Blattids

Created Friday 02 November 2012

Sorry, but calling them blattids is sick.

"It's the last phase. Vanished into havoc. Unfathomable mind. Now beacon. Now sea." — Annhiliation. Their weapon is insanity. And narrowing intellectual bnadwidth. Figuring a species mode of intelligence, and then the tendencies and weaknesses of it.

Inspired by Haloquadratum, the pudgies need salt. They come from an extremely halophilic environment and need nearly as much salt in their bodies as water. Their cell walls are largely glass and their skin shimmers like sunlight into a pond.

Taken from that piece I wrote as an atempt at the begining of the whole real written work.

Maybe call them "Quabs"??

First OED definition is a swamp or mire
Second is either a freshwater fish (like a gudgeon), a sea cucumber (obs, rare), or (also obs. & rare) a "crude or shapeless thing": 1629 J. Ford Lovers Melancholy iii. 49, I will shew your highnes, A trifle of mine owne braine..a Schollers fancy, A quab. Tis nothing else a very quab.
And I do want the sense of them to be rather unformed as well as nicely implying that they themselves are either ill shapen or poorly discerned (out of lack of care or attention as much as anythign else)
- And the double denotation as wallowing in or being a low-lying, boggy thing is nice
- And etymology of quab2 is:

"either early modern Dutch quabbe toad, frog, any of certain kinds of fish, also dewlap (Middle Dutch quappe ; Dutch kwab , kwabbe ) or Middle Low German quappe, quabbe burbot (German regional (Low German) quabb ), both cognate with Old Saxon quappa , Old High German quappa , kape (Middle High German quape , quappe , German Quappe burbot, tadpole), and also (perhaps < Middle Low German) Old Swedish qvappa (Swedish kvabba ), Old Danish quab (Danish kvabbe ), perhaps ultimately < an Indo-European base of expressive origin (with the underlying sense ‘something slimy, flabby, or quivering’)"

How great is that?!
The only thing I don't like is that its antiquated use lends itself more to "W to W", but I don't want to showhorn a race into there that's really just a super-position of these guys into that world. It's not only an imposition, it's a blurring of boundaries my meager skills of literary cartography will already have trouble demarcating.

Glide symmetry?

Name them after Cambrian critters? Kinda reinforces their ancient-ness
- "Marrella? Isn't the one you talked to yesterday also named Marrella?" "Yeah, it's a pretty common name."

Very old and successful Blattids become covered in anemones.

Their whole point is the flip of that coin. Do they become another household pest in our expanding realm or do we instead go somewhere small surrounded by Buzzkills. Sure, it could be niether, some treaty is signed. Or whatever. After all, the space eats it all.

Glad I finally have some ideas to put here. If they're to field an army that's a coni toss from beating humanity, then they need to be worth it.

They have Lamarkian evolution---and good. Individuals can't evolve (almost said they could, and that successive molts were these evolutions), but they can pass down some memories to their offspring.

And they've of course evolved that ability pretty well. So one of the things they've had evolved into them is to become much more n-selecting as they are loosing. And thus to reproduce mroe quickly. And a lot more quickly when pushed to it, parthogenesis in days. All they need, though, is food enough to keep the babies---and their evolutions--coming at ya.

Among their other Lamarkian memories is how to produce a pretty wide range of poisons, pheromones, and other chemicals. And some pretty useful body plans.

The evolution of offspring is affected by their Lamarkian memories, and those memories are affected by the immediate environment. So, even if overall the speices is doing all right, if you get a group of them isolated from other Blattids and start kililng them, they'll really quickly n-select into the devolutionary survival shape.

Which I guess I haven't actually written down yet, I guess. Huh, wonder what other ideas so old to this that they predate me writing this crap down.
Anyway, one of the unexpected superpowers of the Blattids is their design of their own hereditary structures so that as they approach extinction, they evolve into increasing nastier, hardier, and more cunning imps. Small, deadly, and really hard to get rid of all of them.

And they set it so that as their numbers grow out of the risk of extinction, they become more prosocial, longer lived, etc.

The reason being that "this isn't their first rodeo." They call humans the Fifth Great Fire (or something like that, and the number is totally TBA) since (a) they do indeed fear that humans could drive them to extinction and (b) this isn't the first time they've gone through near-extinction events and have learned a thing or two about dealing with it.

So, this self-design of enhancing and fine-tuning not only the ability to do Lamarkian evolution but laying down some really durable Lamarkian memories from some really bad times isn't a bad idea.

2022-01-05

Those dang Blattids. (In an era when "dang" came to gain extremely derrogatory value, "fuck" that never looses its flavor.

It was no surprise when they domesticated the Raptors. The Blattids have a "hive"-wide system of nutrition allocation. And the nutrition goes first who need it most ("most" in a hive-wide decision way). And what starts as cappings and propolis makes it way into becoming pure sucrose (or some -ose): sure, in a healthy hive, there are lots of calories left over, but a little un-used nutrients as possible, so those are entirely empty calories (in an unhealthy hive, there can (but isn't always) a higher (wasted) nutrition content in that "honey").

But Blattids make a highly refined sugar as their primary waste. Sure, a lot of Blattids can shit out a lot of that honey, but there has long evoled an entire ecostystem that does just fine right behind those honey tubes. It's one way---one critical way---that Blattids have come to establish a healthy equilibrium with their environment. But it took making that "healthy euqilibrium" stratgey so stable that it was adaptive to evolve towards that equilibrium. And that was the first thing that the Blattids have memory of ever hard-wiring themselves into their own DNA. That scatological relationship is their oldest collective memory. Beat that dogs! (And I guess they did....) They used their "Lamarkian" evolution pattern

(one that's so prevalent on the Good's world that they could evolve into a whole-world organism)

to tell themselves that they as a species had decided it was beneficial to evolve a certain way, and so to keep in our species the memory to evolve in a certain direction. And thus to set up situations---especially but not always---that encourage Lamarkian exchanges between individuals. And, yeah, sometimes particular individuals if things get either really dicey or really onto something big.

(In which case, yeah, there would be memories for generations of lineages as they should play out

(Yes, humans' main "memories" of their families & heritage stories go back in time; in Blattids, they go forward, and names get forgotten (quickly, no need to even allow for that type of confusion) when they are no longer needed. Fresh growth, only a few generations ahead is usually all that's needed.)

to get the Blattid Race---or subgenes of their race---to where they as a species need to go. And individual Blattids would form relationships in large part based on the history and future of their two subgenes. "I am of Family X and one of our older family memories is to keep being friends with you." Of course, each generation is different and they very carefully select against having too little randomness between generations---and any bias in the randomness. So, sometimes a given generation won't get along as well with that other subgene. Or get along a heck of a lot better. Even in a foolish love sort of way.

And yes, a totally random love sort of way: If you're going to maintain a certian level of randomness that ensures a certain mean and range of possible bad sutff happening (and thus by subtraction at least the probability of so much good) then you're just kinda a fool for not also working in your subgene (and species) a certain amount of chance of really good things. "First loves that last a lifetime" sort of good. The sort of good few of us could any longer hope for.)

And to maintain that hive-wide nutrition balance, the Blattids are used to training each other very efficiently

(hey, if nothing else is selected for in self-evolution, it's some level of efficiency

(inevitiably, those who do that more efficiently will out-compete the others (except in times of extinctiuon when their sharp tip coutl break off and a duller strain selected for.

to breed in certain ways that maintain a certain hierarchy of nutrition.
And so it was natural to select and train the Buzzkills to beg. Just let them have their religion, and do whatever else you want to do with them genetically. As long as you can make them not bite a Blattid hand, whatever evolutionary tricks makes them a more wicked army are totally fine. In this war of species dominance, any trick is fair.

By the way, that's how the Blattids beat the Busskills. On the battlefield, the Battids were able to coordinate their efforts into killing those Buzzkills that were less likely to breed into domesticity over successive generations.
But the Blattid are finding doing that far harder with humans. Things are happening too fast for them; they're used to teh biggest wars being intergenerational. And are better at those battles. (Which is why them loosing even wars and even for centuries not necessarily indicative that they've lost the long war. Unless you can drice Blattids to extinction, they are very hard to beat before they domesticate you. Even those low Blattids they've "deadman switch"-ed themselves to evolve into in a crisis ("in a fire" as they say to themselves)---even as those creatures the Blattid accutely maintain their species' ability to domesticate other species.

Blattid piss, anyone? It's got a ton of uses for a honey so pure.