Questions tagged [fauna]
For questions about animal life in general.
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Critical animal species for temperate rainforest climate
On my terraformed exoplanet, the largest habitable land masses are primarily covered with temperate rainforests (average temperatures from 8 to 18 C)
Assume for this question that the bottom of the ...
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Plausible evolutionary path from modern birds to "dragons"
I'm interested in how you could get a creature that is broadly "dragon-like" to evolve from modern-day birds. Considering that some extinct early birds or proto-birds looked pretty reptilian,...
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Plausible evolutionary changes for fauna on a terraformed planet?
My planet is a tidally locked rocky planet (90% Earth surface gravity) orbiting an M-type star. This M-type star orbits a G-type star at roughly 1.5AU.
This means that it has a kind of day/night cycle ...
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How effective would this spider's technique be in getting it food/shelter(for its young)/transportation/protection?
So I have this idea for this unique species of jumping spider.
Basically it is around a foot long/medium sized hat size and has pretty big fangs for its size. It jumps on to people's heads and uses ...
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What is the most efficient design for an IR sense organ
Deep beneath the ice-crust of Europa, lies its famous subsurface ocean. Having existed for billions of years, this ocean now harbours a huge range of life forms on its sea floor.
However, in trying to ...
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How can I give Henry Ford's customers what they want: a faster horse?
I'm working for Henry Ford's engineering department and thought I'd gatecrash your "worldbuilding" forum to do my job for me. Our customer research department tell me that our customers want ...
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What life could survive in a backrooms-like enviroment [closed]
you know what the backrooms are, you're on the internet.
for those who somehow don't: the backrooms is an internet urban legend that entails a pocket dimension that you can get to via no-clipping ...
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Justifying why nonhuman sapients would not develop civilisation [closed]
I am imagining a project where the development of more advanced brain-computer interfaces allow humans to communicate telepathically with animals, and so discover that numerous species on Earth are ...
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Colonization of the Siberian taiga by engineering crops and ecosystem
(REVISED)
It usually is common sense to believe that any crops would just die within Siberian soil. But I just thought about creating genetically modified crops which are adapted to boreal, permafrost ...
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How would I go about explaining the science of a world where everything is made of fabrics and craft supplies?
I'm working on a little project called Scrapbook Street where everything is made of fabric and or craft supplies, but while working on the world of the project, I've started to wonder how the world ...
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Designing a bipedal/quadrupedal canine
So, in this sci-fi scenario, humans create uplifts or “algernons”; sapient animals created through genetic engineering. Torn between making these animals identical to their counterparts or being more ...
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What conditions could fish people evolve to be in their current humanoid form?
My fish people live in underwater nations. They look like a mix between the Creature from the Black Lagoon (left)
and the sea creatures from Luca:
with the exception of some minorities that resemble ...
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What would cause glass to replace calcium carbonate in shells?
Sea creatures have some very pretty shells. Unfortunately, these shells are quite opaque, and much more boring to look at than they could be.
So what if they were made of glass. It’s not unheard 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 a cold blooded animal survive in an arctic environment?
I have found numerous questions on how cold blooded humanoids or at least an intelligent species could survive the cold on this site, but this is not the question I am asking.
I want to know ...
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How could crustaceans evolve lungs?
I am trying to imagine a scenario where, on an abandoned terraformed planet, decapod crustaceans (more specifically, carideans such as shrimp) evolve lungs and colonise the land as insects have done. ...
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Thermotrophy: An open-ended question [closed]
Something I've been thinking about recently is the viability of thermotrophic organisms - that is, organisms that are able to obtain energy by absorbing heat, and then - by some mechanism or process - ...
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Does prey necessarily have to be bigger than predator when it comes to larger animals?
I am trying to create various fictional animals and monsters to inhabit my world. Many of the animals I am creating are huge, and some are even bigger than elephants. Some of these include the ...
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To what extent can fauna/flora migrate northward from Central America as the climate warms over time?
My story takes place thousands of years in the Earth's future after a climate apocalypse. It centers around Alaska and western Canada, but the climate in that region has transformed to more closely ...
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Could animals/plants survive off of coolant instead of water?
Say there was a source of water that animals and plants alike were surviving in, a sort of desert oasis situation, here we have Fred, he is an animal who lives off of this body of water. Buts let's ...
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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 ...
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Hydroponically growing animal feed in a space ship
Same game i mentioned in my other questions. Artificial gravity, robotic harvesting/replanting, and plenty of energy are available on the ship. The farming block is 50x70x10 meters in total but i ...
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water producing creatures
I'm trying to create a desert planet, and I plan on having water be produced by slug-like beings that consume oxygen and hydrogen from the atmosphere and produce water as a by-product f their ...
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Can an animal have a body covered with "hearing" hair?
Since our ears have small hair inside which (at least partially) make it possible to hear, is it possible for an animal to have hearing based on hair on its whole body? Like highly specialized small ...
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Could advanced Aboriginal Australians have domesticated the Emus/Cassowaries?
In an alternate universe where Eurasia is less advanced and the native peoples of the Americas and Australia build powerful civilizations, what animals could be domesticated that weren't domesticated ...
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How strong does a rope need to be to hold back a harpooned elephant?
Relating to a previous question, say that a group of people is hunting an elephant-sized land animal. For some reason, this animal needs to be harpooned so it won't simply run away to an inhospitable ...
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Could cavemen domesticate the Tyrannosaurus Rex?
In pop culture, there are ideas that paleolithic humans and dinosaurs lived together. The Flintstones is the most famous example of this idea. This obviously wasn't the case in reality, but what if by ...
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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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Could the Malagasy domesticate the Dodo bird?
In an alternate universe where other groups explored the world before Europeans, what new animals could have been domesticated? In my alternate history world, the Malagasy that came to Madagascar not ...
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Would intelligent humanoid carnivores start a civilization?
Let's say in an alternate world, Homo Sapiens died out but another Homo species evolved. Homo Carnivorous is very similar to Homo Sapiens with one big difference. Homo Carnivorous can only digest meat ...
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What sort of music could octopi play?
It can be really hard to distinguish between sounds and find the source of a sound underwater. How could an octopus musician play music with defined notes that are not blurred (significantly) or ...
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Is Island Gigantism Necessary to have Megafauna even if I have Solved the Other Problems of Energy, Weight and Heat? [closed]
I want to have megafauna on my world. I have already solved the structural problems related to megafauna by having strong but light bones, and the animals breathe a "magic" air that provides ...
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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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How could an animal grow hair overnight?
I am trying to create scientifically accurate werewolves. Of course, werewolves are not really possible, but I am trying to make mine as believable as possible. How could they quickly grow hair/fur in ...
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Could a photosynthetic plant form a symbosis with fish in an oceanic environement to get nutriets from the sea bed?
On Earth their are thousands of animals with symbiosis with plants such as honey bees and flowers. However for this question I'm focusing on a very specific kind the one that leaf-cutter ants have ...
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My cows lactate oil instead of milk, how do I stop them from igniting?
Starting off, these domesticated herbivores, much like cows, exist on a terrestrial world 15-20% larger than Earth. With a higher gravity of 11.2 G, Earth-like atmosphere, and if it existed in our ...
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Would it make sense to have an atlatl user in a world where archery is mainstream? [closed]
I'm writing a story is set in a Monster Hunter-like world where giant animals roam the landscape. Most of the main characters are archers, but I want to have one who is an atlatl (spear thrower) user ...
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Why would murids (such as rats and mice) be sacred animals?
In a future web-series I want to create, there is a species of massive humanoids named giants (Homo gigas) (technically, there are still humans, just not Homo sapiens). They are less social than ...
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How would domesticated semi-intelligent reptiles differ from mammals?
A common complaint I see about fictional reptiles is that they behave like mammals instead of reptiles. One of my cultures has almost exclusively reptiles (e.g. monitor lizard-like creatures) as pets/...
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In an alternate world, can giant bugs and humanoids be in the same planet?
There must be a rise in oxygen, but too much O2 might poison humans so I thought the increase was a gradual change and both invertebrates and humans evolve the necessary respiratory systems and other ...
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Would a grizzly bear be big/strong enough to ride?
I'm asking solely for the purpose of one possible scene in my story/WIP. Non-spoilery context: my characters become real-world animals, one of them becomes a grizzly bear. In a scene, I have him ...
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What would cause plants to survive on the ground while restricting animals to the air?
What would be the natural reason for the surface of a planet to be toxic or otherwise uninhabitable to animals but not plants? This planet is not Earth and life would have evolved this way from the ...
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Elephant gloves?
Humans wear gloves to protect our hands from dangerous or just unpleasant substances, in exchange for some decrease in sensitivity (and sometimes also dexterity, depending on how thick the gloves are)....
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Would it be plausible for a group of pseudo-spiders to form a colony?
So, ants and bees form colonies, could my spider analogs from colonies? They’re the dominant species on the planet they live in, like humans are. The pseudo-spiders are about 2-3m long, about 1m tall ...
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Evolution of flying animals on a windy planet
I'm thinking about the evolution of flight on a tidally locked planet where winds normally are 70 km/h (45 km/h) and can easily reach 120 km/h (75 mph). I've recently asked about clothes humans wear ...
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What are the most important aspects of an environment that a drone would need to report for survivability?
Setting: You have an armada of intergalactic unmanned drones, whos sole purpose is to survey planets (or portions of planets) and report information about its survivability, and usefulness in ...
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I'm not a biologist or an engineer. How do I design legs for a large animal that leaps very long distances?
For designing fictional animals, I'm trying to design one with four appendages that is meant to jump large distances vertically and length-wise and is as large or larger than a human, with hands or ...
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How would animal husbandry and domestication change if animals could talk and think [closed]
In the world where Intelligent and speech are much more common and any animal bigger Then rat size rodent Not only has human level intelligence but the ability to speak and understand human language. ...
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I’m making this story that has a blown up planet, and I’m trying to have some animals and creatures that live here that have changed or been modified [closed]
So In this story the main planet has been blown up way before the point of the story taking place, and well I have most of the architecture down I’m stuck on coming up with creatures to inhabit it and ...
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