you don't have territorial problems because just about everything migrates continually. Even the fastest growing set of plants are going to be hoovered up by a large herd of pseudo-sauropods. And it also helps in terms of the human economy. If a small group of hunters, with, essentially, a large razor-edged boomerang, can take down Apatosaurus...that's a lot of meat for the tribe/clan/whatever. That's an image I want.
It's actually one I need because the whole reason for the plot is that the protagonist's lander gets accidentally flattened under a dying Giant Beast of some sort (in a darkly humorous scenario) and he's stranded and has to trek all the way from the equator to Landfall because that's the only place with equipment he can use to contact his ship. That's the story. He's going to traverse a continent with stalwart companions (who keep him from getting killed). I'm going throw in some local politics too, but that's not my specialty (if I can be said to have one), so the details remain quite nebulous.
The problem with Dinosaur Planet is two-fold:
1) While small dinosaurs existed, you only really think about those larger than your car. Lovely for some encounters, but you want human-scale animals too...not just something that might step on you.
2) I'm a tremendous fan of covergent evolution...and Darwin's comparative zoology isn't going to be too sophisticated ("Fins, gills: we'll call it a fish."), but you still can't pull species directly out of the Jurrasic. It may be that there are optimum feeding strategies for multi-ton animals, the same way that there are optimum bodies for ant and termite eaters, but writing about T. Rex and Diplodocus with funny colors and different names just won't cut it. So you've got to be extremely vigilant when brainstorming/daydreaming these guy to stay away from fossil archetypes, if possible.
The balance I'm trying to strike is somewhere between "Crowded Rainforest" and "Dinosaur Planet". But the dynamics remain slippery. Our Hero runs into a fierce dog-bear and must escape. Nice, dramatic, etc. But what is this dog-bear doing when he _isn't_ part of the plot? What are his prey species doing when not escaping from him? If the landscape is as crowded (compared to our own) as I'm making out; how do animals sleep without being bumped into by something which might consider them edible? You've got to come up with different survival strategies, tweak the population densities, alter behavior and defenses to compensate. But then all those tweaks have their own ramifications that need to be followed through, because they're sure to lead right back into factors you already thought of as "fixed".
This is the problem of going at ecology piecemeal. I think up a critter, say "that'd be cool", and then whip out some evolutionary history and a few ecological specs. But I do each one of these in a vacuum and then try to put the puzzle pieces together at a later date. If there's a way to invent/outline/diagram the whole thing at once, I don't know what it is. Even with a food web or something, each species gets invented out of whole cloth one at a time.
Heck, the minute you set down a predator/prey relationship, they start changing right before your eyes! If the prey has a clever defense strategem, it can't be _too_ clever, because they still get eaten occasionally. And if the predator has a particular attack strategy, shouldn't the prey have evolved to compensate for it already? The Red Queen in action and in maintaining relative position, nothing stays the same. The application of rational thought causes animals to blur.
_______
That actually wasn't even the problem I'd intended to rant about tonight, but it serves as a nice intro.
The real problem is describing the microecology. If the large-scale world is extremely energetic and competitive, how does that reflect on the local bacteria? This is more important than you might realize, because if Darwinian Germs are as fierce and diverse as their larger counterparts, Humanity is toast the moment they breathe the air. The only salvation would be some sort of massive biochemical incompatibility, but that would seem to put the kibosh on a lot of large-scale interactions. If you and the germ aren't speaking the same language, are you going to be able to digest the plant or the meat?
I'm _tempted_ to stipulate that bacteria are already faster and more fecund than the macro-ecology, here on Earth. So, having reached its theoretical limit, Darwinian germs aren't a _great_ deal more competitive than our own. What they're likely to do is to highly specialize, since rainforests are home to tremendous diversity. "A place for every parasite and every parasite in its place." The last chapters of "Yellow Fever, Black Goddess" talk about an intriguing concept called "genetic herd immunity". The entire population doesn't have to be immune from something in order to be safe. Just _enough_ individuals have to be resistant to keep it from spreading, breaking the chain of contagion short. Ranchers apparently take advantage of this, only vaccinating some of their cattle. This has interesting implications for tree diversity and dispersal in the rainforest too. You don't want to be too close to the next member of your own species because if it gets infected by a dedicated, specialized infection, you'd be likely to be susceptible too...so everyone keep their distance. There are enough different types of trees in the rainforest for them all to do this and still have a crowded jumble of trunks.
So anyway, I've handwaved away the threat of continual superplagues rendering my Darwinians extinct. But that still leaves the "virgin field" problem. _Initial_ biochemical incompatibility is ok. Darwinian flus don't understand our cell receptors, etc. and our flu doesn't understand theirs. But that's not going to be the case forever, and once that first flu bug gets a clue, the Darwinians would have _no_ prior immunological experience with it.
Turns out, if you make Darwinian germs just a _tad_ more efficient than our own, the problem solves itself. Every once in a great while, a Darwinian Germ learns to infect people. It does so very successfully. In fact, once the initial hurdle of trans-species contagion is cleared, it does so too successfully. Time between infection and death is too quick to be sustainable, especially since people on Darwin are dispersed into small, basically isolated, pockets.
The Darwinians would call these things Flash Plagues. All of a sudden, within 2-3 days, or even quicker, an entire Clave drops out of the global communication net. This sort of event would be random...and relatively rare, like earthquakes or other natural disasters. The entire Clave drops dead almost in unison and the disease disappears. Most of the time, it'd just go completely extinct, but there's always the danger of spores or some such, so the Clave would have to be torched from a distance before anyone attempted to repopulate. It's not quite as drastic as it sounds because the Clave (as I'll get around to explaining 4-5 more history chapters down the road), is essentially shaped like a stone stadium where everyone lives in homes inset into the bleachers. You could coat the structure with oil and set it alight, then just wait for the stones to cool and move into the freshly ashy, but unharmed, superstructure with little trouble.
So that's one problem solved. Germs are taken care of. The interface between them and larger Darwinian life is a little trickier, but I can probably ignore it with little problem. Sufficed to say that the slightly better immune strategies of Darwinian plants and animals ought to shrug off human contamination without too much trouble...no rinderpest epidemics, and just might offer some highly effective medicinal materials of their own.
...but predators and prey are _still_ giving me a headache...a headache multiplied by each biome under consideration (i.e. how can I "soup up" a river-system plausibly. Can I do it in a manner consistent with the land ecology and still allow for relatively safe boat travel? Do rivers operate under different constraints than land? Can such a narrow environment support really large animals, or are rare river dolphins and bull(?) sharks the best even a Darwinian river could support?)
grrr...see how it all snowballs?
* I was shocked to learn, upon researching it, that Terran plants are only 1-3% efficient when photosynthesizing. That's an _awful_ lot of wasted sunlight. Darwin does better.;-)
