Questions tagged [reproduction]
For questions about the means and methods any species, organism or entity uses to propagate itself.
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Would humans crossbreeding with animal people cause more birth defects? [closed]
I am working on a world inspired by witcher where humans and animal like race live together.
would for example, human crossbreeding with water dwelling humanoid cause something like mermaid syndrome?
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Do androids left on their own have any hope of replicating?
The scenario goes something like this: In the not so far future a fully automated exploration vessel crashes on an uninhabited planet not unlike earth. Unlike earth however, this particular planet is ...
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Impact on genetic diversity with 6 person mating groups
Context
I know enough about genetics to know I need to ask others. I'm writing an alien humanoid species that revers the number 6 as part of their culture and religion. Their marriage equivalent forms ...
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What kind of reproduction methods would allow for an only male animal species to exist?
I was reading that there are certain species of starfish which fission made them in some locations to have a scarcity of female starfish and in other locations there are species which only male ...
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Why and how would a species reproduce exclusively by converting other sapient beings into more of their own kind?
In a story I'm just beginning to write, the aliens who have invaded Earth have a ghastly secret that is about to become known: They reproduce exclusively by transforming other sapient beings into more ...
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Can fertility be tied to an individual's strength?
So I've got this species of nocturnal humanoids that reproduces asexually, or rather, they use a form of parthanogenesis for their reproduction and have only one sex.
I've got them figured out for the ...
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What is the stumbling block for a world of "Alphas"? [closed]
In 149597871's utopia, there will be no need for that as only a small minority of "alpha" males would be allowed to impregnate girls while the rest of the (beta) men will only support them ...
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How could my hybrids from species of the same genus with radically different appearance have more fertility issues but still be mostly fertile?
I want to know if my interspecific interbreeding is realistic or a total fiction.
Most animal hybrids are sterile (mostly the heterogametic sex according to Haldane's rule). Some famous examples ...
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How long would a species have to have this brain symbiote to prevent early puberty?
So, a race of sapient aliens I designed for a series of short stories owes its sapience in part to a symbiote which lives in their brains and produces hormones that induce the brain to grow faster and ...
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Minimum Group Size for Sterile Workers?
Essentially, I'm planning on designing a race of sapient aliens with a sterile worker caste, but I have one big problem:
On earth, sterile workers castes are only found in groups of thousands or ...
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What is fastest believable growth rate and reproduction cycle for a 150-300-meters-tall tree?
The trees in question are 150-300-meters-tall, 18 meters in diameter and have no branches except at the very top where each branch has a single leaf that takes up the whole branch. Its bark is thick ...
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Self inflicted extinction in a modern setting - Plausibility and Duration?
Suppose there exists a species of humans which are better physically, mentally and aesthetically(in a conventional way) by at least three standard deviations(any large margin will do) when compared to ...
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Can a plant or alien plant have fruit and shoot seeds as well?
On my planet Chlorea there are desserts and in them is a tree-like plant. During the dry season nothing really happens; the plant saves water, they lose leaves to save water etc. But in the wet season ...
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How do the eggs of birds that fly using their legs not crack?
I've been designing bird-like creatures that both fly and walk using their legs, saving the trouble of growing extra muscle mass for both. Because of this they have an odd look for birds: They have ...
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What is a good rate of growth of size and numbers of creatures that start with a microorganism?
I am thinking of a story where a meteor carrying a microorganism lands into some hot spring mountain caverns that between a city and a desert and evolves to be able to able to take DNA samples from ...
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How could these aquatic humans survive and reproduce?
The aquatic humans resemble regular terrestrial humans almost perfectly as adults. This means they have hands, feet, and all of their bodyparts identically to humans (H. sapiens sapiens)
As children (...
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Anatomically Correct Vegetable Lamb
The vegetable lamb is a plant that has a sheep for fruit. These sheep are quite similar to natural sheep, with legs, guts, and wool in the same anatomy as a sheep, and are attached to the rest of the ...
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What are some ways for an unethical government to increase population growth? [duplicate]
So, I have this tyrannical, oppressive government. Let's say that it needs a bunch of disposable population.
It's already tried things such as ensuring a steady supply of food, giving tax credits to ...
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Reproduction via male gonad transfer
A major issue for many earth species is finding a mate when you need one. This problem is particularly acute for species that live in sparse environments (e.g., deep sea benthic zone) and those that ...
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Choke on the bitter fruit of my demise
In death a new beginning is certain, for the jaws that bit my flesh will suffer a tragic end and no amount of laments or tears will ease the pain.
My blood will flower and fruit inside their bodies, ...
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How can a male klepton species sustain a settlement without kidnapping women?
The male klepton is a unique humanoid. It has no females, and reproduces by mating with other humanoid females, who bear children that are clones of the klepton father. No females are born, and all ...
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Reptilian beauty standards
This isn’t limited to lizard folk but humanoid reptiles in general. The most common mistake I see when designing females of a reptilian race is to give them human breasts and proportions, despite them ...
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Winning the game of life
all lifeforms alive today want to live and reproduce as much as possible, because those with differing ideas are extinct or about to be.
Clearly the meaning of life is nothing else but to keep your ...
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Any given couple is either only capable of having sons or only capable of having daughters [closed]
Consider a world in which every human is divided into two groups: call them Group 1 and Group 2. There's a completely random 50/50 shot for everyone to end up in each one, and it's not genetic or ...
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Would marriage exist in a parthenogenetic human society? [closed]
I'm working on something about an all-female human society modeled on real single-sex parthenogenetic species like the famous Whiptail Lizard. A few of the things I'm borrowing from Whiptails are:
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Explain the concept of "two haploid eggs fusing to produce a single diploid embryo"
So I'm creating a society that is hermaphroditic (specifically what I really want is a society where there's only one gender and both sexual partners experience pregnancy) so I've been doing research ...
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Could an intelligent alien species reproduce via pollen?
Could a sapient, animal-like alien reproduce with pollen and ovules, rather than directly producing sperm and eggs?
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On the plausibility of both sexes producing gametes on demand
In most animals there is a different way of producing gametes: the male produces them "on demand" at the time of the reproductive act, while the female produces them on a roughly "fixed ...
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How long should an egg-laying species of human size and intelligence gestate and incubate its eggs?
In my fantasy world I have a species of reptilian humanoids.
Their body mass, lifespan and overall intelligence is about the same as humans. This probably means similarly sized brains.
They are NOT ...
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Sex determination that would explain the complex reproductive system of my aliens?
Phemogian are a seven-sexed species that passes gametes in a chain. Each sex can inseminate one other sex and be inseminated by another sex. Each phemogian has three parents, with the last parent in ...
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What would make human males an inefficient option for spreading alien genes?
An alien species colonizes worlds across the galaxy, expanding its empire and propagating its race. However, it doesn't do this by subjugating the inhabitants through force, as its technology is too ...
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Anatomy of a sexual "parasitic" specie with small and intelligent females but large and “brute” males
I already made a similar question searching for possible features which can make this fictional specie biologically functional, so this question can be considered a second part of this. I would ...
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Would the crew of a generation spaceship obey population control for a century? [closed]
I'll try to keep this concise and focused on the question at hand.
A generation spaceship leaves Earth around the year 2060 on a journey to Alpha Centauri A. Thanks to fusion power and other new tech ...
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Why does an Insectoid species that reproduce via deuterotoky still have males [closed]
Say you have a (sentient Hive-minded) bee-like alien, that functions pretty much like a earth bee: Builds hives, the only fertile female is the Queen, has different castes, drones are only there to be ...
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Would larger humanoids be able to give birth to less "undercooked" babies?
I'm working on the biology of a fantasy race of very large human-like beings (think something like the Vrykul from WoW or the Norn from Guild Wars), and got stuck on one aspect of their development as ...
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Can two species of different dimensions hybridize and successfully produce offspring?
I was just wondering: In some alternate 3-dimensional universe, could a 3-dimensional and a 5-dimensional version of an alien, whose cross-section appeared in the 3-dimensional universe, successfully ...
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Evolution of sexual parasitism in a species with small and intelligent females but large and "brute" males?
So, I had this idea about a sapient alien specie paritally based on the reproduction of the schistosoma
A flat worm specie in which the male is notorious bigger than the female, and this have a ...
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How would interspecies lovers with alien body plans safely engage in physical intimacy?
Now I had previously asked how a loving interspecies couple would work around very Alien Body Plans that is now sadly closed (How will interspecies lovers overcome different body plans?)
That question ...
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What would make a biological host compatible to bear an eldritch child?
Artificial incubators have become the most common way of producing children, to the point where old methods are shunned as backwards. Over 90% of the world's population are born this way, a it has ...
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Human-Alien Hybrid Babies (18+) [closed]
Okay, I have stories with interspecies sex, complete with viable offspring. What kind of gene editing would be needed for that to even work, and how would the resulting child's genes be expressed? And ...
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Would a sexual dimorphism like monkfish be useful for bigger or terrestrial animals? Would it bring an advantage or would be more harmful? [duplicate]
In the monkfish, the females are the larger sex, while the males are very small: in comparison males measure only one tenth of the female, for example a female can measure up to 20 centimeters long ...
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The necessary secondary characteristics of a humanoid, sequentially hermaphroditic race
I'm stewing on an idea about the people of Earth encountering a humanoid race exhibiting a pregender phase. After a period of time, this pregender develops into either male or female based on ...
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Is there a real-life intersex condition that leads to functioning ovaries but with some male secondary sex characteristics?
One of the main characters in my story has an intersex mother (dead by the time of the plot). She was assigned male at birth due to her prominent penis that led a physician to conclude that she may ...
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How Would I Scientifically Justify Dragons Reproducing Asexually?
In my book series, there are several species of dragons, the common ancestor of which ultimately evolved from pterosaurs. One of these dragon species, the Arturian dragon, however, is the only species ...
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How does near-guaranteed pregnancy affect a species' libido?
I have a species of intelligent human-like creatures. One of the things that makes them different from humans is that unprotected sex has a very high likelihood of resulting in the female becoming ...
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How would a planet-size entity reproduce?
I know its questionable whether such an entity could exist, but if there were entities big enough to be mistaken for a planet, how could it reproduce? Would two collide and recombine into three or ...
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What could lead to everyone on Earth becoming gay, and the human race facing extinction because they believe they can't reproduce?
I'm interested in creating a (humorous, satirical) science-fiction short story wherein the protagonist repeatedly claims
if everyone was gay, the human race would die out.
Then (somehow) one day... ...
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How can people procreate when the medieval period is cursed with invisibility? [closed]
Set in the medieval time, overnight a giant meteorite strikes the pacific ocean and then a bright green glow sweeps the entire globe turning all human invisible to mammalian sight! Note that this is ...
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In a world where everybody is a male or female clone of one person, how would reproduction work? Would inbreeding be an issue?
If they reproduce like normal humans, will their offspring be inbred, or genetically identical like everybody else? The only difference in any of the clones are the X and Y chromosomes.
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Anatomy of a Female Giant
In many depictions of giants in fantasy, we usually get visual examples of the male of the species, especially in more realistic settings in terms of biology (Game of Thrones Wun-Wun etc.) But as far ...
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