Worldbuilding -- Rollicking Rules of Ecosystems© by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
1. Life feeds on waste.
You breathe the waste product of plant photosynthesis---trees suck
in the trash you exhale as part of cellular respiration. You eat
plant life and, in a natural system, your excretia becomes the mulch
that feeds the plants you eat. Trash is a product Life knows how
to use.
2. Life grabs opportunities.
Excess trash of any kind will make an opening for any new form
of life that can figure out how to use it. Expect, within the next
few thousand years or so, the arrival of the Huggies Monster and
the Tire Mound Scavenger.
3. Life likes volatiles.
Stable elements like nitrogen are never going to be the basis of
a life form. Think of them as bran---they go in and they come out
unchanged. You need unstable stuff, that Life can mix and match
like tinkertoys. Any nice moderately unstable stuff will do, however.
4. Redundancy matters.
The smaller and weaker and tastier you are, the more kids you must
have all at once to guarantee survival of the species. If you are
a member of a species that gives birth to snacks at the point where
they are most likely to be devoured, you'll have millions of children
at a time. Witness a mayfly hatch if you doubt this.
5. There are at least five ways of doing anything and Life will
try them all.
Take traveling as an example. Fly, swim, hop, run, bounce, slither,
burrow, tumble, float on a breeze, or roller-skate. Or travel as
a parasite in someone else's belly. You'll still get from point
A to point B.
6. Microclimates demand microecologies.
Every desert, island, jungle, mountain, desert, valley, and ice
field gives you the opportunity to invent neat new life forms adapted
to their environment. Furthermore, each of these specialized terrains
demands that you take it into account when designing life
forms. A desert rabbit, a jungle rabbit, a tundra rabbit, and a
plains rabbit will all have very different characteristics, and
will not be able to inhabit each other's ecological niches.
7. Big predators eat a LOT.
If you have a wide variety of big predators, the number of little
buggers you will need to support them is mind-boggling. Don't forget
to design a wide and weird variety of little guys, too. And don't
forget to mention them, show them, and have them play some part
in your story. The absence of small, non-predatory life forms on
planets that support a wide variety of huge, hungry monsters demonstrates
sloppy writing and that the writer has no concept of how a planet
and its lifeforms work.
8. Life's Big Three: Eat, Excrete, Reproduce.
If you can design your beasties with these three factors in mind,
all art, psychology, warfare, science, and religion will follow.
Try it, using only one of the big three. Create a sapient creature.
Figure out what it eats, and how it must go about gathering or acquiring
its food. Because it is sapient, tool development for food acquisition
will ensue, as it figures out more efficient ways to gather its
current food.
It will, furthermore, teach its offspring to use tools, and its
offspring will have survival rate compared to others in its species
-- a successful foray into reproductive improvement. More complex
tools will follow as your sapient becomes more efficient. And this
efficiency will have a price on your creature's environment (the
extinction of over-hunted herds or the destruction of top-soil in
over-planted or over-grazed fields, for example) that will necessitate
further tool development, and changes in social structure. Cities
or wars may ensue.
9. Life is weapons escalation.
New weapons (tools for guaranteeing the safety of the breeding
population) breed new defenses, which make new weapons necessary,
which---aw, hell, just ask the Pentagon. This holds as true for
a plant's excreted toxic resins or a deer's better antler design
or a skunk's more noxious skunk gland spray as it does for a human's
Star Destroyer or Colt Peacemaker. Something, somewhere, will develop
a way of getting around the defense to get at what it wants.
(And part B of this rule --- Unlike the Pentagon, Life balances
the budget.)
Any species that expends its energy in weapons development while
shortchanging eating, excreting, and reproducing is going to become
extinct. Any weapon system that makes too big a drain on the creature's
resources will cause its eventual extinction. (Pity this rule doesn't
work in the strange microecology of Congress.) (Or does it?)
10. Specialists are more efficient.
Specialists meet the Big Three by doing a certain thing a certain
way---by only sipping nectar from the flowers of the rare thurka
tree, for example. Specialists let the thurka tree provide for all
their needs, and thus conserve the energy trial and error require.
11. Generalists live longer.
Generalists have to work harder. They are rarely as good as the
specialists at any one thing, but they are not too bad at meeting
the Big Three. However, Generalists are not shit-out-of-luck if
some virus kills off all the thurka trees. Inefficiency can save
your life -- something people frequently fail to consider. And only
Generalists go into space.
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