So I'm working on an alien creature, and I'm not the brightest when it comes to biological/creature science… so I would appreciate some help making it a plausible critter and maybe tips on design that make sense with it's habitat and such.
So far, their diet mainly consists of iron. Literal iron. They make use of saliva/spit that has a similar effect as hydrochloric acid, to dissolve iron for consumption. They're also opportunistic carnivores, they will attack other creatures within the ecosystem that have a high amount of iron in their blood (Well, high by our standards).
Reproduction is done asexually. Egg sacs are deposited in caves riddled with deposits of iron (Sacs emit a noxious scent and contain fluids poisonous to other species). Juveniles are lethal shortly after hatching (They're lethal at 8 months, and I do mean lethal ;) and fully developed, much like Great White Sharks.
Intelligence wise, I figure they're about as smart as a crow.
I haven't decided how well individuals get along in a group.
They can shift between bipedality and quadrupedality, though the latter is mostly considered to be simply crouching/crawling.
I was thinking the creature's home planet would more then likely be rocky, with Mountains, various valleys and plains, simple vegetation…
Design-wise, there isn't much, yet. I have been listening to the Jurassic Park music and the Velociraptor sounds a lot, and I do know it'll be vaguely reptilian/avian. I just really need some other input on this…
If I need to elaborate, I will in the morning. (It's 11:00 pm where I am)
I don’t know about a complete design for your creature but since they live in a rocky terrain, they would need some kind of protected from the rocks or their hands and feet would need to have some kind layer of skin to protect or even have better grip. Same thing for the temperature, it gets cooler higher in the mountains so their skin would need to be special. A more creative way in my mind for an actual alien design is researching lesser known aliens ( from conspiracies theories and all that) and taking and switching up different elements to make it your own. This has helped me quite a bit when coming up with my creatures so maybe you could try it.
I’m looking at the Wikipedia page on ‘alleged sightings’ and am considering the reptiloids.
(Okay I just realized maybe alleged sightings wasn’t the best place to look as the story they’re involved in has them being one of the first lifeforms found on a planet other then earth.
I dunno my brain’s weird)
I'd suggest crocodile-like skin, if it's a rocky planet thick scales/skin would probably be more helpful to them than fur or feathers would be. You'd also need to consider if it's warm or cold?
Also take into account their diet , when you talk about then eating iron how would they get this iron is it just around or do they have to dig for it, if it's the ladder is it with here claws do they use there teeth what do they use. Maybe herds could be centered around iron deposits in the ground.
yo these are really cool creatures and they got me thinking! Prepare for a lot of questions and speculations XD
I was gonna say roughly the same thing as the above post–how do the find food? If this planet has a creature that specifically evolved to consume a mineral, it hints that there's a lot of this mineral just out in the open. Perhaps there are exposed iron veins in the mountains, and the creatures scrape or dissolve some off when they need it (like a salt lick for cows/deer/horses)? This leads to other questions. If there's no more iron left on the surface of a vein, are they willing/able to dig for it? Do they migrate from vein to vein? If they find iron that's mixed in with other minerals so it isn't pure, do they have a way to sort the iron from the other stuff (maybe by breaking down the rock in their mouths or maybe just through a special digestive process)? How do they detect iron in the first place? Can they smell it? Do they go around licking random rocks to see if they taste good?
As for the question of how social they are: My thought is that these creatures would be solitary. When a creature exists, it has to decide whether the cons of joining a group outweigh the risks. Your creatures can reproduce on their own, and their young will fare much better if they have as much iron to themselves as possible when they hatch. This probably applies to the adults as well: foraging in a group means that the food gets used up much faster, which means more hard work to get it and possibly more infighting. In this case, it seems that being solitary or at least minimally social would be best for the survival of each individual.
That being said, there's one major problem with that argument: Their intelligence. Off the top of my head, the most intelligent animals are all gregarious, highly social creatures (I'm thinking crows and dolphins especially). That can't be random chance, it almost has to be that intelligence is facilitated by complex interactions with others of the same species.
So. Maybe they're…..partially gregarious? Maybe they hang out in groups for seasonal reasons, or in certain environments/situations that make group life better. Maybe they lay eggs and forage in solitude, but share a communal sleeping ground? If they're opportunistic predators, they might sometimes band together to take down larger prey? Or, here's a thought: genetic diversity goes way down if individuals never mix their DNA, so maybe they have the option to reproduce in pairs and do it on occasion for whatever reason? (Edit: I remembered that Parthenogenesis works much like this. Here's a snippet I shamelessly lifted from a post elsewhere by @BecInMYday : Females can reproduce alone, in few cases, leading to most or all-female species. In this case, an embryo can form from an unfertilized egg cell, eliminating a need to mate with males of the species. (Although mating does present a evolutionary advantage))
Allllll of this is pure speculation, and obviously it's your species, so feel free to disregard any or all of what I said. But hopefully you'll find at least some of my rambling to be helpful ^^; Good luck!
In terms of their digestion and the need for iron, what if they need iron because it also creates their protective armor? They need it for nutrients and such, but what if the iron coats their bodies and flakes off over time? They can eat any rock as long as it contains iron because they poop out the "slag," if you will. Ones that haven't eaten in a while have rusty coats that chip and flake easily.
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