Posts tagged biology
Imagine the human body has access to infinite energy through some magic. How could that be useful in any capacity to "boost" the immune system? By boost I mean more resistance to disease, and ideal...
This was inspired by the question How would tattoos fare on reptilian scales Let's assume for this question that humans never lost their hairy, hairy bodies and are covered in fur. How would tattoo...
The habitat of the creature in question is most commonly atop mountains (or in moist areas). Such an idea would mean that the creature wouldn't need a heart or stomach to break down things into blo...
The world is divided in several factions. Among them : Insects and Humans. When I say Insects, I don't mean insects : insects are the little creatures with six legs while Insects regroup all soci...
*By life, I mean something more complex than microorganisms. Something closer to what we have on Earth. similar to this question: Is it possible for complex life to evolve on planets without oxyg...
There have been questions about sizing giant animals, giant humanoids, giant flying creatures (also discussed particularly for dragons and giant floating mammals), and giant spiders, one type of i...
Suppose we had reached the moon and found it to be habitable. It was big enough to support an atmosphere, albeit a thinner one than the Earth has, and at some point in the past few hundred million ...
I would argue that ants are one of the most dangerous, effective and successful creatures on earth. But as we know they are not the dominant form of life. They also vary through-out their many spec...
Suppose that there is a race of intelligent being (actually not as intelligent as human but it isn't important) with great bat-like wings that let them fly. They are a bit smaller than the average...
Assuming a lithotrophic slime mold were to be created, which metabolized iron, carbon dioxide and sulphur, and released, how much damage would it do? Let's say it was created to help manage landfi...
I have this idea of homicidal alien beings that upon death (after their body ceases living and begins to decompose) release enough poisonous gas into earth's atmosphere to wipe out all life on the ...
I came up with an alien species that has the following reproductive life: They hatch out of eggs, tended by their mothers, and by the end of the first year (about two Earth years long) they are ...
I know water would be out of the question, but what about liquid nitrogen or liquid hydrogen, Would silicon work instead of carbon?
There have been a few questions about an intelligent avian species lately and they have gotten me thinking. It seems to me that it would be hard for an avian species to evolve to be more intellige...
I am a survivor of the United Nations Space Corp's 2nd Exploration Fleet. On our travel to the distant Epsilon Canares system, our scouts encountered a strange lifeform. We call them 'shapeshifter...
Inside our eyes are two different kinds of receptors: The rod, in which the human eye has 120 million and work in low light The cone, in which the human eye has only 6 to 7 million of them, the r...
This question is based off of an earlier question of mine that dealt with what would happen if humans and our Neanderthal cousins were dropped off on a world with large, technologically developed a...
I know about humans, and how we have adapted to different eviornments with skin and hair color, but I want something a little bit different for my creatures. They are amphibious humanoids, and live...
Why would a creature that lives on the surface of a planet evolve limbs that can bend at many points (like a tentacle or elephant trunk) and still end in some sort of hand-like appendage?
For the following stars -A Class -F Class -G Class -K Class -M Class What are the most likely skin tones for each type of stellar class? Also for their eyesight how different is it to vary ...
Imagine, if you will, a world where aural communication is impossible. Everything is done through gesture - sign language and written language are common, but the spoken word is not used, and using...
If we remove all the ferns and horsetails from the ecological equation would grass be the only candidate to fill the void? If not, then what else?
I have decided on my preferred method of zombie apocalypse. I have chosen super leeches. But I have run into some problems, I'm not entirely sure if such a thing would be possible. I have a few ide...
I'm fond of a insect race in a videogame, and want to base a race off of them, or write a fan fiction, but they flex a bit in the torso, and I wasn't sure... Hope this makes sense. :) Animated pi...
I have a character who loses her forearm. To up the cool factor (and because this once happened in a dream of mine), I'd like for her to dip her stump in gold. Would this actually result in gold ...
The (female) human body is pushing the anatomic extremes to support, later bear and nurse a baby while maintaining upright posture and bipedal walk. I cannot see a way to realistically make pregnan...
An improvement of this: A Completely Different Kind of Reef Which I couldn't delete because it already had answers, and deleting an answered question will dock me some reputation. Today's reefs ...
Dragons commonly breathe fire. They can do so over considerable distances, often many times their body length. But this needs to be powered somehow, by a substance that the dragon can generate on i...
I have an alien species that is my pet project. Now I'm to reproduction, which I have a specific idea for, I'm just not sure exactly how it works. My creatures are aquatic, and everything goes on u...
One property of life is communication. In particular sound is very useful due to it's non-directional nature. An alarm call is heard by every member of the pack and warns them immediately of the da...
From my understanding of animals, lifespan is all based on the speed of its metabolic rate. As endothermic animals, mammals live a high-octane life - growing up fast, being quick on activity regard...
Given the existence of neon kittens with: the internal properties and mentality of normal kittens bioluminescent fur. What evolutionary process outside of intentional human breeding/gene manip...
From the answers I received in my previous question explaining why a humanoid society couldn't live atop giant mushroom caps, I have considered going back to my previous idea of them building their...
Experience shows me that some people dislike when a given world has monolithic species. By this I mean the planet has one culture, language, empire or purpose that unifies all of its member. Most...
On Earth, photosynthetic organisms require additional nutrients to survive; in addition to "feeding" off of sunlight, plants respire and absorb water from the ground in order to grow. However, th...
As a tree grows new layers are added each year so that the trunk expands in radius. The living part of the tree is a relatively thin layer on the outside just beneath the bark, and the wood further...
Many different books and novels contain creatures that have human upper body. But have the legs and thorax of spider. They are usually called by different names but they're sort of like centaurs b...
I'd like to send my protagonist permanently into the near-ish future. I suspect that something as simple as the common cold could be deadly to my protagonist once we get a little further along. I...
Essential Question : what adaptations can be made to a crawling vine that would allow them to obtain as much energy as a top level consumer if the vine was on a planet 1 au from a sun sized star?
Purely hypothetical and kind of creative quesiton. My idea is an alien humanoid-like civilization (and basically everything alive on that planet) which uses methanol/ethanol or other alcohol as a s...
Background A common staple in science fiction is the idea that we can augment humans by replacing limbs with mechanical substitutions that enable superhuman feats - weightlifter like strength in a...
Background Information As we all know, life as we know it today is caused by the process of natural selection, sometimes referred to as survival of the fittest, as proposed by Darwin. Essentially,...
I know there are different types and levels of radiation with different affects. I read about some positive affects of ionizing radiation like : Useful for imaging parts of the body and other obj...
An aquatic creature made of a yellow goo moves through the water by moving its body like a squid. The goo can slowly dissolve small creatures and the planet's form of seaweed/kelp. It also has an a...
Imagine that, without any aliens having been ever found, we get to a point where we can build sub-atomically precise simulations of reality, spanning at least something the size (if not the likenes...
Five million years ago, the warm Miocene gradually descended into the cool Pliocene before dropping into the frigid Pleistocene. Such a change in temperature was so gradual that life went on withou...
Imagine every organism is a matter-modifying and sorting mechanism within a very large chaos. Organisms believe their purpose is to evolve by reproduction and they're able to not wipe themselves ...
I make no assumptions to the nature of this planet. There are high chances it does not have an atmosphere or a lithosphere. But in a planet that shows a high level of radioactive activity, would it...
Introduction I have a vague notion of building some sort of strategic space game. Similar to other strategic games, locations are assigned value based upon some abstract evaluation. Following in...
I'd like to create a temple haunted by beings who are ostensibly ancestral spirits - basically, ghosts. How could ghosts be explained without an afterlife? gives me some intriguing ideas, but I'd l...
