Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.movies
Subject: Alien biology
From: alien@acheron.amigans.gen.nz (Ross Smith)
Date: 8 Nov 92 16:33:12 GMT+12
Distribution: world
Organization: Wanganui Amigans, Wanganui, NZ

   I've been doing some serious thinking about the life cycle and caste
system of the Aliens, inspired by some reading on the social insects.

   Before I go any further, I strongly suggest that any reader who thinks
"Aliens" was a bad movie and/or inconsistent with "Alien" should save us
both a lot of trouble by hitting their "kill" key right now.  I considered
cross-posting this to rec.arts.sf.science, and may still try to move this
thread there if the flame level gets too high, for two reasons :  first,
that's probably a more appropriate forum for a technical discussion of
Alien biology anyway, and second, with a bit of luck we could leave the
"Ridley Scott is God and A2 is crap and anyone who can't see that is a
dork" crowd behind...

   Now that I've made it clear that this should only be read by people
interested in a rational discussion of Alien biology, we can continue.
Please keep in mind that this is just my suggestion for how the Aliens
live, based partly on the movies, partly on the Dark Horse comics, and
partly on pure speculation.  If anyone has any different ideas, share them
with us!

   When people hear "hive creature", they tend to think of the simplest
possible hive system :  a single queen who does all the reproducing, and a
whole lot of workers who are sterile (I'll get to the question of males in
a minute).  This is the sort of thing we're familiar with from the more
familiar kinds of ants, bees, and termites, but it's certainly not the only
way to organise a hive.  Among Earth's insects, you can find every
imaginable variation on the hive theme, and a few that nobody would have
imagined.

   In some cases only the queen reproduces, but in others the workers can
lay eggs too.  Sometimes worker eggs develop in the same way as queen eggs,
but in many cases there are restrictions :  in some ants, for example,
workers can lay only male eggs.  In other ants, most worker eggs are
infertile and are used as food for the larvae.  In some wasps, multiple
queens can share the same hive.

   In most hive insects, the reproductive castes have both male and female
members, with the males dying (or, as in bees, being killed by the workers)
after mating, while the females live on as queens.  However, there are some
(mostly solitary) insects in which reproduction is largely or entirely
parthenogenetic (female only, without fertilisation), and males are rare or
nonexistent.

   An important feature of termites, possibly relevant to the Aliens, is
the presence of "supplementary reproductives".  If a colony loses its
queen, new fertile females appear, not true queens but capable of taking
the queen's place.  An adult termite cannot change caste, but the immature
nymphs that would normally have developed into workers or soldiers can, if
necessary, become imperfect queens instead.

   Many people have commented on the contrast in behaviour between the
creature in A1, which cautiously hid itself away and attacked only one or
two humans at a time, and those in A2, which on one occasion simply threw
themselves en masse at the Marines' automated gatling guns.  I think this
can be explained if we remember that the first Alien knew it was alone, out
of touch -- possibly forever -- with its Queen, while those in A2 were in a
hive and under the Queen's control.

   I suspect that, if the first Alien had survived and reached an inhabited
planet, it would have founded a new hive.  It wouldn't have become a Queen
itself -- I'm assuming that, like Earth insects, an adult Alien can't
change caste -- but it would have laid eggs, and one of those eggs would
have carried a genuine Queen embryo.  Actually, several of them probably
would, but only one would have survived to adulthood; we know from the DH
comics (especially "Genocide") that there is strictly one Queen to a
planet.  The common Alien caste (the one we see in A1 and A2 -- I'll call
it the Warrior caste) may or may not lay eggs in a normal hive (probably
not, for a reason I'll explain later), but they can, I think, if there's no
Queen around and Warriors are left to their own devices.

   How many Alien castes are there?  We know of three from the movies --
Warrior, Queen, and the one in A3.  This was produced by the same
facehugger that implanted the Queen embryo in Ripley (I think -- it's been
a while since I saw A3, but that's how I remember it), whereas the one that
got Kane in A1 carried only one embryo.  My explanation for this is that
the creature in A3 was of a highly specialised caste that exists solely to
protect the young Queen until she's produced enough Warriors to establish a
hive.  A Queen-bearing facehugger, unlike a Warrior-bearing one, carries
two embryos -- the Queen herself and the protector creature (let's call it
a Nurse caste).

   The DH story "Genocide" depicts a fourth caste, a kind of super-Warrior
that exists in small numbers and acts as the Queen's "personal guard" in
mature hives.  The function suggests that perhaps these are a later stage
in the Nurse's life, but the totally different appearance, and the fact
that there are several Guards but only one Nurse per Queen, argue against
this.  Probably the Nurse simply dies (or is killed by the newly hatched
Guards?) once the Queen reaches maturity.  Incidentally, I'd guess that a
Queen egg laid by a Warrior, unlike one laid by a true Queen, would
probably not include a Nurse embryo as well (the Warrior that laid it would
carry out the protective duties itself).

   We can guess that there may be other castes that we haven't seen yet.
In termites there are no less than ten different castes (queen, king, male
and female secondary reproductives, large and small workers, and four kinds
of soldier), although no one species exhibits all ten.  So far I haven't
considered the question of male Aliens; my own suspicion is that there
aren't any, reproduction being entirely parthenogenetic.  Either the animal
kingdom on their homeworld never invented sexual reproduction, or there
used to be male Aliens but they disappeared after parthenogenesis was
evolved (as in the female-only insects I mentioned earlier).

   One objection to my claim that Warriors can reproduce when they need to
is the DH story "Aliens vs Predator", in which the Predators scatter
Warrior eggs over worlds so that they can have the fun of hunting the adult
Warriors (killing an Alien is an "initiation ritual" for young Predators).
They carefully remove any Queen eggs from the mix so that the infestations
won't get out of hand (except on one occasion, when their source of eggs --
a captive Queen -- outsmarted the egg-sorting machinery and managed to
sneak a Queen egg in among the Warriors).  This suggests that the Predators
know that Warriors can't reproduce.

   But the Predators don't strike me as being the sort who'd be big on
scientific research.  I said earlier that I don't think Warriors in a
normal hive lay eggs (because if they did the Predators would have noticed
by now).  I think the Predators are just *assuming* that all Warriors are
sterile, and one of these days they're going to get a really nasty
surprise...

   What do you think?


--
...... Ross Smith (Wanganui, NZ) ...... alien@acheron.amigans.gen.nz ......
                  "Sir, trust me. My whole case hinges on
               proving you're a dork." (Kryten, "Red Dwarf")

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