Worldbuilding

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How would you approach the idea of coexisting sapient predators and prey? (lemmy.radio)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Admittedly my attempt at this isn't too far from the typical "they just eat fish" solution, but I thought it would be interesting to play with how they acknowledge their respective statuses as predators and prey.

The two species have different but complimentary funeral rites. When a prey animal dies, it is ritually butchered and its meat consumed by a predator. When a predator dies, seeds are buried with the body so their remains fertilize crops that are eaten by members of the prey species. Specific individuals or families are chosen by the deceased in their will to carry out this task, and the relationship is treated like being a godparent.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, the whole species is the prey animal in the thread context. They just have a subspecies they are willing to sacrifice.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

How does this subspecies handle the situation?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

they don't have a say in it. They have been bred into pretty much being cows.

When I came up with them I wanted to figure out how out a species that evolved from something that used numbers strategy to survive. Its probably in the realm of edgy grim dark stuff, but I wanted a setting where if you where to zoom back out far enough the relationships between the species should feel almost like a nature documentary with individuals acting sort of like cells in a body. One of the quarks of their evolution is that almost any species can gain nutrients from eating them. So sometime sthey will just eject a bunch of their cattle into space in order to escape more predatory species. Trade acts as a sort of symbiotic relationship that they share with some other species in exchange for minerals and the like as they kind of suck at mining.