Jurassic World

Say, what's the most active online community for this franchise?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Your best shot is probably the Jurassic Park subreddit. The fandom is really fractured these days.

Well, all I want right now is to figure out how big Isla Sorna really needs to be in order to be plausible for it to be able to host a self-sustaining ecosystem of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals ranging from tiny compsognathi to massive sauropods, without fear of population collapse in at least the near future from inbreeding depression, overpredation, starvation, contagious diseases or losses to tropical storms. I thought about boosting it to the size of Java or North Island (both over 100,000 sqkm) and then appropriately scaling up the rest of the archipelago's main islands to it, but that brought me to consider what impact would the existence of such relatively large islands have on North American history.

FWIW, I sidestepped the issue of the island now dwarfing Costa Rica by shifting ownership to the much larger Mexico, roughly between Clipperton Island and the Galapagos Islands. I then handwave that the archipelago had remained undeveloped by both the Spanish Empire and independent Mexico due to a combination of its distance from both the North American mainland and what sea routes existed in the eastern Pacific for Mexico to care about, an unusually high frequency of severe storms battering its area for decades that only wound down slowly over the latter half of the 20th century (so even private ventures in hopes of uncovering a possible wealth of resources were seen as not worth the risk), and Mexico having an assortment of more pressing issues to focus on. This left InGen and more specifically John Hammond an opportunity to convince the Mexican government to lease the islands in return for a hefty sum to grease the politicians' pockets. Does this seem reasonable?

Edited by MarqFJA on Jul 26th 2022 at 12:56:50 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

You could say that a lack of resources until Ingen imported them to the island is why it was unoccupied. Catalina Island was owned at various points by Spain and Mexico and the US but was rarely ever inhabited because of the lack of freshwater sources.

What kind of resources, though? Obviously not freshwater, because that's needed for the de-extinctioned wildlife, and I don't see how anyone in our time would have the know-how and resources to conduct an engineering megaproject that would somehow give such a huge island a natural source of freshwater and a system of rivers all across it, especially since InGen had never planned to use Isla Sorna for anything other than mass-producing new dinos and temporarily housing them, with apparently the secondary purpose of exposing the animals to the modern environment and all of its stresses and pathogens under relatively controlled conditions to get them used to it. Them taking over the island after Hurricane Clarissa was unplanned for, and they were expected to die off in short order.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

In the novel version of The Lost World it was a plot point that the island was NOT self sustainable indefinitely. There was a prion disease running rampant and other problems besides but it was clearly not a viable ecosystem for long.

"These 'no-nonsense' solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel."

Yeah, the books weren't meant to sustain an endless franchise, so the fact that the dinosaur populations were unsustainable was a feature, not a bug. Jurassic Park was a horrible idea that one billionaire came up with to try and turn a profit, which would ultimately self-destruct and leave no lasting impact on the world.

These animals cannot coexist with the modern ecosystem. In time, they would be washed clean of it, returning to extinction from whence they came. And the world would move on as if it had never happened. The Jurassic Park novels were meant to end when they were over.

In fact, the whole reason Crichton needed to introduce a second island is because the first novel ends with the (nonexistant) Costa Rican Air Force carpet-bombing Isla Nublar and annihilating all of the dinosaurs. So obviously the second novel can't take place there!

...but it's a franchise now, so the islands are now able to sustain these populations. And a handful of dinosaurs escaping from one guy's garage in California can suddenly turn into a global invasive species crisis with thousands of dinosaurs blanketing every continent on Earth. Because, regardless of how much sense it makes, that is a thing that needs to be true in order to continue making Jurassic movies indefinitely.

Camp Cretaceous, the absolute best product to come out of the World revival, even adds in a third even more unsustainable island that has like dozens upon dozens of predators and like four herbivores. Not four species, mind you. Four herbivore animals, period. Three of them are babies.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jul 27th 2022 at 8:06:22 AM

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

And even had the franchise cleaved unto the unsustainability aspect of the de-extinctioned animals' populations, there plenty of fans that are interested in the idea of said de-extinction unintentionally creating a diverse and self-sustaining ecosystem of prehistoric wildlife on an isolated island, which can be the subject of many exotic takes on otherwise common plots, such as the threat of poachers, people getting stranded on the island and desperately trying to survive until they find a way off, etc.

So... anyone have further feedback?

Edited by MarqFJA on Jul 27th 2022 at 8:39:21 PM

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All in all it would be extremely difficult to make an island perfectly suited for sustaining numerous species of dinosaurs, even more so without human intervention. The fact of the matter is that Jurassic Park brought together dinosaurs from countless different regions whose environmental needs were different. The T. rex and Stegosaurus lived further apart from each other than the Rex did to humans, so having them share a habitat is more extreme than lions and kangaroos living together.

Ironically, if dinosaurs were actually going to survive long term in the modern world then them escaping the island and spreading world wide is actually the best (maybe only) viable way that could happen.

Of course it does raise the implications of what so many invasive species would do to a modern ecosystem but the dinos would probably be better off.

"These 'no-nonsense' solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel."

That's true of the second novel, where Chrichton was clearly writing with an end in sight, the re-extinction of dinosaur island. But it's not true of the first book.

While the park was always doomed, the animals were not and the story ends with some species (mostly compies and raptors) escaping and making it to the mainland (which is what the whole World trilogy was working towards).

Edited by MrSeyker on Jul 27th 2022 at 8:10:44 AM

I feel like the end of the movie gave us the more optimistic answer to that when it showed so many of the wild dinosaurs joining up with the herds, flocks, packs, and pods of existing native fauna. As far as the ecosystem of the African savannah was concerned there was a slight increase in the elephant population, just some of these elephants had their tusks on the top side of their heads.

Sure... but realistically, elephants are having a hard enough time without new species competing for the same niche. Even if they get along well enough.

Edited by FGHIK on Jul 27th 2022 at 4:43:01 AM

I missed the part where that's my problem.

I'd imagine one dinosaur group that would be an extremely destructive invasive species would be hadrosaurs. Most of them are the size of elephants or bigger which means no modern predators would be able to touch them, studies indicate that they could eat pretty much any plant matter they could reach (even rotting wood) and unlike modern large herbivores, they had a fairly rapid reproductive rate as they could lay clutches of up to 20 eggs as a time and these offspring would mature quickly as growth rings indicate that they could reach half their adult size by the end of their first year.

That assumes that their natural predators aren't introduced alongside them, which should keep their numbers under control. Of course, what impact those carnivores would have on modern species that they could reasonably prey upon is another can of worms.

But is the reimagination of the Muertes Archipelago that I had presented plausible enough for Willing Suspension of Disbelief, at least?

You mean extinction? Because de-extinction is the reverse of extinction.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Should've said re, I've amended the post. Thanks for pointing the mistake.

Introducing large theropods would probably be the only viable option to control hadrosaur numbers aside from regular cullings. If you go that route, you'd hope they'd be willing to ignore smaller modern herbivores in favor of bigger prey.

I can only imagine such attempts making things worse. History has plenty of examples of bringing in a natural predator of an invasive species, only for them to cause as many or more problems than the species they were meant to control... often while not even solving that problem either. And that's with modern species we understand a lot better than dinosaurs.

I missed the part where that's my problem.

I mean, at least they're big compared to other hard to eradicate critters we had trouble with. Megafauna's our real extinction specialty here.

Secret Signature

One of the main reasons for that is because mammalian megafauna tends to have a very slow reproduction rate. Dinosaurs are different in that they breed much more rapidly, with large clutches and fast maturation.

Yes, but, dino omelette.

Secret Signature

The prey species and the smallest carnivores like compies, at least. Large ones like Tyrannosaurus evidently have a far slower reproduction rate, as demonstrated by the single juvenile that the couple in The Lost World were shown to have after four years of living in the wild; at most, he might have had a few siblings that either were Too Dumb to Live or got offed by medium-sized opportunistic nest raiders.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I just rewatched the first Jurrasic World for the first time in years, and gosh, I forgot just how judgey the film is towards Claire. Like, it's having a go at her for being too controlling before she's even done anything particularly bad.

Kaze ni Nare!

I assumed the Rexes lost any other kids to smaller predators. All it takes is the wrong move and they could lose a bunch of eggs or young to raptors

Every accusation by the GOP is ALWAYS a confession.

As I recall, in the Sorna rexes in the novels had three babies.

There's really no strong evidence in the movies that JP dinos are particularly explosive breeders.

Even if they were, predators, both modern and prehistoric, are going to make baby dinos part of their diet. The chances are high that most babies in a clutch are not going to make it into adulthood.