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.These are two of the ingredients that led to the genesis of thecomplex ecosystem of the Avalon continent, after Niven, Pournelle andBarnes had had fun inventing a reasonable but not very deep ecology for the island of Camelot, where the Earth colony had built itssettlement.We don t want to give away the climax of Legacy of Heorot,but we have already told you that the samlon are the grendel s larvae,which it normally eats.After the novel had proved a great success, theauthors asked Jack over to California to craft the background to a200 MODELLING ALIEN ECOSYSTEMSforthcoming sequel, on the basis of what they had done with the first.Pournelle rang first: We want you to do a proper job on the ecology ofthe continent, which they ve only made mapping and miningexpeditions to. Jack replied: Do you want me to do an ecology for usto go adventuring into, or do you want to start off with a skeleton plot,and then I ll build the ecology around it? There was a long silence fromPournelle, then: You invented this speciality of yours.Come overprepared to do either or both.Jack s speciality of Alien Design functions in two contexts.Sometimes (Harrison s Eden and Gerrold s Chtorr) the authors want anovel ecosystem to adventure into.Others (McCaffrey s Dragons) wanttheir plots, including (retrospectively) those of any existing books in thesame series, rooted in a credible scientific/historical background.Inmany ways Heorot was both, as Pournelle had seen: the authors hadinvented what an ecologist would call a depauperate (impoverished)ecology on the island.The intention was that the (brighter) secondgeneration of Earth colonists would adventure on to the continent,where the first book had suggested plot lines.Niven, Pournelle andBarnes, spent a very tough week with Jack, taking hints from the firstbook and building them into the ecosystem on the continent.Therewas only one kind of grendel on the island (so far as we had been told),and there was evidence that as a successful carnivore it had pretty wellcleaned out all the valleys; there were, however, little furry joeys(altogether too mammalian) on the upper slopes, and there wereflowers.Grendels are what reproductive biologists call r-strategists: manyoffspring, not finely tuned to any particular ecological niche.Wedecided that what kept the grendels from undergoing a populationexplosion on the continent was a great variety of other, specialistgrendels.A successful way of life like that would have taken over as agreat flowering, but then the major competition would have been othergrendels, and evolutionary pressures would have specialised them notto compete for the same resources.That way of life would have beenmost subject to subversion by grendels that ate other grendels babiesinstead of their own.So we invented several kinds of more K-strategistgrendel that made their own lakes, sometimes with their own bodies(dam grendels), and sometimes by building them (beaver grendels).K-201 WHAT DOES A MARTIAN LOOK LIKE?strategists are more highly specialised, and look after their babies.Someof our K grendels specialised in taking other s samlon from such lakes,some specialised in using those lakes for their own samlon, camouflagedas the lake guardian s own (nest parasites), and so on.The Camelot-type general-purpose or basic grendels were forcedout of the lush forests, up the valleys to the sparser wildlife high in thehills, where their fierce competition honed the kind of violentcompetitive behaviour between females that occur in the first Heorotstory.The specialised species would not adventure out to the island, butthe basic type would.On the continent, there was a symbiosis with aparasite that made one kind of adult grendel rather more intelligent,and infected its samlon, which on average survived better.Therelationship between the hero/villain Aaron and his grendel was set upwith an intelligent grendel of this type.The flowers presented another problem.There was no choice: theyhad to be pollinated by a flying colour-sensing animal, because theywere native flowers, not ones imported from Earth.There wereterrestrial bees on the island, but there had to have been a creature thatdid the job before humans arrived.We invented a whole phylum offlying creatures like bees but rather bigger, and with a different flightprinciple, like some beetles.They had a front pair of fixed wings, likethe elytrae of beetles, but their rear wings could not begin to holdthem up, as beetles rear wings can.They were simply propulsive, likelittle propellers: airscrews, really.The Heorot bees were like smallmodel aeroplanes in flight.They didn t have a tracheal system, like ourinsects, but a very efficient lungbook organ, like some terrestrial crabs,some species of which have more efficient breathing than smallmammals.The bees did the pollinating, and they had some oddpredators, including a monkey-like creature that spins a web betweentrees.Some bees had some nasty habits of their own, which we won ttotally give away here because the plot hinges on them in several places.What we will give away is where Jack got the idea, though.There hadbeen a paper in the Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society about thebees of the Amazon, some of which took the very nutritious juices ofcorpses back to the nest
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