How in the hell did the biosphere of the Pitch Black movie work? The planet was in sunlight for about 3 years and darkness for 27 years at a time. (Or so.) The creatures that were featured in the film lived underground during the light periods and came out to feed at night. No other creatures were shown during the movie, though large skeletons were shown in a few scenes.
One poster suggested the bat creatures ate each other. Another pointed out there had to be some food source other than themselves.
Were they an evolutionary advance so successful they were in the process of completely killing off the biosphere of their planet?
Or is there some other food source we never saw?
I won’t entertain notions that they waited for space travelers to crash land on their planet to eat.
One thing that’s never really explained in the movie is that there are two “types”, if you will, of creature: the small, swarming types which were first found in the coring room, and the larger brutes which were seen underground when whatsername went looking for whatsisface. They could be two different life stages of the same species, or they oculd have been different (but similar) species altogether. We never really got a good look at the smaller variety, so it’s difficult to tell one way or they other.
Either way, it is likely that one or both varieties were themselves invaders to the planet. It is not uncommon for introduced species to wipe out native ones on a much smaller scale here on Earth, so it is not outside the realm of possibility that the same could occur on a global scale. The only real reference frame we have for how long the creatures had been on the planet is that they were probably what wiped out the previous colony some 27 years earlier. Beyond that, we don’t know whether they had recently arrived before those colonists did, or after, or had evolved there in the first place. They may well have first shown up those 27-odd years ago, and proceeded to wipe out everything else on the planet, only resurfacing when our heroes (such as they were) arrive.
It’s entirely possible that the entire system operated on those three years of light. The plants had all evolved as ephemerals and the animals were equally ephemeral, or else major league hibernators in the case of the large species.
A similar situation is found in the more extreme desert locales on Earth, triggered by rain rather than light. The plants will lay dormant as seeds or tubers or leafless, spiny stems for decades if necessary until triggered by rain. There’s no reason why the same system couldn’t work on a planet with no light. Given that the plants would rapidly evolve to either wither or become inedible during their dormant phase, the animals would simply evolve to behave as sub-arctic species do today, eating as much as possible during the growing season and entering some form of torpor for the next 27 years.
The mean mother predators of the movie may have evolved to fill a very specific niche, that of being active immediately after dark. This would allow them to clean up the last remnants of the plant life and any hibernating animals that hadn’t hidden themselves well enough.
Perhaps even more profitable, there would likely be huge amounts of dead and dieing animals that have reproduced and left eggs and aren’t going to bother living through the dark, rather like the masses of dead salmon left at the end of the spawning season. In a system that runs at full tilt for three years non-stop the survival struggle would get pretty harsh. Soft and squishy humans may well appear to be just another dieing prey item.
As for why there were no plants or animals seen, that’s easy. That close to dark the animals will all have either spawned, or gone into deep caves to avoid the nocturnal predators. You would be no more likely to see animals than you would be to see bears or salmon in Canada in late November. The plants will have employed a similar trick, having ceased growing and withered away in preparation for the dark. With no new growth any vaguely edible or recognisable above-ground parts will have been chewed back to ground level by the last animals entering hibernation. Whatever plant life was left is unlikely to be recognisable as such.
There were also those glowing bug things, so presumably there were other life forms they fed on that we didn’t actually see.
I had a bigger problem with why those contact lenses gave Vin such an odd display of bizarre colors in the dark, when the ideal thing would be something more like night vision goggles.
(And the poster that suggested they ate each other was me, and I didn’t merely suggest that - they were shown eating each other, and the main characters said “They’re eating each other!”)
I figure that was the mating season during the darkness.
The smalls flew way up high to breed away from the bigs, who
mated nearer the ground.
Or perhaps the flyers both big and small are the last stage of a physical form stage (like catapillars -> butterflies) change. And when night comes they escape their cocoons to mate as above.
FYI: This is the stuff I really wanted the movie to go into… I could care less about seeing another movie about a group of people trying to survive in a hostile environment and getting ripped apart while they try… Lame.
I was really hoping that any sequel would deal with the aliens true homeworld. My pet theory is that the dark-loving aliens originated on another world – maybe a sequel could take place on that world. They really should have established something like that in the movie, it would have filled in some of the gaping logic holes of the whole thing.
Remember all those bones that the characters found drying out on the surface? Those were the native inhabitants by my reasoning, eaten to extinction by the foriegn species.
Doesn 't look like the sequel(s) will deal with the original movie’s aliens though. They’ll just be about Riddick…
I don’t buy it that the creatures came from another planet. I’m not saying it’s impossible, in the world of the movie. It’s just that there’s no evidence shown. No other space-faring species are discussed. No alien ship is shown. I believe we have to work on the assumption that the beasties are at home and doing what they do best.
So, the daytime is the dormant period, and night is when the planet comes to life? The characters saw only a small part of the planet. Perhaps the desert was just that. A particularly harsh part of that world. Most of the life grows elsewhere. And at the bottom of the food chain, you have something like algae which grows in sunlight. To the algae, the daylit times are the ‘feeding frenzy’ they enjoy. During the dark, small beasties feed on algae. Larger beasties feed on them, etc. Somehow, enough algae survive the dark to grow in the light, 27 years later.
So why are the predators hiding out in a desert? Do they hibernate away from the light in a place specifically chosen for its remoteness? If so, what sort of REALLY nasty predator are they hiding from?
Dooku, I knew the featured creatures were eating each other. It seemed like your earlier post suggested that it was a self-sustaining process.
The ecology was what interested me about Pitch Dark, too. I thought about it and decided the problem originated with a fearsome creature called a “scriptwriter” who knew diddly about ecology but knew a good movie monster when he imagined one.
But it is fun to think about how such a system would work. I’m thinking the creatures are native to the planet, an evolutionary adaptation that has worked so well that it has pretty much destroyed other native life forms and is now in a slow spiral toward extinction. Each 30-year cycle, they come out and eat whatever’s left of the native life but mostly each other. This allows some to reproduce, which they do, massively, providing a next generation, but in smaller numbers since a lot of potential breeders will have been eaten. If any native life survives for them to feed on, eventually an equilibrium will be reached in which there’s a small enough population of the creatures to be sustained by food sources other than each other. If not, they go the way of the rest of the planet’s wildlife, presumably opening up new niches to whatever tiny creatures survived.
Another theory – the creatures are a temporary aberration caused by a planetwide ecological catastrophe that wiped out most animals.
That’s what I figgered. About the scriptwriter and the extinction, that is.
The creatures are like piranhas. Those little fishies are not much of a threat when they’re in a river, but when the dry season comes and small ponds get isolated in the mud flats, all the food in each of the ponds is exhausted, and nothing but hungry piranhas are left…
Don’t crash land your spacecraft there. This means you.
Likewise, I don’t buy that they evolved there on the planet. All native species will reach an equilibirum with other species. This does not appear to have been the case on that planet, at least not in the desert region in which the story takes place.
The ravenous main critters would have had to evolve alongside other species, if everything was native to that planet. However, as ravenous as they are depicted, nothing else would have had the chance to evolve. Certainly not the large beasts which are seen only as remains - beasts which clearly had no escape from the night, so would have been defenseless once the night cycle began.
A successful ecology requires diversity, and there clearly was none on that planet (or, at least, not in that region). No life, beyond the two critter forms and some glowing slugs was ever seen. And not everything could have lived underground - again, witness the bones of the large beasts which were orginally mistaken for trees. Beyond that, the sheer numbers of the predator beasts would have required an enormous amount of biomass to support them - again, biomass for which we have no evidence.
One could also argue that the ferocious creatures simply migrated from elsewhere on the planet, but that wouldn’t solve much. Since where they migrated to was barren, one would have to conclude that the rest of the planet isn’t in much better shape, which simply extends the issues of the region (no diversity, insufficient biomass, etc.) to the entire planet.
Thus, I am left to conclude that they are in fact, relatively recent arrivals (on the order of a few decades). As portrayed, there is little chance of them co-existing with the native life forms to any degree which would allow them to flourish while devastating all other populations, or indeed, even allow other populations to flourish to the point where they can, for example, evolve eloborate tree-like boney displays. As such, native evolution does not make sense, while the situation seems to bear all the trademarks of an introduced species wreaking havoc on the native populations.
Bah. Homer Simpson is less lazy than the typical screenwriter!
Darwin’s Finch, I see from your profile that I should not with you fuck. On this subject, at least. Then again, I’ll boldly forge ahead.
Compare the beasties to man. Man has developed an evolutionary advantage that has put us so far and away above the second highest position on the food chain that you could argue the same things about us. You might say that we CHOOSE not to exterminate the other species, while the beasties would devour anything they could find on the Pitch Black planet. Well, we went about making that choice in only the last century or so. Before that, we decided some animals were too dangerous to safely domesticate. Some were not tasty enough. Some lived in difficult places.
What I’m saying is, without our decision to ‘save’ the other species, some would still be alive, and coexisting with us. At our pleasure, of course.
While the Pitch Black beasties seemed voracious enough to consume anything moving, you have to consider that we saw them right at the end of a multi-year semi-hibernation. They would have been HUNGRY. Also, the humans were quite soft and tasty compared to those big lumberers. Perhaps the biosphere of the planet is not quite as devastated as we think.
In summation, I think it’s more likley they evolved on their planet than were transplanted from another.
Wait.
Unless they’re intelligent beings who tried to colonize this dark planet, which turned out to have deadly sunny periods which killed their civilization and plunged them into barbarity…
First off, I am not suggesting that these beasties were intelligent colonizers. Remember, there was at least one previous human colony, and humans are notorious for bringing uninvited guests along on their journies - recall incidences in our own period of Earthly exploration wherein rats would stow away aboard ships, then come out to ravage the local fauna upon the ship’s landing at a convenient island. It is not inconcievable that the Pitch Black critters got to that planet as stowaways (they were certainly able to find their way into the storage containers of the crashed ship) on a previous human, or even an alien one.
Note, however, that until recently, we weren’t really capable of exterminating most life on the planet. We would have to make a concerted effort to do so, if we chose to, and in the end, we would find ourselves extinct. Even locusts, which periodically rampage in great numbers, eventually die off until their numbers are more sustainable. The problem is, on a planet as apparently devoid of life as the one in the movie, the sustainable number would be “zero”. Which means that in the before-times, prior to the movie period, this species would likely have eaten itself to extinction; once they’d eaten everything else, they would begin to die off.
About the only way I could see these creatures being native to the planet would be if, as Evil Captor opined, there may have been a global catastrophe which wiped out most life on the planet. This would likely have been before the previous colonists, mind you. At this point, these critters would still find themselves in dire straits: they come out of hibernation (more likely, something akin to estivation, but whatever), find nothing to eat, and fall upon each other. The survivors eat their fill, then go back into hiding for the next decades-long daylight cycle. This continues for a few generations, with each subsequent generation becoming less in number. Then, colonists show up, offering up a tasty variation to the beasties’ normal menu. This perhaps results in a brief population explosion (based on the bone pile at the bottom of the coring room pit, it looked like there were quite a few colonists), after which they again go into hibernation. Then, the movie starts…
