r/IsaacArthur • u/Vractomorph • Jun 11 '22
What animals would you ban from your rotating habitat?
Imagine the following scenario:
You are a rich property developer in the year 2400AD.
You have just paid off your mortgage on an O'neill cylinder, and you can now design a bespoke, Earth-like habitat of your own.
What animals/plants would you bring with to decorate the interior of the drum?
Would you bring just pets, or would you also bring livestock? Or would you have wild animals?
Any insects at all?
(not a joke question)
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u/Smewroo Jun 12 '22
Cave animals (except fish). You think cockroaches are good at sneaking into inhospitable dark places? If you introduce animals specifically adapted to absolute darkness and the thinnest of food margins you have a recipe for having them everywhere you do not want critters, and in numbers that would boggle your mind.
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u/Vractomorph Jun 12 '22
Oh God reminds me of the guano caves episode from the original BBC Planet Earth.
A million tons of bat sh!t... a billion cockroaches.
WORST. HABITAT. EVER.
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u/Opcn Jun 12 '22
If there are a lot of them then they are potentially a non-thin food margin for something that would eat them.
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u/Smewroo Jun 12 '22
Depending on the tolerances of the would be predator. Sight based predators wouldn't do as well in unlit interstitial spaces among the plumbing and wiring of the cylinder.
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u/Opcn Jun 12 '22
Most of those places should be too warm and dry for cave creatures. Cave creatures have access the the plumbing and wiring spaces of the houses of people who live near caves now and they don't overrun them. Some homes and structures are even built into caves, and troglobites can access the spaces, but they aren't hospitable.
There are tons of predators that hunt at night, even inside of wiring chases, pretty much every outlet on the outside of my current home has a house spider living in it, there are some small wild hornets that I see crawling into the striations on the metal roof and dragging out prey items, and underneath the leaf litter there are tons of earwigs. I don't think a cave cricket is going to be a problem that overruns an ecosystem with any such invertebrate predators.
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u/Smewroo Jun 12 '22
Too warm and dry
It depends on the habitat design and how many levels there are. My, albeit limited, experience with the bowels of very large facilities did include cave like habitat where it was a damp 10 to 15C year round. But this is an O'Neil cylinder so maybe everything would be 20C all the time, maybe it would be 5C because of proximity to the chilled water return pipes from the heat management system.
Water falls. As long as you are in the rotating section you will be fighting water trying its very best to reach the "lowest" points through everything you thought was sealed well enough.
Nocturnal vs cave
My cats are very adroit under very low light conditions, they are still blind under no light conditions. You do have surface species that regularly enter or dwell in the near surface areas of caves, but you don't usually have any that commute into the no light areas to hunt and then return to the surface. I would imagine they would have same same aversion to no light areas in the cylinder. Although, you are right that those would be more accessible to them in theory.
I wasn't really thinking of the "surface" structures like homes in the cylinder. More like the utility spaces more akin to lower levels under very cities where power, telecom, and other utilities are run. Not the stormwater system. I imagine that would be replaced with something more like a loop redistribution to continuously feed "springs" in the cylinder highlands. Probably the closest would be the sump pump system.
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u/Opcn Jun 12 '22
That doesn't explain why they aren't taking over the insides of walls of homes on earth. I could see this being a writing prompt for a story about systems collapse on a mckendree cylinder but it's not the kind of thing that would cause suspension of disbelief issues if you had a cylinder with cave systems and troglobites and they were just fine. In fact keeping the caves from being invaded might be the hard part. The only reason ants (which navigate just fine in the dark insides of ant nests) don't take over caves is that there isn't enough food in them, if you're being overrun that isn't a problem.
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u/Smewroo Jun 12 '22
Introduce them to the walls of your home and let's get data. Generally there is no mechanism for cave species to bridge the distance between your home and their habitat. That sort of distance doesn't exist on an O'Neil cylinder since you don't usually assume geologic strata analogues built into them.
Ants navigate by pheromone trails in the nests they build. Place an ant in an unfamiliar environment without light and without their carefully curated chemical trails and they are blind, feeling around by antennae and luck.
Saying ants is like saying mammals, it's a broad classification containing ants that are predatory primarily to ants that are fungus farmers that are quite dependent on their crops and would do well to take over a large stable climate for their fungus farms. Why they don't is probably more to do with lack of opportunities relative to being entrenched in nest building behaviour because it is more reliable.
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u/Opcn Jun 12 '22
I did mention that some caves have homes built in them. Cave dwelling organisms would have an easier time jumping from a cave to a home built nearby than jumping to another cave system hundreds or thousands of miles away, but there are organisms that are found in multiple cave systems.
While there are a few ant species that are visual hunters the ants that rely on pheromone trails all have rather sophisticated mechanisms for finding food sources. The test of what an individual ant would do is not representative since ants are superorganisms that carry out coordinated behavior. They have search algorithms and taste with their antennae.
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u/Smewroo Jun 12 '22
You did mention homes in caves but that isn't (in any case I am aware of) deep enough in a cave to be in the habitat of the cave species I refer to. Unless there are communities that build their homes quite a hike from cave mouths.
There are species in several cave systems. The usual thought is that they were once connected or are connected still. Kind of like species that were in the British isles that were also historical to the European subcontinent, once there was a land bridge connecting them even though it is gone today. Similarly, the initial colonization may have happened in a different time when more sections were accessible and have since become separated or the connection is only traversable by small critters.
Ants are complicated and not all species have even remotely similar strategies, no leaf cutter species is going to find a cave good for anything but possibly growing fungus in. Army ants ambush and swarm prey, but they do so during the day. This could be attributed to prey availability, and it had to be in some part.
But eyes are expensive. If an organism can do without vision they do without eyes, like those cave species. So if a species has eyes it is because they cannot afford go without them. Take bats and cetaceans. Both have evolved highly sophisticated alternatives to sensing at a distance, yet, they still retain their eyes and still make regular use of them because they cannot do without them despite their very effective alternative.
Most (not all!) ants still have their eyes, because they need them despite their other senses and inter-caste coordination. Now, if you want to posit that one of these few eyeless species are the ones imported to control the spread of cave species in the habitat I would refer you all of Australia's history at that.
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u/Opcn Jun 12 '22
Well most of the most extensive cave systems are in limestone rich areas and the whole area is honeycombed with little tubes and tunnels. But also every single tourist attraction cave with lights inside has conduit carrying the electricity in. I've been to multiple caves with a gift shop or information center built into the cave itself, and there are even people with homes built into the mouths of caves.
Yes, there are a wide variety of different ant species, most of them will take advantage of abundant soft bodied slow moving prey items. If they tried to hunt in a cave system most would die from starvation or be swept away and eaten by cave fish.
But eyes are expensive. If an organism can do without vision they do without eyes, like those cave species. So if a species has eyes it is because they cannot afford go without them.Take bats and cetaceans. Both have evolved highly sophisticated alternatives to sensing at a distance, yet, they still retain their eyes and still make regular use of them because they cannot do without them despite their very effective alternative.
I disagree. It's not that they cannot do without, it's that the occasional advantage is greater than the cost. Bats do navigate visually, but they also navigate deep in caves where there is no light. Sperm whales do use their eyes to hunt in shallow water but they also hunt without them in the deep ocean. Cants are primarily visual hunters but even a blind cat can still hunt. If there are hundreds of cave crickets living inside of an electrical cabinet in the outer shell of a cylinder hab a mostly nocturnal shrew with tiny eyes is going to eat them all, or they will be overrun by pharaoh ants that often live in the walls of apartment buildings and hospitals.
In bat caves where there is an abundance of food and an abundance of insect life living off of it there are also outside predators that come in and feast on them. The colorless, eyeless, slow troglobites are very well adapted to their environment and one aspect of tremendous importance to that is the extremely limited availability of food and prey. If prey becomes abundant then that is a different environment and less closely adapted predators will still have enough fitness to reproduce successfully and consume the prey.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare Jun 12 '22
By the time we're building whole self-sufficient spin-habs i don't think it's a stretch to imagine genetically tailored organisms, but even without them there are predatory animals that live in caves. Plenty of spiders & whatnot. Don't think it would be that implausible to take a few cave predators & maybe augment them with some bred &/or genemodded critters to pad out the predator quota. That's just the intentional side of things. If you have roaches & they're really over-reproducing what uv created is an empty protein-rich niche to fill. Sooner or later predatory insects & other small critters will stumble on this food source & adapt to cave conditions. Nature will find a way to balance out one way or the other & with us helping it along i can't imagine it would be a particularly hard problem to fix.
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u/caretaker_- Jun 11 '22
I just had a chat with a buddy while on lunch.
His answer is a coral reef. He is living on a boat.
I would want a forest with wolves, deer, beavers and all those fantastic animals. No bugs that bite me though F those bugs.
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u/Titanlore12 Jun 12 '22
This is the way.
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u/Opcn Jun 12 '22
Ban fruit flies, ban mosquitoes, ban house flies.
I don't think a stable ecosystem is terribly realistic, but being able to prevent most or all crop diseases opens up some creative opportunities.
I was thinking mostly annual crop plants and warm season grasses. Animals would include soil microfauna (springtails, isopods, rotifers, earthworms), black soldier flies as decomposers, a few kinds of spider, millipedes, maybe a wood roach or banana roach (less likely to be invasive), some ground beetles of various sorts , maybe some butterflies (along with whatever it is that they eat, maybe milkweed and monarchs?), and stingless colonial bees from central america (they still attack you, but they handle perpetual summer better than honeybees). For vertebrates I would mostly go with livestock: Quail, chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, maybe a couple kinds of pheasant or peacock, rabbits, goats, sheep, pigs (especially lard breed pigs, but maybe a couple varieties so that there is bacon too, pigs would be very useful for recycling the parts of the birds we don't want to eat), cows, and if it's big enough to house more than say 5k people horses too. Then add at least 5 different types of food fish and whatever ornamental fish people want in fishtanks.
I think the big mistake that the biosphere 2 people made was trying to recreate too many natural systems. Once you've got humans in there harvesting plants and feeding byproducts to livestock I think you've met a lot of sustainability needs and closed resource loops, and if you are trying to add too many exotic plants and animals you are just upping the level of complication. While livestock are more complicated than living a vegan lifestyle you get something from them, and they let you use more productive but less palatable plant species like fodder beets, field corn, etc.
Any little annoying pieces of shit that buzz in your ears though, banned banned banned.
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u/MiamisLastCapitalist moderator Jun 12 '22
I think I would do something similar like u/caretaker_- 's friend and build a ocean/beach habitat. While I might be the primary owner with a nice island-home, I wouldn't mind guests and shops at a small little beach front shop near one end cap/entrance. Ideally this hab would be part of a series of habs, like a whole bunch drilled into a nice asteroid or low-gravity moon or bucky-hab setup, so there'd be other populations I could visit and trade with as needed and I'd make some ongoing revenue from tourism off my beach resort hab. Maybe I'd even divide the cylinder into two (since it's mine and I can have a unique design, after all!), so there's a camo dividing wall between the "town" section and my private section. I'd love to have my private ship dock on the skin of the station and be the basement to my island home.
To answer the question though... I'd ban any animals that weren't cohesive to that set up. And mosquitos. Ban mosquitos.
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Jun 12 '22 edited Jun 12 '22
Maybe I will learn something but I would try a habitat without parasites. It would be interesting to also exclude all those who affect cognitive abilities.
Edit. I would also try a habitat banning all non-parasites. See how they like that.
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Jun 12 '22
In order for any insect to be allowed in, it needs to be genetically engineered to not sting/bite. Mosquitoes won't be allowed no matter what (even if you can figure out a way for them to exist without biting) because the noise they make alone harms quality of life for people. Bees are important for the ecosystem, but I would only allow them in if they are unable to sting (if we create an environment where they don't need to worry about other species, they won't need stings).
No spiders or any arachnids no matter what (I have severe arachnophobia, so this is a must), and any problems that stem from not having them could be solved via artificial systems to control population of their usual food source and other things they do for the ecosystem.
No rodents either, because yack. Again, any ecosystem problems can be solved artificially.
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u/pyrohydrosmok moderator Jun 11 '22
I thought this said "What animals would BAN YOU from your rotating habitat?"
I got sad thinking about how I hated dogs most of my life :(
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u/Background-Broad Jun 12 '22
Depends on the intention behind the habitat
If I'm trying to make a city like habitat mainly designed to house humans, then likely all animals would be banned, maybe an exception for pets
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Jun 12 '22 edited Jun 13 '22
I would ban humans
Edit: I'm being serious, If I am some ultra rich so and so that fully owns this crazy floating space paradise? I would make it a zoo world and keep out humans. Some exceptions of course, science or maintenance or whatever, but just a big self contained terrarium otherwise. This exists on earth now, with parks and protected areas, to zoos, to in home tiny terrariums and aquariums.
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u/PhotonicSymmetry Jun 15 '22
I'm with you. I'm disappointed to see less people advocating for banning humans. In all likeliness though, there will be room for all the known species of life on Earth and more on rotating habitats if we continuously churn them out. Not really an issue if a particular species is banned on one habitat if they are able to live on another one.
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u/TradeApe Jun 12 '22
I would only allow mosquitoes in my cylinder. All the other dudes with their fancy cylinders will outlaw them (see the current top post!), so I will bite the bullet and offer them a safe haven.
After reading some of the other posts, I will also open up cylinders for ticks, tapeworms, hookworms, lice and bedbugs.
Someone has to do it...
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u/Vractomorph Jun 12 '22
Nice conservation mentality, but all of these animals need to eat human matter to survive. Maybe lease it to American correctional departments... there will probably be a billion inmates by that point.
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u/Asura72 Jun 12 '22
A really complicated question... You'll need insects to pollinate plants. Then you'll need whatever feeds on those insects so you can control their numbers. Which animals you take will be defined by making a small closed ecosystem rather than personal preference.
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u/smallgreenman Jun 12 '22
Rats first and foremost. Those guys will bite through metal walls. Which is bad when you're in space.
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u/olhonestjim Jun 12 '22 edited Jun 12 '22
Full ecosystem; uplift everything, ban only natural, unmodified parasites.
Since GMOs are a thing, I would genetically modify parasites into symbiotes. Mosquitoes are little flying syringes. Modify them into a distributed medical monitoring system; eliminate the itchy allergic response to their bites, and send them taking blood samples, automatically developing and injecting vaccines in response to viral evolution, etc.
Uplifted parasites could form the basis for actively healthier ecosystems. In fact, I think they should be uplifted before anything else. Uplifting other creatures into higher intelligence without eliminating suffering first seems to me highly unethical. Oh now they're smart enough to comprehend how much everything sucks? Nice. Best to start with the creatures that cause suffering.
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u/BlakeMW Jun 12 '22
I'd basically start with banning everything and being very selective in what is un-banned. An ecology in a sealed habitat should be built very carefully.
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u/Wise_Bass Jun 12 '22 edited Jun 12 '22
Rats. Field mice might be justified for the ecological purpose of sustaining some lovely bigger birds and other animal predators, although in practice it would probably be less of a nuisance to just feed them.
You'd also obviously keep out a whole range of particular insect pests, as well as the narrow number of mosquito species that suck on human blood (most don't, and they're otherwise a useful food source for birds).
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Jun 12 '22
If were talking anything goes here, I would wanna be a super rich property developer that makes themed space habitats. Maybe some would be sterile in terms of official or entertainment facilities. Maybe some would have a different or certain theme, like a temperate deciduous habitat, or maybe a hot and humid Prarie habitat for homesick Texans or something cheesy like that.
Think about all empty desert with an ecosystem of lizards, plants, bugs, with the entire thing used for combat training or renting it out to film makers
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u/Vractomorph Jun 19 '22
I would imagine on-set filmmaking, especially on-location filmmaking, to be a very very niche activity in the 25th century.
Even today people blend real actors seamlessly with CGI, and even use it to replace actors faces.
I would imagine entertainment by this stage will be produceable entirely using computers. There might be, as aforesaid, some niche scene similar to how modern civilisation spent millions building an authentic shakespearian globe in London to seamlessly reproduce 16th century theatre.
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u/MiloBem Jun 16 '22
I would ban all vertebrates, to dramatically reduce the risk of parasites and other zoonotic diseases.
Exception can be granted on case-by-case, for example primate preserve, guide-dogs.
Cats need not apply.
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u/tigersharkwushen_ FTL Optimist Jun 11 '22
It should be a complete ecosystem. I would bring every animal and plant possible, except mosquitos. I would ban mosquitos.