Space Vermin

Recently I decided to allude to roaches and rats and other stowaways on spaceships in my works. It's become something of a running gag: just like on the wooden ships of old, various small animals stow away on spaceships in the future.

After some thinking, I figured that cockroaches in particular would grow to significantly larger proportions in microgravity. Football-sized cockroaches have become familiar critters to my characters, due to unforeseen consequences of microgravity on insect growth and metabolism (Artificial Gravity is only a recent invention and the kinks haven't been worked out, such as one's stomach lurching every time they cross gravity plates. Also most ships with gravity plating only have it where humans would go, so the air vents, often even the storage bays don't have gravity. Larger ships overtax the artificial gravity and have to use rotating components.)

What are other peoples' thoughts on Space Vermin or Space Pests?

edited 13th Nov '13 5:41:47 AM by fulltimeD

Haven't thought about it but you really can't have spaceship punk without space vermin.

I figure some kind of tapeworm like thing that latches onto power conduits.

Those cockroaches might need some extra oxygen to get to that size. But at that size they wouldn't really be able to be vermin. They can't hide, crawl through small holes, they might even have problem with Air-Vent Passageway.

Space is big. Space is scary. Space could be filled with solar powered jellyfish creatures who play havoc on equipment...

Theres sex and death and human grime in monochrome for one thin dime and at least the trains all run on time but they dont go anywhere.

The size of insects is constrained by their breathing mechanisms (which are not like ours). The current largest insects on Earth, goliath beetles, reach a mass of about 100 grams (as larvae) and a length of about 10 centimeters. This is about the upper limit given our planet's current atmospheric conditions. A space habitat capable of supporting football-sized insects would have to have such a high oxygen concentration that it would probably poison its human occupants, at least over long periods of exposure.

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it's over a very long time and they've adapted to the point that humans see them as symbiotic roving trash eaters; it also has to do with several other reactions between insect physiology and microgravity in the long term that weren't anticipated

EDIT: There are no aliens or space-dwelling creatures in my 'verse. The most complex animals humans have found on habitable planets are the equivalent of earth worms and prehistoric molluscs (and the worms make decent eating for the protein-starved). Not even alien insectoids, and certainly nothing intelligent.

edited 13th Nov '13 5:31:06 AM by fulltimeD

I've put several such species into my current GURPS setting.

Coronan Fireflies: The planet Corona, seat of the Empire, is often called a paradise world. The first settlers found it covered in lush vegetation...most of which glows in the dark. Bioluminescence is extremely common in coronan lifeforms, and this has made coronan flora (like the Neonvine, which looks pretty much exactly what it sounds like, or the many different species of Glowfrog) popular exports. On top of that, Corona's biochemistry is highly compatible with Earth's... ...which is where the problems start, since this means that coronan pests can survive on human leftovers. One such pest is the ubiquitous Coronan Firefly. It undergoes two metamorphoses in its life, first from a grub-like larva into something vaguely resembling a cockroach, then into a winged (and glowy) form. They are actually rather nice to look at and wouldn't be all that unwelcome if one of their metabolic byproducts wasn't butyric acid. A Firefly infestation is usually first noticed as a faint disturbing odor seeping through the air vents...and quickly becomes a gag-inducing miasma. Needless to say, no matter how pretty the winged stage may be, spacers kill Fireflies on sight (or smell, as it may be).

Jellyblimps: Airborn cnidarian-analogues (i.e. floating jellyfish) from MacArthur. Literally brainless, the larval "aeroplankton" form sometimes ends up drifting into landed ships by accident. If they find a reasonably moist enviroment anywhere, they'll try to enter the sessile stage of their life cycle and, in the absence of any kind of food they can actually digest (MacArthur's biochemistry took several very weird turns from a terran perspective), expire, eventually decomposing into a sticky, vaguely nasty-smelling slime. Cleaning up after a Jellyblimp infestation is a task usually left to the most junior crew member, or whoever owes the others the most money.

Neorat: Actually, this is plain old Rattus norvegicus, back in its familiar role as Mankind's faithful companion on all our journeys. Introduced into the wilds of Corona by accident, they quickly found several native species to be extremely tasty. Humans would probably disagree, since the coronan antigens they ingest with their prey and spread everywhere they go with their saliva tend to cause violent allergic reactions. Unlike their prey of choice, Neorats don't glow...their urine and excrements, however, often do.

edited 13th Nov '13 7:40:55 AM by MattStriker

Reality is for those who lack imagination.

They'll only really start occurring once produce is live-shipped, because processing would kill them.

How about a critter that can't resist nibbling on the electrical cabling inside starships? Or insects that love to set up shop inside instrument probes, with potentially disasterous results+

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Another element of my novel involves pressurized, sealed human habitats on hostile worlds using insect-like "recycler robots" to purify the air and water. They're programmed to operate in hives for efficiency's sake, and construct more of themselves as needed.

In my 'verse, rats are known as "vores" (from "omnivore") and roaches are simply "bugs." That's because they're some of the few life known to future humans that isn't genetically engineered to aid terraforming projects and human settlements in exotic conditions. Everything else is a "designer animal" whose genome is owned by some big-wig corporation.

Like I said, the vermin serve a symbiotic relationship of spaceships, but the crew has to keep their numbers low or the bugs will weigh them down too much at take off with their biomass.

In all likelihood, in the 40,000 years of space travel that is the backdrop for my novel, the roaches and possibly the "vores" might have developed a taste for chewing on electrical wiring, perhaps as a way of draining energy for themselves when food is scarce, making them subspecies of roaches and rats.

"WORM FARMERS"- these guys live on pretty much every habitable planet that wasn't terraformed; they breed worms for processing into protein paste for space travelers and distant outposts. One of the running jokes of the novel is how there's no intelligent life, not even any alien insects or other arthropods, but the galaxy's got plenty of diverse species of worm.

edited 13th Nov '13 5:38:49 AM by fulltimeD

One of my WI Ps(the 'big' one) is post-cyber/biopunk. Humans created a lot of different creatures and whatnot. Now ~50 years After the End some of them can still be found in the 'wild' and some are creating some real problems.

For example one of the Ring Worlds have a huge problem with a Radiotrophic lichen. It's really hardy and 'self sustaining'. The fungus part can as normal decompose stuff but it can also get some energy from gamma radiation, the other part lives on the decomposed matter and light, but can also get some energy(in the form of ATP) from the fungus.

I could see genetically modified extremophiles (the type of organisms found to be living inside nuclear reactors, for example) being very useful for long term space travel. Maybe there's a GE bacterium that feeds on nuclear waste and expels caesium resin for use in thruster engines, or something similar.

Also if you are writing about a Living Ship, symbiotic life would probably be very diverse and serve a lot of different functions to keep the both the ship and crew comfortable and functioning. Moya in "Farscape" was a good example of this. Among her symbiotes was included a species whose droppings seal microfractures in the hull.

There is no living ships per se, but there is(or was) ships with some living systems. Most of the life support system is biological(simply using plants, bacteria etc). Biological hull healing would be one of those things that never went past the prototype stage or possibly some secret military ship. Wetware CP Us was common and still appears ~50 years after the end.

Back to bugs. In the Future, We Still Have Roombas but we will also have photosynthesising "bugs" walking around eating dust and stuff. Some of these can get quite big. Some might actually be crabs and not insects. Really flat green crabs sweeping the floors with their pincers.

edited 18th Nov '13 11:13:48 AM by m8e

It also makes a fair bit of sense to use biological components in your environmental systems. Plants for keeping your air fresh and microorganisms for waste treatment and reclamation are already tried-and-tested technologies today, and improvements on that (plants or fungi engineered to survive vacuum and/or hard radiation, modified ants to keep the plant cultures running...) would make for a very interesting hybrid between "full" bio- or hardtech.

Reality is for those who lack imagination.

^yeah that's pretty much how most of my life support tech works

Have you ever thought of people eating these roaches and "vores?" Some cultures on Earth eat insects all the time, and a football-sized cockroach would probably provide a lot of protein, along with being the size of a small lobster. Some people find the idea of eating a cockroach disgusting, but those people probably don't have a problem with eating crab or lobster, two animals that eat poop and carrion along with other marine life. (Anyone who's kept a crab in an aquarium knows they have a habit of killing just about everything inside of there. One of my friends kept a blue crab in with a 6-11" bluefish and the crab killed the fish, ate it, and stuffed it's spine into an ornament in the tank.) The bugs would be dirty, but they can be cleaned before eating, and the heat would kill the bacteria.

Also, do these animals ever have the chance of hurting the crew? Could they gang up on them in swarms to devour them if they get very hungry? Is there a chance that some crew members or enthusiasts could keep them as pets, like how some people keep rats as pets?

X-posted from the old worldbuilding ecology thread:

Some cultures view animals that we think are cute as ugly, unclean or worse and vice versa, see What Measure Is A Noncute.

I take this and run with it. One nation exterminates large birds because they think they are evil. Another nation has a love-hate relationship with bitechnology. Some of their worlds import and export tailor-made critters, others don't. Earth is all over the map, some critters are vermin, others are fine. Some "vermin" are imported to "re-balance" or terraform planets. But like those Aussie rabbits, there are worlds crushed by plagues of cats, dogs, foxes, etc.

edited 21st Nov '13 8:06:52 PM by TairaMai

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be a case on The First 48

^^ Yes, but usually only when their rations (various protein and fiber constructs) run out.

No danger of swarming. Good thing about big bugs is that they've adapted by reproducing more slowly. There aren't as many of them as there would be normal sized cockroaches on a seagoing vessel. However, on ships with large rotating sections providing earth like gravity, swarming could be a problem- but these roaches would tend more to stay out of sight and act more like Earth roaches.

Artificial Gravity isn't perfect. It's based on graviton deck plating, so when you step from one plate to the other, there's a weird feeling like a half second of weightlessness in between. The huge roaches tend to stay in areas where artificial gravity is inactive or weakest (since it's a very expensive technology and is used sparingly, such is in corridors, cockpits, crew quarters, but not in the innards of the ship).

Most people in space in this future aren't used to non-synthetic food. They might have hangups about eating the shipboard pests, even if it makes sense in a logical, survivalist kind of way. And people on planets have livestock and game to eat; they don't need to subsist on roaches or vores.

edited 22nd Nov '13 5:31:59 AM by fulltimeD

One person's pest is another's staple. Or it could become a delicacy due to some chemical or protein in the "vermin". Contrawise, a food animal introduced could become vermin due to a Rabbits In Australia-type situation or it being inedible to the species now in control of the planet.

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be a case on The First 48