Alien enough?

[BigBadRon]

Last night on Discovery, there was a show which featured the following:

A shrimp that could punch with the force of a .22 calibre bullet (it feeds on crabs, and uses the trick to crack their shells).
Another shrimp which uses a modified claw to compress microscopic bubbles of air in a special chamber. When these bubbles are released, the pressure change means that (very very VERY briefly) they reach the same temperature as the surface of the sun! This causes a tiny explosion as the surrounding water boils in a fraction of a second, and the shockwave stuns the shrimp's prey!
A thing called a velvet worm (which looks like a fuzzy red centipede), which has a directable nozzle on each side of its head, through which it sprays a very sticky glue all over passing prey.

The point is, these are REAL animals. Makes some of the things in SF movies, books, games, etc, look positively... normal.
So what features of real animals are so bizarre that you've used them in alien creatures?

 

[tjoneslo]

Originally posted by BigBadRon:
Last night on Discovery, there was a show which featured the following:
Another shrimp which uses a modified claw to compress microscopic bubbles of air in a special chamber. When these bubbles are released, the pressure change means that (very very VERY briefly) they reach the same temperature as the surface of the sun! This causes a tiny explosion as the surrounding water boils in a fraction of a second, and the shockwave stuns the shrimp's prey!

I strongly doubt the details of this is true. I'll believe the shrimp compresses an air bubble and when it pops, generates a shockwave to stun it prey, a number of animals do this trick. It's the bit about the bubble reaching 11,000 degrees and causing the sea water to boil which is wrong. You can achieve the bubble popping with stun force with a lot less effort than surface of sun hot. If you are really interested in the effect, goole for "cavitation".

 

[BigBadRon]

Hmmmm... possibly correct there, I was just going by what they said on the show. On the ultra-ultra-slow-mo playback you can actually see that the water does appear to boil into steam in a fraction of a second.

 

[Tom Schoene]

Originally posted by tjoneslo:
You can achieve the bubble popping with stun force with a lot less effort than surface of sun hot. If you are really interested in the effect, goole for "cavitation".

I did (actually "cavitation shrimp") and found this site, apparently by serious researchers in the field of 'shrimpoluminescence'

How Snapping Shrimp Snap

We now also report that a short, intense flash of light is emitted as the bubble collapses, indicating that extreme pressures and temperatures of at least 5,000 K must exist inside the bubble at the point of collapse.

Compare with solar photosphere temperatures around 6,000 K. OTOH, the total output is tiny, on the order of 10^4 photons.

 

[Ben W Bell]

Was this one of the BBC's Blue Planet Series? If so a damn fine series and full of things so alien you wouldn't believe it.

The Mantis Shrimp is the wonderfully coloured one that smashes through anything. They come into fish tanks on living rock sometimes and when they grow they smash the tanks. Very pretty but extremely dangerous.

 

[trader jim]

did you know ALF likes to eat shrimp!!!???

 

[BigBadRon]

No, it wasn't "Blue Planet", although that did have its share of strange creatures too.

I just remembered they also had film of a cuttlefish changing colour so rapidly that it had waves of different patterns flowing all over it.

Some of these things were so bizarre that if you put them in a game your players would laugh at such a "stupid" idea.

PGSP-0 (Plasma Gun Shrimp Portable - TL0) anybody?

 

[trader jim]

cuttle fish with human brains...hhhhmmmmnnn....could mean BIG trouble!!!

 

[Jame]

Why not uplift shrimp?

 

[pauldrye]

Originally posted by Jame:
Why not uplift shrimp?

Because halfway through the process you always get hungry and, well, out comes the cocktail sauce.

 

[pauldrye]

Originally posted by BigBadRon:
So what features of real animals are so bizarre that you've used them in alien creatures?

I've borrowed pentastomes (left as a Google exercise for the reader). Animals, but not mammals, reptiles, crustaceans, insects, fish or any other well-known phylum. They're all parasites, but I started from the idea that mammals weren't that much further up the dominance chain once upon a time, and tried extrapolating animals from them.

I had some pretty weird ones by the time I was done.

 

[Gunner]

Originally posted by Jame:
Why not uplift shrimp?

Reminds me of a sci-fi short I read somewhere.

The Bad Guy Aliens (BGA's) were giant lobster types. Terra was protected by SDI sattlelites, so the BGA's didn't want to tried a direct invasion. The SDI sats were controlled by one central space station, so the BGA's decide to sneak aboard as fresh food (which was the only thing the space station got on a regular basis).

Anyway, the cook takes one look at the size of the can, and decides to boil the "lobster" in the can, without opening it. Vo'la, one LARGE "lobster" dinner.

 

[jzeitlin]

Originally posted by BigBadRon:
Hmmmm... possibly correct there, I was just going by what they said on the show. On the ultra-ultra-slow-mo playback you can actually see that the water does appear to boil into steam in a fraction of a second.

Which doesn't take 11K degrees; a couple of hundred (Celsius) would suffice.

 

[jzeitlin]

Originally posted by BigBadRon:
Last night on Discovery, there was a show which featured the following:

etceterated by quoting poster

The point is, these are REAL animals. Makes some of the things in SF movies, books, games, etc, look positively... normal.
So what features of real animals are so bizarre that you've used them in alien creatures?

It doesn't even take oddities like that to make a creature seem alien; how many people know that in Terrestrial birds, it's the female that determines the sex of the offspring - the sex-determinant chromosomes are designated W and Z instead of X and Y; the female (egg-layer, generally incubator) is WZ, while the male (sperm-donor) is WW.