on further thought something was bothering me about the whole "breed for bigger by mating flight competition" mechanics. why bigger? like i get that a bigger dragon would be stronger and such but strength isn't really what they need for fighting thread. that and there'd be no way to put an upper limit on their size except them eventually reaching the Too Big To Fly stage, which would leave the humans in Deep Shit at that point. it's like they were engineered to be weightlifters when what they needed was some kind of hurdles and marathon running type athlete. a big dragon takes more energy to fly and is, once large enough, less efficient. they take more resources to feed and maintain. they're a bigger target for Thread to hit and have a wider turning radius. (they'd also have a harder time getting into the air, like some large species of birds we have on earth, but i figure thats what the teleporting could help with) a dragon bred for agility and stamina would prolly be smaller and faster, take less energy to fly, have a much tighter turning radius, less area to be targeted by Thread, and be overall more efficient. in other words it'd be a long-distance race horse rather than a draft horse. so it would make more sense for them to be engineered to select for agile and enduring mates rather than size. so what gives kitty ping? :/ ...shit did i just discover a furry kink of anne's? D:
The selecting for bigger does have a natural upper limit... in that any dragons too big without the stamina and efficient energy use to fly well would not mate! Because mating relies on the faster, smarter, and more fit dragons, which in turn selects the genes of dragons probably more suited for the long hours of threadfall. Probably. This is also why green and blue dragons are considerably smaller than the other three colors - for agility. They have less stamina and have to get replaced more often, if I remember correctly, while browns and bronzes can last longer and that is why they serve as the anchors of the fighting wing formations.
more questions (because i am Bad At Biology): what is the benefit of two different types of breeding female? were they different species that merged kind of like those one reptiles that are all female and breed asexually with themselves and sexually with males of the nearby similar species? what controlled the firelizard population when Thread wasn't around? (especially since we don't know how old they get and even if the greens were Bad At Parenting, that doesn't explain all the clutches the golds must have had) why are there all the different colors anyway? (is there camouflage benefit? is it just other traits that happened to be tied to color? how did those differing colors develop? what benefits do they confer to the group?) i mean, i know we won't ever get official explanations for all of these, but some kind of sense would be nice :/
I have ideas! I think you could break the colours down to just two actual colours, and then gender dimorphism comes in. Golds, brwns, and bronzes could be the same colour, all of them tinted with a brown pigment. The browns and bronzes would essentially be the difference between brunette and blonde, just varying levels of pigment. And then, the females could somewhat thinner skin, leading to golds having the thinnest layer of pigment, and some translucence, giving them their pale shiny colour. Then blues and greens would be the same. Blue pigment that's more concentrated in the males, with the thinner-skinned females looking green from dispersed pigment and refraction. The blue pigment expressors could either have a lowered growth hormone factor tied to the same gene, or the biological effort used to make the blue pigment could be taxing on their bodies, making them smaller to compensate. That could also explain why they're generally less intelligent, they'd be undernourished during their developmental period, and probably be more geared towards foraging and hunting to try and get their nutrients. I'm not sure how to work golds being able to lay all five colours and greens only two, though. Do the golds have variable gametes that code for blue or brown pigment, and the sperm determines sex, while greens only have 'blue' gametes? Or maybe the smaller greens do initially have eggs in all the colours, but the larger eggs are too big for their bodies, and spontaneously abort/reabsorb? They could potentially lay a very small brown or bronze egg on occasion, then. Or maybe it's like blood type, the greens system attacks brown range fetuses, whereas the golds don't have an antagonistic reaction to blue range fetuses. So many options!! Of course ,that doesn't really gel with the colour ideas I stuck in the other thread, but... *shrug!* There's lot of options!
OH OH! what if they're a little like bee colonies? like you have the Queen and then you have worker females that, at least in some species, can reproduce on their own but don't make queens themselves that would help explain some of the other weirdness too. cause dragons and firelizards are mostly reptilian, yes, but they also have some insect traits with the faceted eyes and all. and it would make the caste thing make more sense too. like the gold/bronze being the Queen and Drone-like caste, with the brown/green/blue as Worker-like. it would make the browns kind of in-between the two categories of Breeder castes and Worker castes which would also make the greens being able to lay eggs make more sense too. if they need more workers just let them have clutches of their own. that way less competition for roles of leader but still more workers to do needed things. when you have enough workers the group ignores the extra eggs and focuses on the Queen's clutches only and that would fit with the wildlife of Pern evolving to survive Threadfall by population booms, like with the initial survey stuff and the trees they found
Ants have heavy workers and light workers, so that could explain the browns. I like that! Does that make greens and blues ss, fully lacking the shiny allele? Or do they have something additional at play influencing their colour?
Yup! It being linked to a single gene was the best way I could think of to explain how distinct the castes are (if it was multigenetic, I'd expect a fair number of in-between-y dragons rather than a fixed five types), since there doesn't seem to be any sort of external thing affecting colors (a la royal jelly in bees making larvae develop into queens). Males being blue/bronze when females with the same genotype are green/gold is just plain old sexual dimorphism.
And queen eggs being rare would be due to them tending towards the unviable size? There could be more queens conceived that would run bigger than Ramoth, but they just can't make it to maturity. Another size limiting factor is the integrity of the shells. An eggshell has to be permeable for gas exchange, and thin enough for the hatchling to break from inside. If it's not strong enough to contain the mass inside when it's laid or growing, pop. If it's thicker to be strong enough, then the embryo will suffocate, or be unable to hatch (like Ruth).
Yup! A lot of embryos with the shiny allele, even heterozygotes, are nonviable, but the allele stays in the population anyway since shinies that do survive are way more likely to have a lot of children.
It seems to me like having green/gold breeders provides both r and K reproduction strategies for the species as a whole. Gold clutches require the efforts of all the fair. Green clutches are left to luck. There are fewer golds, so overall there are fewer offspring with more involved parental care, suiting a K strategy. Greens, however, lay overall more eggs, but with less care, meaning that some will survive that small investment. Depending on the circumstances of the environment, different strategies will have more or less success. This provides greater flexibility for survival of the species throughout the different conditions of passes versus intervals. It was noted that wherries and tunnel snakes attack clutches to eat hatchlings. I'm pretty sure that without thread, there is a larger competitive influence from wherries and tunnel snakes as their populations grow in turn from the increased resources available. Simultaneous predation amongst the different groups keep the populations constantly balancing into the carrying capacity. I like your theory @LadyNighteyes though it is a bit incomplete. Looking at the options, and charting it out, there is no differential for why females with shininess, SS or Ss (golds), are bigger than males (bronzes), and also rarer. Unless females with a shiny gene somehow get a compound growth effect that doesn't happen with females without the gene, as greens are smaller than blues... hmm.
Yeah, I know it doesn't entirely work, but it was the best I could come up with. Maybe there's some other sort of sex-linked inhibition besides the bronze/brown gene, I don't know.
Firestone as a growth inhibitor? Queens don't/can't chew, so they're the ones that reach the full potential size of the Ss dragons, while bronzes and browns are slightly stunted?
Nutritional factors leading to an eventually more hard-wired body shape thats seems only tangentially related to color? Like, we see golds and bronzes in the wild drive blues and greens off of the food they want, and only allow them back when they've gotten their fill even if the flight as a whole could be benefitted by all eating the same amount. So if that's a behavior that's been established for a long time, I could see it having an effect on the general body shape that differently colored fire lizards (and later, dragons, though that can probably be considered a Fucking Kitty Ping thing) have.
sexual dimorphism! somebody already proposed that the blue/green pigment inhibits growth; I'd say it's reasonable to say that this inhibition has more of an effect on greens, since they also have to put together a complicated reproductive system. so naturally females are larger than males, but the energy greens put into making tons of eggs and fighting Thread makes them smaller than their male counterparts.
I really wish there was a book between Dragonflight and Dragonquest. Mostly to deal with Lessa and F'lar. In Dragonflight, these are two not-nice people in a strange relationship. It's one of those mutually abusive things where one partner is the overt abuser and one is the covert one. By Dragonquest, they have settled down into a strange kind of mutual respect, like a comfortable older couple who may not have love, but have a way of living with each other and making a team. I think there is an interesting story to be told there. Especially with F'nor hanging around as an observer. Too bad we never get it. ETA: Don't let Todd tell it!
I have now read approximately one million reviews of Pern books, paying special attention to the negative ones. The books do have a ton of problems. They are rapy as a bad "dirty book". The society doesn't make any political or economic sense. A lot of the main characters are flat and the villains might as well be twirling their mustaches as they plot their evil deeds. Yet these books remain incredibly readable and popular. How does that work? Dragons. Specifically McCaffrey's dragons. McCaffrey's dragons don't give a fuck. They are the ultimate Lebowski--"Well, that's just your opinion, man." When humans act weird, they just wanna fuck or eat or fight Thread or go bowling. If it wasn't for the dragons and their droll commentary, these books would just be lost in the dustbin of literary history.
