Whilst watching an episode of The Mandalorian, I noticed something in the background that was odd enough that I should have taken note of it ages ago: the Star Wars universe sure has a lot of large apex predators for a setting that has been civilized for tens of thousands of years.
This is not the case on present-day Earth. Biodiversity has taken a sharp nosedive in the last 20,000 years. Pretty much any large species that looks tasty, which might have a taste for humans, or lives on land for which we have other purposes in mind has vanished or been greatly reduced in numbers. Because human lifespans are so short, we take the Earth’s depleted state as normal, so are spared angst over all the cool beasts no longer extant.
In the Star Wars universe, the story is very different. When visiting a world in that setting, one should always have a contingency plan for attacks from the local whale-sized predators. What the heck is going on?
Conservationism
Perhaps the civilizations of the Star Wars galaxy decided in antiquity not to impoverish ecosystems. It might be that the Republic and the polities bordering it have had conservationist regulations for millennia. After all, nobody wants to live in a galaxy whose worlds are denuded deserts.
As pleasing as that might be, there is precious little evidence of an excess of prudence in the Star Wars setting. Additionally, it’s hard to believe that a culture incapable of mandating guard rails around the surprisingly deep chasms that appear to be an integral part of the Republic’s architectural design philosophy would be able to frame and enforce conservation regulations for thousands of years.
Incapacity
Perhaps the intelligent beings are incapable of massacring megafauna fast enough to put a serious dent in their numbers? At first glance, this appears implausible. After all, blasters abound. Still, a blaster is only as effective as its owner’s aim and if there’s one thing the Storm Troopers teach us, it is that marksmanship is a skill very unevenly distributed in this setting.
It only takes a few Wild Bills to put a huge dent in megafauna populations, large animals being by their nature comparatively rare, so I am inclined to reject this explanation.
Buy the Book
Fugitive Telemetry
Hunters are only half the story, however. Perhaps the issue isn’t that the hunters are too inept but that tens of thousands of years of natural selection have filtered for megafauna with adaptations to technological predation that permit them to flourish despite blaster-armed trophy hunters. Perhaps most megafauna are exterminated soon after encountering civilized beings, but the exceptions have spread into the empty niches.
There’s some evidence to support this explanation. For example, take the dianoga, the garbage monster in A New Hope. How did such a large beast manage to establish itself on the new Death Star? To quote Wookieepedia:
Over many millennia, dianoga migrated from Vodran by stowing away aboard garbage ships in their microscopic larval forms, and could be commonly found in trash compactors, garbage pits and sewers across the galaxy, living off any present organic matter.
Perhaps the other large megafauna have analogous life cycles, lifeways that permit them to prosper despite civilization’s best efforts to contain them. The Republic’s slapdash approach to safety guidelines could work in the animals’ advantage, the absence of methodically applied and effective quarantines might facilitate the spread of species fortunate enough to be preadapted to survive contact with intelligent beings. Basically, we’re seeing the galactic equivalent of zebra snails and Pablo Escobar’s hippos.
Urbanization
Perhaps megafauna thrive thanks to uneven population distribution and equally uneven economic development. Most of the worlds we see in Star Wars are underdeveloped, low-population backwaters whose inhabitants scrape out marginal lives. Perhaps Coruscant and the other Core worlds act as magnets, their populations and economies growing at the expense of minor worlds, thanks to cheap, fast space travel. Easier to move to the big city to seek one’s fortune than to try to create a big city from the ground up. This seems very reasonable to me, coming as I do from a county with a handful of big cities and vast expanses of considerably less populated territory.
***
A combination of selective adaptation over millennia and uneven development seems plausible enough. But perhaps there are other explanations.1 Feel free to share them in comments.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF(where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Well, writers and sf/x guys do love them some blue-screened monsters. But we’re pretending that Star Wars is real, so we can reject that right off.
I don’t have any viable additional theories off the top of my head; rather I would add that there is a “suspension of disbelief”-inhibiting lack of flora to support the base of the food chain on many of these worlds with excessively large fauna.
As for most plausible, I’ll throw my support behind the theory you listed of adaptation to technology. These creatures seem to be far more resistant to blaster fire than the armor most species wear. Hmm, that alone should increase the risk of hunting of these animals. Any successful – if rarely so – hunt would yield a hide that could be turned into armor as effective beskar it seems. And you know human(oids) are always up for high reward – low chance ventures.
edit to add that I know the hide resistance level is an exaggeration. Sometimes is is shown they are hurt, just so large they can shrug it off. But there are a few (the big sand dragon thing this season comes to mind) that do seem impressively impervious to conventional weaponry.
A (space) wizard did it.
One suspects that in the last million years in this galaxy, there has also been a lot of genetic engineering (c’mon, how many Hutts want big and unique monsters for the dungeons under their palaces?)
#3) Don’t forget the need for Sith monsters. Or bored galactic big game hunters. Or defense contractors thinking “This time charismatic megafauna bioweapons will worarrghhh!”
Because it’s a pulp serial and they’re cool. Saved you 700 words; you’re welcome.
#5 has the right answer. It’s cool when characters get to fight giant monsters. CGI allows for bigger ones. Don’t worry about the lore, because it’s mostly just space rivet counting.
“Because human lifespans are so short, we take the Earth’s depleted state as normal, so are spared angst over all the cool beasts no longer extant.”
Excuse me, I’m angsting over the losses. How cool would having a guard thylacaleo carnifex be? Now *there’s* yer dropbear.
Humans and other sapient beings are not the apex predators of the Star Wars universe, and are constantly fighting each other and blowing things up. The galaxy is full of ruins and barely inhabited worlds. Plenty of room for wildlife in this universe.
If you’re a giant alien monster that lives inside an asteroid in the middle of an asteroid field and you eat starships, how do you survive between meals? Or are starship pilots always flying into asteroids?
If you really want to go nuts, look at the weird technological and economic disparities in the Star Wars universe. Nothing in Star Wars makes sense. That’s kind of the point to Star Wars.
Maybe, à la Dune, these giant creatures generate some by-product of value to Star Warsians. Maybe not spice, per se, but some other tasty spices? Maybe gelatinous goo to be hawked by the Tatooinian equivalent of Gwyneth Paltrow? Blubber that makes the best lubricant for droids? A giant egg that, once poached to perfection, feeds an entire village in one go?
@7 – As a kid, my favorite animal was the sabretooth tiger. I’m still not over that loss!
The SW universe is pretty sparsely populated. Even the most heavily populated worlds, save Coruscant which seems to be an anomaly, contain only millions instead of tens of billions. That means the pressure from sapient populations to compete with megafauna, which has been so critical on Earth in killing our own fauna, just is not there. And a lot of the sapient population is highly transitory and heavily space based, since we have seen full on abandoned planets before. There is a higher number of inhabitable worlds in the Star Wars Galaxy, sapient life has not evolved on all of them and even tens of thousands of years of space travel can’t fully colonise them all. We’re much more spread out there.
It’s because the Force is with all beautiful and awesome things, naturally.
I tend to agree with the idea that, in the Galaxy Far, Far Away civilisation is very old and exists on many worlds but that the focus of development appears to be interstellar, rather than planetary; people are more interested in tapping new markets (or acquiring their own shiny new world) than they are in exploiting their back yard.
Which presumably leaves plenty of room for local megafauna to go on doing their thing while their sapient neighbours seek a brighter star on the other side of the sky.
@11 I wanted a Chalicothere, sort of a giraffe panda bear mashup. I wish they’d made it to the present day, alas evolutionary pressures…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisodon
@12: Perhaps the sapients of the SW universe have a naturally extremely low birthrate, or some very common substance drastically lowers fertility. It would make sense for the various governments to include the latter in rations.
Perhaps creatures like the space worm that lives in asteroids developed similar abilities as the tardigrade, an can drift through vacuum and restart it’s life cycle when it comes the best conditions.
But yeah, Krayt dragons, space worms, rancors, that mindflayer thing from R1, rathtars, that creature in the Maw, the arena monsters, Obi-Wan’s squalling feathered lizard, whatever ate Artoo, that’s a lot. Even The Mandalorian gave us giant spiders.
But in the immortal words of Qui-Gon, there’s always a bigger fish.
An interesting observation. Most megafauna on Earth, particularly the most massive varieties, were driven extinct by humans as they expanded out of Africa. The exception was the African megafauna itself, which coevolved alongside humans and therefore acquired a wariness of them that their unfortunate kin on other continents couldn’t evolve in time to save themselves. Why wouldn’t this process have been replicated, on a grander scale, in science fiction universes?
A possible explanation: it was. The many habitable planets of, say, the Star Wars universe once possessed far more megafauna than are portrayed. The examples you see on the screen, as numerous as they appear to be, are just the remaining sliver of once far greater populations. This could also explain both the tenacity and the animosity towards humans and human-like aliens with which these beasties are often depicted.
Possibly the writers of the Star Wars universe know little about ecology and evolutionary biology, and care less. That would explain a lot.
@19 Of course that’s the most probable explanation, but it’s a fun imaginative exercise, retroactively rationalizing their ignorance.
For the record, Camestros Felapton had an entirely different explanation.
@20
True enough, I was being a killjoy and you’re quite right to call me on it.
And when we look at Star Wars physics or planetology, their liberties with zoology, ecology and evolutionary biology pale in comparison.
Personally, I blame the Rakatans. They’re to blame for nearly every other thing in Star Wars, after all, and they canonically had a fondness for great big things with teeth.
Sure Star Wars is a mess, scientifically speaking. And of course Lucas was paying homage to Alex Raymond and Frank Herbert, genre-wise. But I think the prevalence of apex predators does contribute to the “medieval future” of Star Wars. As galactic civilization has crumbled, and the Pax Republica has declined, the cosmos is going to seed.
That said, I also find C. Felapton’s argument convincing. Can we posit that the Vl’Hurgs & G’Gugvuntts in The Hitchhiker’s Guide came from the Star Wars galaxy? I think we can!
What do they eat when they can’t get adventurer, and why do we even have a square cube law?
@22 The absolute best retroactive explanation for Star Wars silliness, comes from the observation that one of the Ewoks is wearing a corvid skull.
Corvids are frighteningly smart birds, and one with a skull that large would be terrifying, and large enough to carry off Ewoks.
So the idea is that the Ewoks were so strategically developed because they have to defend themselves from these monster birds. They’d even designed the means to attack them in the air!
@26: Ewoks are an apex predator on their planet, and if you know anything about Endor from the Legends continuity, you’ll understand just *why* that’s a frightening thought :v
I rather prefer this take on the dianoga: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Baptist
As for the whale-sized flora, we get occasional explanations of their anti-technology survival traits, such as the krayt dragon’s ability to sense and avoid starships in the atmosphere.
And while humans are notorious for hunting high-risk high-reward creatures in our timeline, we only see small bits of that in-universe, such as the Tusken’s eager butchering of the krayt *only with human help,* or the Jawas sending Mando on a suicide mission to get mudhorn egg.
That’s like saying Chuck Jones doesn’t know how gravity works because the coyote doesn’t fall until he looks down. Star Wars is pulp space fantasy; it’s a deliberate authorial choice to disregard scientific niceties that says nothing about their level of knowledge. Terryl Whitlatch designed a lot of the Star Wars fauna and she studied zoology in college.
Pretty much any large species that looks tasty, which might have a taste for humans, or lives on land for which we have other purposes in mind has vanished or been greatly reduced in numbers.
There are exceptions: megafauna which are tasty and domesticable, or otherwise useful and domesticable, have in some cases absolutely thrived (cattle, sheep, water buffalo, horses, camels, etc.).
Excessive abuse of the Jedi Force Ability “Summon Bigger Fish?”
The square cube law hasn’t prevented Earth from spawning Tyrannosaurs, Brachiosaurs, Baluchitheriums, and similar creatures. Most of the planet bound creatures we’ve seen in the films and Mandalorian (I can’t testify to the animated series; I’ve never seen them) are not much, if any bigger, then any of those. Space-based life forms would not have the square cube law to deal with.
It’s Star Wars, relax lol!
2 words: Space. Dinosaurs.