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

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Fish

An extreme case is the angler fish, where the tiny male actually fuses with the large female and atrophies away until virtually nothing of him is left.

This could have variations. For ex, borrowing an idea from E.E. Smith, which he applied force-field based creatures, you could have a species where the male and female don't jsut mate but merge, into a single parental form of the species, to look after the offspring. If sapient, this could produce a very alien psychology, esp. if the mind of the merged entity is a different being than either of the sapient 'pre-parents'.

Then, of course, there is the Pak life-cycle of the Niven 'Known Space' universe, which consists of child, then a subsapient 'breeder', when, after reaching the end of the reproductive years, a metamorphosis to an asexual sapient 'Protector' stage that instinctively guards and protects the children and breeder age Pak. Humans are in fact descended from the Pak, and we can produce Protector-stage humans if conditions are right.

Then there are the 'Eddorians' of the Lensman series, who are rather like unicellular beings in that they don't really die except by violence. Instead of dying from old age, an old Eddorian fissions into two new young Eddorians. They are absolutely, totally asexual.

You could have aliens like starfish, in which severed bits of the body can grow into a new alien. That could be the standard means, or it could be a side-means, with sexual or other reproduction also in play.

Then there are the dragons of Pern, which have two kinds of female (the enormous Golds and relatively small Greens), and three kinds of male (in order of decreasing size, the Bronzes, the Browns, and the Blues), who fill in the size range between the female Gold and the female Green.

The details are never given, but we're told that a Bronze/Gold mating can produce eggs of any color, but a Brown/Gold can't produce Gold eggs and not many Bronzes.

Or you could have tremendous sexual dimorphim. The land-dwelling Great Dragons in my world, for ex, are all male, the females are pelagic ocean dwellers who look totally unlike the adult males. (Their actual reproduction is fairly straightforward, though.)

Or you could have a species in which the 'eggs' are more like 'seeds', putting out root-like structures to take in food and moisture to sustain the embryro, and not hatching out until conditions are right. Such a species could apparently be extinct, even though their living eggs are hidden away somewhere waiting for the right stimulus to hatch.