Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Selective Pressure, Part Two

Welcome to Worldbuilding Wednesdays!  Every Wednesday, we spend what is probably far too much time walking through our worldbuilding process.  This week, we're adding some finishing touches to the intelligent species.

What We Have So Far

During the initial development of details for our three species, we added a new Key Element to our Design Philosophy:  Peer Adaptation.  As we use our knowledge of the species' needs and environment to determine details about them, we'll also be considering that the three species will have a more or less benign influence on each other.  We've also decided to use our Nu-humans as the baseline of the intelligent species, so many details are gleaned by comparing the other two species to them.

Last week, we wrapped up by considering the following details:  Size, Appearance, and Speech.  This week, we'll look at three more details:  Diet, Behavior, and Tendencies.  This should be enough to guide us as we move into the next stage of worldbuilding.

Benevolent Friction

Why those details?  Up until now, we've looked only at details that are uninvolved with competition.  The thing is, though, competition is bound to occur.  All species, including ours, will make every effort to expand to fill whatever niche they can occupy.  Biology drives us to do at least as well, if not better, than our ancestors.  So it is that humans began their journey by carefully venturing forth from the trees and into the savannas, eventually discovering a niche as legendary pursuit predators with a knack for hitting things from a distance.  From there, we've expanded into every known biome on Earth, even the ones where we are physically incapable of remaining for long, like the deep seas and active volcanic vents.

The humans of our new world will try to do the same.  So will the other species.  This means they are bound to encounter each other and compete (with varying levels of aggression) for resources.  That our world has so much more space, and by extension resources, to offer simply means that direct conflict is unlikely.  Tension, however, will be present.  The form that tension takes, and how the species choose to deal with that tension, will to some extent be driven by our last three details.

Supplemented Diets

As an example, let's look at the diets of each species.  Humans, our baseline, moved from low-level tree dwellers to opportunistic predators to omnivores in a pretty clear line.  Our omnivorous traits allowed us to snack as we walked behind prey, throwing rocks to stun or scare them, until we either managed to injure the prey or their efforts to avoid us caused them to overheat and collapse.  As time went on, we discovered that intentionally growing the vegetation we snacked on allowed us to have consistent levels of food (though not as nutritious as prey animals were).  Staying in one place to actually benefit from growing the vegetation in turn led to the need for defenses to keep nomadic people from wandering through and snacking on everything, and from there, civilization formed.

Being omnivorous is a massive advantage, but it tends to cause stomach problems.  That's why most major terrestrial predators are only opportunistically omnivorous, if that- cats, for example, are obligate carnivores.  Humans moved toward meat eating, not away from it, but our progression slowed as farms became the hip new fad.  So it is that even now, some ten thousand years after some of our ancestors decided that all this walking was nuts, meat is a minority component of the typical diet.  We mostly eat things we grow, and on average, about half of the things we grow are just some kind of grass that we've bred to be tasty.

This all makes sense, yes?  We are creatures of the plains, one step removed from the forests.  Our food is grass, things we can pluck from trees we can reach, and whatever meat cannot get away from us fast enough.

Now let's look at the furries.  They are leaping predators, but they are also denizens of massive forests, able to easily collect fruits and nuts.  It makes sense that they would be omnivorous too, not likely to easily digest grasses (since they have no practice with it), eaters of smaller prey, but when they venture to the ground, they will discover that their precise leaps make them skilled at taking down terrestrial animals too.  Similar leapers in particular will be in for a shock, used to bounding away from danger, only to discover that a furry can not only leap at least as well as they can, but can reliably leap to the same point their prey does, closing in quickly.

Here we have two points of friction.  Humans and furries both like fruits, nuts, and meat.  Humans also like grass, and furries will likely be able to handle varieties of fruit and nuts that humans can't, but there is considerable overlap.  In the long run, that's a good thing!  Humans and furries can sit at the same dinner table with little issue.  In the short term, disagreements will likely arise, especially when it comes to meat.  Both species will be interested in the same kind of meat: terrestrial animals that have a hard time escaping from predators, such as herd animals and those that use their size as a defense.

Next, consider the scalies.  Where humans exhaust and pick off their prey, and furries ambush their prey from above, scalies have the changing tides on their side.  Tides move in and out much more often on this world than on Earth, thanks to our three satellites (the Lantern and blue and red moons).  For scalies, this is no issue; they are equally adept at striding through the marshes and wet sands as they are at swimming through estuarial puddles or scrabbling up roots to avoid the more massive crawling predators of the shoreline.  In fact, having such an easy time of it would incline them to take advantage of this knack to force prey into an environment it cannot navigate, while the scalies have no such problem.  That sounds an awful lot like setting up fish traps and similar clever tactics, such as hunting from the roots.  Scalies will thus have access to fish, to any relatively stationary seafood such as clams, and even to the predatory arthropods and tentacled beasties that fail to look up as they roam.  Kelp and seaweed are in ready supply, as are vegetables that grow well in brackish water and even some of the fruits of the trees whose roots they exploit.

Now, protein is protein, for the most part, so it is safe to assume that scalies will trap terrestrial animals as they move inland.  They may also attempt to venture higher into the trees.  In either case, they'll encounter our other two species, and again, friction.  Scalies will hunt the less intelligent animals, which make easy prey for the others as well, and they will feed on fruits with little issue (they likely will have less experience with nuts, which are more rare near saltwater).  Humans and furries both, in turn, will happily ingest the easiest of the prey animals of the scalies, and judging from the popularity of sushi, humans will likely be down for the other vegetables as well.  Furries, able to ingest fruits and nuts the others can't, will be more than willing to move into the upper levels of the trees whose roots host the scalies.

All of these interactions invite aggression, territorialism, and fights for control.  More importantly, none of these interactions is vital.  While the three species will definitely interact, there will never be a feeling of "it's them or us."  None of the things the three species will compete over are absolutely vital for any of them, which invites negotiation, sharing, or even deciding that "it's not worth it."  We now have reasons for the species to regularly interact, and those interactions can range from pitched battles to cooperation.  All that from deciding what the diet of each species would be.

One further note of interest:  the species most likely to have problems with each other are humans and scalies.  Their respective palettes blend a bit more than either does with the furries.  Whether this observation is significant remains to be seen.

Flipping a Coin

Behaviors and Tendencies are awfully similar, so let's explain the difference really quickly.

  A behavior is an activity that a creature engages in.  For our purposes, these are specifically activities that the creature is built to do.  A carnivore, for example, is built to eat meat.

  A tendency, on the other hand, is an activity that a creature is inclined to engage in.  They don't automatically perform the activity, but they can, and circumstances dictate that they'll be likely to.  If the way a given creature acts is its behavior, the list of its potential behaviors, especially those it is seemingly built for, is its tendencies.

Clear?  If not, watch how this works by examining our species again.  Human behaviors include activities that reinforce their endurance, their hand-eye coordination, and the habit we all have of picking up objects and hurling them at things.  Due to that same hand-eye coordination and regular periods of idleness, we have a tendency to develop and use tools.  This seems to be a side effect of our evolution, rather than something that was selected for, but it's one of the reasons we are the dominant creatures of Earth.  This includes fire, which allows us to see in the dark, harden our tools, and prepare our food, among other things.

Furries are leapers and ambush predators.  They would engage in activities that allow them heightened and precise mobility, so rope swinging would be a thing; it is one of the most basic ways to turn in mid-air if you don't have wings.  Being nocturnal and favoring ambushes means that furries will be quiet and adept at holding still until they leap.  We can expect that even among arboreal creatures, they are noteworthy for their sure-footedness, since higher intellect corresponds to fewer accidental falls.  As with humans, they'll engage in tool use.  They'll have tendencies toward woodworking in particular, and when they preserve their food, it will be by drying or smoking it; they won't have as ready access to salt as the other two, and fire is more dangerous in a tree than on the ground, but still possible.  Since they attack by landing on or near their prey, expect furries to have a tendency toward piercing weapons, such as knives or spears, and to avoid slashing weapons that could accidentally cut the branch from beneath them or the rope holding them up.

Scalies are natural triathletes and quite strong, even for their size, but this is incidental to their behavior, which is to employ cleverness to trap.  They'll need to be able to build the traps, obviously, and they will favor watching to make sure the trap is sprung.  Surprisingly, this likely means the largest and most physically impressive species is also going to be the most intelligent, although the entire species will have a tendency to obfuscate and misdirect, almost like they try to trap everything, including conversations.  Those scalies that wished to impress would tend to make more clever (complicated, perhaps needlessly so) traps.  Being large, diurnal, and reptilian, they'll also be the slowest of the three species, especially since speed isn't how they hunt or avoid predators.  We'd expect that they would tend to bask in the sun whenever possible, and that fire would be rare in their environment.  Perhaps most importantly, this combination of behaviors and tendencies has caused us to conclude that if there are sunglasses on this world, they will have been invented by the scalies.

Conclusion

We now have enough to not only paint a pretty decent picture of each species, but we can also determine (in broad strokes, at least) how they'll react to various situations.  In point of fact, that's what we'll be doing starting next week:  laying out the final drafts of each intelligent species.

No promises on giving them better names than humans, furries, and scalies, though.  We're still calling the two moons the blue moon and the red moon, and we never even established whether the moons were those colors.