Questions tagged [ecology]
For questions dealing with the interactions between organisms and their environments.
285 questions
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How to make a natural shift from icehouse to greenhouse
Here is the situation. This is the map of a world:
Now, as you'll notice, this world is a icehouse, much like our own. However, it won't stay that way much for longer. Our current icehouse is ...
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How large can a network of underground tunnels be before it collapses on itself?
How large can a network of underground tunnels be before it collapses on itself?
In my world I have an alien planet where most intelligent life lives underground in a global network of tunnels. These ...
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What would the natural diet of Bigfoot be?
Assume for a moment that Bigfoot/Sasquatch was a real animal living in the temperate rainforests and to a lesser degree other areas of the Pacific Northwest. Something like the depiction in Max Brooks'...
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What type of climate or geography would allow for a large mountain (10000m+) that glows when the sunlight hits the rockface?
The idea behind this is that there is a large mountain in my world that can be seen from the capital city over 500 km away. I took inspiration from Denali in Alaska, and how it can be seen from ...
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Feasibility of a bio-engineered, floating tree lifeform in the Venusian atmosphere?
Would it be possible, given many advances in genetic engineering that today remain speculative, to design a lifeform capable of withstanding the hostile conditions of the Venusian atmosphere?
I'm ...
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Life on a planet with never-ending rain
I'm intrigued by the notion of life on a planet where rain is a constant presence. Imagine a world where precipitation never ceases, where the skies are perpetually gray, and the sound of raindrops ...
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Using real examples, how long might it take for the species in a forest/jungle to respond to sudden climate change? [closed]
In my world, thriving forests/jungles experience abrupt and permanent shifts in climate. They remain wet enough to avoid desertification, but some species that thrive in one temperature range would ...
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Growth rate of super moss
Following an answer to aprevious question I posted, this world does is filled with moss and lichen fields that make other plant growth (and crop cultivation) impossible.
But after researching mosses ...
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What life would thrive on land which is frequently -- but not always -- doused with seawater?
Take a large piece of normally-dry land and flood it twice a day with seawater. We expect to see seaweed, crabs, and the like set up an ecosystem.
The flooding is tens of metres deep, and turbulent, ...
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Would the diet described below sustain a human?
In my world I need to feed a colony of Kobolds. I'm modeling my Kobolds' dietary requirements on humans. My question is whether or not the following foodstuffs would meet the dietary needs of human ...
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What would our world look like if it only got 160 days of sun in a year?
A while ago, I encountered a YouTube and Spotify playlist called "songs for an empty world" by LAIN. The description was especially interesting to me:
Only 250,000 people left. 160 days of ...
user106985
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In a setting in which South American megafauna and current African animals coexist, which if any could be suitable for domestication?
In my book series, there is a large area of the Planet Aurea called Zebusylvania with a similar climate, flora, and (some) fauna to the Cerrado and Caatinga regions of Brazil in our world. ...
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How would sensible waste disposal be accomplished for terrestrial creatures in a primitive society? [closed]
Necessary context: Various real animals like birds, foxes and snakes plus fictitious ones like qilins/kirins, gryphons and gloomstalkers (raven-like birds with some minor serpent features) possessing ...
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The miraculous substance of carrangan: can it exist, and what does it change about its planet of origin?
First, this account is a replacement for my old one, Jobah_HigherMind, because I forgot the password after being inactive for four months. But I’m moving away from Algennon questions, at least for now,...
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Fluvial systems: Are they necessary for human survival in domed cities on waterless planets
A world with a natural water cycle has rivers which generate a lot of transportation and ecological benefits. But gravity and sunlight drive those engines. An artificial domed community doesn’t have ...
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Which natural process could make the surface of a planet temporarily uninhabitable for some, but habitable for other species?
I want to tell a story about two sentient species inhabiting the same planet, but never meeting. Essentially, some kind of random event (every couple of days up to every couple of months) causes ...
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How can kaiju exist in nature and not significantly alter civilization?
I'm building a world where kaiju-sized creatures exist alongside regular-sized creatures. How these kaiju don't crumble under their own weight doesn't matter, and can be explained away by them being ...
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What would the geological effects of erosion due to extreme megafauna be like on large timescales?
Whenever I see fictional biospheres with massive or otherwise extreme megafauna capable of significant short-term erosion (such as toppling large rock formations, leveling mountains, digging huge ...
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Where do forge-worms live outside of forges?
Forge-worms are large bugs which flutter about the hearths of forges. They rely on the high temperatures of the forge to stay active and immediately fall into torpor when their body temperature falls ...
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How large could an animal that only eats blood become?
Sanguivores, also known as hemophages, are animals that consume blood. They include obligate sanguivores, like vampire bats, or facultative sanguivores, like the vampire finches from the Galapagos ...
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Can ecological collapse happen in a person's lifetime?
I'm writing a story for a character who is a an old monster hunter. In his younger days, he used to make a living by hunting the most dangerous monsters which are basically the story's equivalent of ...
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Anatomically Correct Chupacabra [closed]
This is a submission for the Anatomically Correct Series.
The Chupacabra is a legendary cryptid animal from North American folklore. It is a strange bear-like or reptilian creature that sucks the ...
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What biomes would Gondwana, a supercontinent consisting of South America and Africa have?
Hundreds of millions of years ago, there was a supercontinent named Pangaea that had almost every landmass on Earth. Later on, that landmass drifted apart into continents. It first became smaller ...
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Would a carnivore that can only see in infrared be an effective predator?
I'm trying to design new animals. One animal I came up with is a type of nocturnal & carnivorous predator that is shaped like a very large wolf. This predator sees in infrared light instead of ...
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Balancing ecosystems with monsters [closed]
When worldbuilding, I am trying to fill my world's nature with a lot of dangerous monsters. However, there was something I realized I forgot to do, and something that I notice many fantasy creators ...
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Introducing animals to a terraforming Mars by air-drop
So, the moment has arrived: Mars is habitable. Plants, fungi, and even insects have been introduced by air-drop, along with fish and crustaceans introduced as eggs. However, what larger animals could ...
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How can human feed themselves on a planet without organic compounds?
I have a planet that is mostly inhabited by "animals" that aren't carbon based, with intentions for humanity to eke out a way of living there. Now, easily I could reason that they just ...
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How would plant life be affected by rapid fluctuations in temperature?
In my fantasy world I'm constructing, there is not a traditional day and night. Rather, magical lights cross the sky. As soon as one sets, another rises. There are three of these lights, each ...
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What is the best non open-air farming method for a country in an environmentally degraded planet?
The surface and skies of Earth have been heavily polluted through various issues. Climate change, war, biological/chemical warfare, nuclear weapons etc. The sky is blanketed in a permanent semi opaque ...
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Can we use consistent ashfall to help reclaim or create topsoil?
Earth has reached a point of significant desertification due to issues such as climate change, deforestation, pollution, etc. Because of this there's significant topsoil loss across the planet. What's ...
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If a planet wide mist/thick cloud layer covered the planet that let little sunlight through, what does large scale farming look like?
Imagine a thick layer of clouds, mist, ash etc of sorts that blankets the higher atmospheres of a planet such that nights are nearly pitch black and daylight is range of greyish (think of a heavily ...
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Can my city be full of giant rats?
The rodents of unusual size in question are not implausibly large from a biological standpoint, being roughly the same weight as an American Beaver, but much more adapted for land living and with an ...
user71781
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Could a pine forest with year-round snowfall survive?
I am trying to design an alien forest ecosystem. The forest looks like this (from Dreamstime.com):
The relevant difference between the real-life Swedish forest pictured and mine is that my world ...
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How would prey animals adapt to large aerial predators?
Let's say the world's natural history evolved along much the same lines, but the modern species of large herbivores we're familiar with - ie cattle, deer, elephants, antelopes, etc - had to deal with ...
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Would paper pulp or resin be preferable to build giant beehives?
I have a hive-based, man-sized creature based on a honeybee. It still builds combs and produces/consumes honey, but (I think) honey wax isn’t strong enough to support the massive increase in hive size,...
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Which large marine animals could live in an ocean 60 m deep? [closed]
The setting I'm currently working on, has a sea that is large in area, but even the deep ocean, far from land, is only sixty meters deep. (It's a Banks Orbital, but I don't think that matters in and ...
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The variety of colour in a world under a red dwarf [closed]
I'm designing a world orbiting a red dwarf. Now, I want the life on my planet to have a rich variety of color just like life on earth does. The problem is that I don't know if that's feasible. From ...
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Make a tiny island robust to ecologic collapse
My world is to have a tiny island that will periodically be inhabited by a person or small group of people. By tiny I'm using a fuzzy yardstick: 1-50 hectares. When people are here, they will be ...
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What's a reasonable environmental disaster that could be caused by a probe from Earth entering Europa's ocean?
I'm working on a story involving life on Europa (or at least a place just like it) being upturned dramatically by contact from a probe sent from Earth. Found this community while researching, and have ...
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How could creatures in a zero-G but otherwise Earthlike environment move around?
Humanity has just discovered a massive, derelict space ark containing its own ecosystem. Its artificial gravity has long since failed, and it's been drifting undisturbed for millennia.
Assume that:
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Guam - Revenge of the Birds [closed]
To quickly recap how Guam became eerily devoid of chirping sounds, it is supposed that an invasive species of snake hitched its way to the island on a cargo ship and began multiplying and exploiting ...
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The "Exciting" Drilling company dug an underground canal connecting Death Valley to the Pacific. How does it change the Mojave climate?
Badwater Basin, part of Death Valley, is 282 feet (86 m) below sea level at its lowest point.
The "Exciting" drilling company, based in Nevada (they are exciting and not at all like their b**...
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If a creature's best food source was 4,000 feet above it, and only rarely fell from that height, how would it evolve to eat that food?
Setting
No sunlight reaches the area where these creatures live, but the food it eats has fairly easy access to sunlight.
The ground below the creatures is nutrient-rich soil, and is heated by ...
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Why would a creature both have carnivore teeth and side-facing eyes?
So, after a long unplanned hiatus, I have started designing alien creatures again, and one image that eve before that hiatus I could not get out of my head is that of a creature which has both the ...
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Energy in a food web of robots
I'm working on a planet with robotic life, until now I think I know how they work, the only problem is that, unless I want to make all lifeforms autotrophic, I have no idea how the energy might move ...
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What niche would werewolf looking creatures have in an environment? [closed]
By werewolf, I'm not talking about normal humans who can transform into big beasts and transform others to be like them. I'm just purely talking about could the werewolf form be its own wild animal? ...
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Could a quantum computer be integrated into a biological medium?
I'm working on an idea for an AI in a short story and have been circling around the idea of a biologically-integrated quantum computer — think, diamond qubits suspended in a biological medium (goop?) ...
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Is there a scavenger or carrion feeder (Or anything associated with death) that's actually BAD for the environment?
I'm designing a dualistic pair of factions of post-apocalyptic scrappers with views based on opposing concepts of scavenging; renewal, re-use, and removal of hazards versus thievery, opportunism, and ...
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If the USA was hit by a bombardment of nuclear warheads, what would the landscape look like?
In my world, technology that could alter a living creature's biology (later called Lazarus Tech) became incredibly popular in many places, until the overuse of the technology cause countless millions ...
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How would a planet having a high concentration of metals like an asteroid affect it's ecosystems?
I am working on a Sci-Fi/ Fantasy world called Atterra which is an very alternate version of earth that has been artificially injected with metals and materials from the asteroid belt. Long story ...
