Re: [Space/Aliens] Reproductive Features: alien, exotic and weird ideas
 

Another species from my Orichalcum Universe:

The slybor, an aerial reptile native to an immense, mountainous tropical jungle on a distant world, its closest living Terran relatives are the snakes and certain lizards, but the kinship is very distant, the most recent common ancestor would be a reptile in the Permian Period.

In appearance, a slybor looks like a sinuous, flexible lizard with a thin, very tough collapsible membrane stretching from fore limbs to hind limbs, adult specimens average around two meters long and are very light for their size, convergence has reproduced certain features common to Aves in the slybor,
such as 'hollow' bones. They are very, very strong for their size, but more fragile than one would expect for their strength.

They can spread their limbs and expand the membrane to five them superb gliding abilities, and they can even fly upward riding thermals amid the jungle-cloaked low mountains that are their natural habitat. Though not nearly as effective in the air as true birds, they are the dominant aerial hunter in their environment due to the fact that their planet lacks any birds.

Slybor females are short-lived as adults and mate only once, dying shortly thereafter (about five local days) while gravid. As the body decays, local scavengers devour the remains and in the process swallow the tiny slybor eggs, which have specialized shells able to resist most digestive acids, and whcih are small enough to be swallowed hole.

The eggs hatch in the stomach of certain scavengers, and live the first stage of their lives as tiny intestinal parasites, until emerging via feces to begin life as independent slybor after about a year. Five years later the females reach maturity, mate, and die, starting the cycle over.

One slybor in about twenty is a male. They are physically very similar to the females, but live considerably longer, and usually mate several times. Instinctively the males fly far away from their emergence into the world, and again long distances between matings, helping to ensure genetic diversity.

Addendum: I didn't mention how the hatchling slybor breathe in the intestines of other vertebrates. We're talking about tiny creatures at that stage of their life-cycle, BTW, and they are adapated to draw oxygen from the blood they feed off of when they tap the circulatory system of the host. They are very distantly related to Terran reptiles, in fact calling them reptiles at all is a judgment call on the part of a taxonomist.

Re: [Space/Aliens] Reproductive Features: alien, exotic and weird ideas
 

In addition to some of the stuff I mentioned previously, I remembered another of my favorite weird real life reproductive strategies. There are some deep sea angler fish where the male seeks out a female, then latches on to her body with his teeth. He then becomes a parasite on the female, and the female's skin gradually grows over him, engulfing him. In the process, the male's body atrophies until he is nothing more than a pair of testes, pumping sperm into the female's body. Some females have several such male parasites attached to them.

Then there are bedbugs, in which the female has no genital opening. They mate by having the male stab the female with his spear-like penis through her body. After he inseminates her, the female then heals up, although this is understandably rather traumatic for her (but since she is, after all, a blood-sucking bedbug, she gets no sympathy from me!).

Recent reports from Sweden warn people visiting the outdoors not to let critters that look like bumble-bees hover in front of their faces. A species of bumble-bee mimicking fly normally reproduces by finding an elk, hovering in front of its face, and then explosively shooting its eggs into the elk's nostrils. The eggs hatch and the larvae develop inside the elk's nose. However, sometimes they mistake a human eye for an elk nose, with the result of the person getting blasted in the eye with fly eggs, which then develop into larvae squirming around in their eye.

Luke

Re: [Space/Aliens] Reproductive Features: alien, exotic and weird ideas
 

How romantic! Is there a way to allow for this on EHarmony?

Re: [Space/Aliens] Reproductive Features: alien, exotic and weird ideas
 

Im still trying to figure out how to properly concebe a perpetually airborne creature, of immense size (say plane)

Re: [Space/Aliens] Reproductive Features: alien, exotic and weird ideas
 

Try googling Dwellers (Iain M. Banks) or Slylandro (Toys for Bob).

Re: [Space/Aliens] Reproductive Features: alien, exotic and weird ideas
 

Good insights

But I was aiming for an earth like world, it could be a bird or some other standard flyer.

But would have to be adapted to live really high, never land to rest, finding his food in that altitude, and reproduce in that altitude.

Maybe it could exist in a planet where birds totally dominate the landscale.

How can you twist it, so that it doesnt need a nest in the end of the day

Re: [Space/Aliens] Reproductive Features: alien, exotic and weird ideas
 

How about a pouch, like Earth marsupials? The bird lays the egg right into the pouch, where it remains, until the young hatches, and where the offspring lives until it can fly.
Another option would be a live birth. Snakes do that, with the eggshell dissolving before the offspring is born. No reason why birds couldn*t. That would mean that the newborn bird would have to be capable of flight immediately.
Another alternative would be an egg that falls to the ground, either with a parachute-like appendage to slow its fall, or else being so tough that it survives the fall. The young hatch on the ground, then take to the air.

Re: [Space/Aliens] Reproductive Features: alien, exotic and weird ideas
 

The big problem isn't reproduction, it's energy.

Flight is energy-intensive, flying birds have high power requirements. You need major sources of energy at altitude, i.e. lots of prey, for full-time flight to make sense. The nutrients are (in most environments) going to be on the ground.

There's a reason that birds tend to lose flight if they're in an environment where it doesn't offer some pretty big advantages.

A full-time flying would probably be more like a balloon than a true bird as we think of it, and you still have the energy cost.

Re: [Space/Aliens] Reproductive Features: alien, exotic and weird ideas
 

Indeed, what about a balloon plant ? would that be possible

Re: [Space/Aliens] Reproductive Features: alien, exotic and weird ideas
 

The word 'possible' covers a huge range of territory in biology, if there's one thing to be learned from centuries of study, it's that living systems can do th most improbable things.

There are Solarigen worlds in my OU where enormous balloon-creatures of various sorts exist. I'll be posting about one soon.

If you have something in the air that can form the basis of a food chain...but even so, bird muscles are vertebrate muscles, they're going to need some kind of rest at some point...