Questions tagged [adaptability]
For questions about how a certain species or object can change to fit a new criteria of living or other.
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On a planet with a 2 atm atmosphere, how would atmospheric pressure affect plant evolution?
Leaving aside the atmospheric composition (let's say there's the same amount of oxygen, despite the higher pressure), would the pressure itself have any effect? Would plants need to be stockier and ...
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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 would humans adapt to suddenly gaining new senses?
I'm working on a magic system for my story. One of the ideas I'm toying with is magic users gaining extra senses, depending on the kind of magic they can use.
One example is Reachsense (WIP name), ...
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Why won't Venusians just explode in our own atmosphere when they're not even wearing protective suits?
So "Venusians" are these Star Trek-y humanoid aliens that evolved on a planet with more than 75 times Earth's atmosphere. In a lot of ways this makes them not too dissimilar from deep sea ...
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What adaptations would be needed for life and water around a blue star?
Of course it's very obvious that blue stars are insanely hot and would boil away most things if they got too close. BUT I'm curious if with just the right adaptations and fiddling, could there, ...
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Can land plants absorb carbon dioxide into their leaves without the need for sunlight?
We all know by now that plants need light to absorb carbon dioxide--whether it be sunlight, moonlight or even artificial cave light.
But what about total darkness, like a cave or a forest floor ...
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Elliptical orbit verses extreme axis [closed]
What could be the differences between adaptations to a planet with extreme axial tilt and one with a highly elliptical orbit? The only difference I think is the tilt world's winters could be avoided ...
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Is this sort of life cycle on a megamangrove feasible?
Point of departure--56 million years ago, in which the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum lasted three to four times longer than it did in our timeline. Today, on this alternate Earth, the twilight ...
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Survival on a dark hycean world
As a follow up to my previous question: Surviving a dark hycean world I ask this: how could life adapt to a tidally locked ocean world with thick atmosphere and perpetual storms? That's the definition ...
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Would a species of giant ape be able to live in an taiga?
In my world, I plan on having a species (not a race) of giant apes that inhabit an island around the size of Italy. This island is still heavily forested in many places, although the development of ...
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I need help with aquatic arthropods
How would an arthropod (invertebrate animals with an exoskeleton)replace and or evolve into a fish-like animal (using terrestrial fish as an example)the question is how would they recrate a ocean ...
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What adaptions would a human need to open their jaws as wide as a snake's?
Would it be a simple change of bone shape? Muscles? Keep in mind, this adaption is not for swallowing bigger food, as the human throat path makes that difficult, but is instead is for intimidating ...
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How will seeded Earth life adjust to a tidally locked, Earth-sized moon?
Starting in 2017, a worldbuilder by the name of Dylan Bajda conceived a new twig in the speculative evolution branch of the science fiction tree: The seedworld. The twig was called Serina: A ...
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How does an animal bred to be a bioindicator function?
You're probably familiar with the use of canary during coal mining. At the slightest trace of poisonous gas the canary dies and the miners are warned. Well my story involves a small animal that was ...
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How Would Freshwater Reefbuilders Differ from Saltwater Reefbuilders?
Here's the context:
Even back home, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was not a good time to be a marine organism. Equatorial seas spiked up to 36 degrees Centigrade, or 97 Fahrenheit! And the ...
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The Marine Invasion Had Come in Full Force, But How Would They Adapt to the Challenges of Terrestrial Living?
Related to my previous question.
252 million years ago, in an alternate timeline, a gamma ray burst wiped out 96% of all terrestrial species and only 70% of all marine species. The ozone layer, the ...
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How would intelligent life adapt on a black hole planet?
The world I'm building, Qi'raad, orbits a stellar-mass black hole. How would life best adapt to survive? Also, the black hole, named Halku, emits a relatively thin radio jet, which has carved a large ...
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How would aquatic life adapt to the oceans becoming highly corrosive?
The reason for the corrosion is relatively unimportant beyond that it is "high tech" in origin, in contrast to the society in my setting (It could be a complex mix of industrial pollutants ...
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Could you theoretically make a Human-like/Human-descended species breathe chlorine instead of oxygen?
What would be the major problems/issues from switching a Human lifeform from O2-based respiration to a Chlorine one?
Would said lifeform require not only adaptations to the respiratory system, but ...
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How would Muslims adapt to follow their prayer rituals in the loss of Earth?
I am very aware that this is a deep question and I am really not an expert in Islam or Muslims, though I have tried to do my research. I know that Islam is the second-largest religion, I don't see why ...
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Would Venusian Sunlight Be Too Much for Earth Plants?
This is Chris Wayans's map of a terraformed Venus:
While there have been questions in this Stack Exchange on how to make Venus more livable for us humans, one question stands glaringly absent, and ...
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Changing the biochemical structure of a living thing
Kaitlyn, protagonist of my series “The Vault”, has a very interesting ability, among her vast set of abilities. She can change her biochemical structure to survive Antarctic cold and volcanic heat, ...
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How would a culture develop when there are 20 foot tall trolls that attack them? [closed]
In a world I'm building, there is a society of dwarves that live in a large, forested, snow-covered valley surrounded by mountains. The forests and mountains have large trolls that hunt the dwarves. ...
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The Serina Series: Episode III: Pterosaurs
Let's take a different route and not take the Serina route using a modern species. Today, we're looking at pterosaurs. But considering that pterosaurs had ruled the skies from the Late Triassic to ...
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Could Prehistoric Species of Animals Eat Modern Species of Plants and/or Animals?
One of the most recurring elements of paleofantasy is anachronism.
For instance, this still is from the 1966 film One Million Years BC, and yes, that is a Triceratops fighting off a Ceratosaurus, a ...
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The 42-Hour Day: Instant Extinction?
The information presented in the previous episode is out of date.
In an alternate universe, there is still an Earth in geochemistry only. This one, Alternate Earth 600, is a "backwards Earth"...
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The Serina Series: Episode II: Crocodilians
In the first episode of this series, Cats, I asked if it's possible for all 600 million house cats to evolve different niches if they were the only amniotes in a terraformed world. Needless to say, ...
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How Would a "Lungshark" Breathe Out of Water?
Allow me to introduce to you the epaulette shark:
This one species stands out over the other 511 in that it can breathe out of water. How? It actually has several adaptations:
They slow down their ...
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Linking genetic sex to a set of climate adaptations
My world is fairly chaotic, with the same 2/3 of it being completely broken up and remade in chunks such that the whole 2/3 is always completely different than it was ten years ago.
So once species ...
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Pros and Cons of Humans Having Hobbit Soles
Yes, hobbit feet have been popularly described as hairy. But they are also described as having thick, leathery soles. Of course, this is fantasy, but what if this were real-life? What are the pros ...
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Would a 200-Pound Dwarf Still Need to Wear Clothes?
The average Neandertal male stood 64 inches tall, weighed 143 pounds and had a brain volume of 1600 milliliters. The average female stood 62 inches tall, weighed 110 pounds and had a brain volume of ...
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Would a 200-Pound Dwarf Still Need Facial and Body Hair?
How does a Neandertal compare with an anatomically modern human? This diagram below is a simplification of the real answer:
The average Neandertal male stood 64 inches tall, weighed 143 pounds and ...
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How do hardy flowering plants that thrive in low 'g' and thin atmosphere disseminate their seeds?
Imagine a type of flowering plant capable of growing on terrestrial planet with surface gravity a tenth of Earth and it has a thin atmosphere with composition similar to Earth's but as thick as ...
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Megamangrove Roots--Which Kind of Aerial Roots Would Best Support Their Large Size?
In an alternate Earth, early or midway in the Eocene Epoch, there debuted a family of angiosperm trees whose roots need to be completely submerged. As a result, the limit is that they can't germinate ...
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Could Sharks Survive a Longer PETM?
First things first, a little backstory:
Sometime between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, there was a mysterious, sudden, dramatic rise in global temperature. This moment in time was known as the "...
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Would a Longer PETM Save the Creodonts and the Mesonychians?
Some 55.8 million years ago, Earth underwent a really dramatic heat wave known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. What happened, exactly? We don't know how it happened, but we do know ...
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The Serina Series: Episode I: Cats
"Serina" is a popular speculative evolution project in which, apart from a long list of fish, invertebrates and plants, the only terrestrial chordate to colonize this terraformed moon is the canary. ...
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What is the minimum and maximum gravity level that nearly all humans can sustain over a 5 year period?
There are several questions related to effects of different gravity levels on the human body, but none adequately answer a fundamental question: What is the maximum and minimum gravity that nearly all ...
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What Adaptation would Humans in a Volcanic Underworld Develop?
The TBD are a fantasy humanity offshoot that is fully adapted to life a few kilometers beneath the surface, settling in cracked earth near vents and hot spots.
Air quality ranges from stale to toxic, ...
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How CAN a Wyvern be a Scansoriopterygid Dinosaur?
It's become a popular speculative evolution trope for the likeliest candidate of the mythological "wyvern" to be a Cenozoic family--if not superfamily--of scansoriopterygid dinosaur.
Now the first ...
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In an Ice Age Extinction, Which Latitude Would Be Hit Harder--Tropical or Temperate?
Back home, five million years ago, the warm, wet climate of the Miocene sloped downwards into the cooler, drier Pliocene before descending even further into the more so Pleistocene. The slope was so ...
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How Would the Multituberculates Survive Longer Than in Our Timeline?
In exploring likely candidates for an alternate Earth without rodents, someone suggested multituberculates to me. Here's a little summary as to who the multituberculates were for anyone not in the ...
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Could Cats Add Lots of Plants to Their Diet?
Because nature is never straightforward, there are different levels of carnivores. On the lowest rung of the ladder are the hypocarnivores, in which meat can't take any more than 30% of their caloric ...
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Could Bear-Dogs Look and Act Like Actual Bears?
Back home, Amphicyonidae (bear-dogs) predated Ursidae by only four million years. While the latter still lives in the form of eight species, the former had been extinct for two-and-a-half million ...
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Bryophitic Plants in an Underwater Forest
By "bryophitic", I mean "non-vascular land plants", being the liverworts and the mosses. (Hornworts are comparative latecomers, so we won't be talking about them.) Without vascular tissues, these ...
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Pinniped Creodonts
Here is all you need to know about the creodonts:
They were a group of carnivorous mammals that, despite having carnassials, had no relation to Carnivora.
They were a global force, occupying ...
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The Marine Jungle of More Than Just Angiosperms [closed]
Recently, I asked whether or not the other plant groups besides the angiosperms could evolve to adapt to being submerged under salty ocean water 24/7. While marine conifers, ginkgoes, cycads, ferns, ...
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What adaptations would be advantageous given a regular, but extreme variation in climate?
In a fantasy world I am constructing, a planet goes through regular, but extreme temperature cycling. Roughly every 500 years, the planet begins to heat or cool, dependent on its current temperature. ...
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Could a Greater Number and Diversity of Marine Plant Species be Possible?
As landlubbers, we often let ourselves think that if salty seawater is undrinkable for us, it could be even worse for plants. However, certain types of angiosperms have found ways to not only thrive ...
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Will the Dinosaur Empire Still Stand Strong If Chicxulub Hit Earth at the End of the Jurassic?
66 million years ago, the dinosaur empire was in its death throes when its final nail in the coffin came hurtling down from the sky. A clump of rock the size of Mount Everest smashed into the Gulf of ...
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