#gituk

papermonkeyism said: This is super fascinating, and I love it! Question! Do the gituk have any natural predators? Not that those would have any chance of getting to space. Dogs new master race

Thank you! Gituk totally have predators. Actually, back in their original habitat in Duniyaa’s oceans, they’re pretty small fry. There are quite a few aquatic critters that think gituk are delicious.

The reason gituk are so dangerous is that, as you said, their predators didn’t follow them into space.

Until they ran into their new nemesis: Canis lupus familiaris. The master race.

greecelt said: I HAVE A QUESTION. Gituk sound REALLY deadly to Coral. What keeps them from depleting their food supply in a really short time? What makes them poisonous. Predator protection? Could the poison actually be part of their breeding process?

So when I talk about gituk being able to kill bioships, I’m talking worst-case scenario. This is where the engineers haven’t been doing their job, and no one has noticed the coral dying in droves (there are a lot of signs), and the gituk have been allowed to run rampant totally unchecked. It can happen—and has happened—but it’s preventable. It takes a while to kill a bioship—probably a couple months, since it takes time for gituk to eat and reproduce, and bioships are pretty big, so that’s a lot of area for even cat-sized scorpions to cover.

Also, I figure that gituk might be a bit territorial? They like to have a certain amount of space between each other, so once space becomes a premium, they’ll start fighting each other. They aren’t pack hunters.

I… like that idea of the poison being part of the breeding process. I haven’t decided what type of poison they use, so I will definitely keep that in mind. Updates will be forthcoming.

So the long and the short of this is: While an infestation of gituk is definitely an emergency, they aren’t going to kill your bioship and your entire crew in twenty-four hours. You have time to get things under control. But don’t wait.

More on the gituk, from yesterday. I was talking about them with my best worldbuilding buddy, Han, and, as usual, we decided they weren’t horrifying enough.

In addition to using their needle-stingers to stab coral and then digest them by coating them with gastric juices, gituk are poisonous to coral. So if a gituk stabs one polyp and it bleeds everywhere, the nearby polyps are poisoned as well.

I haven’t decided how gituk reproduction nor sexes work, but I have decided that they lay their egg-equivalents in a coral polyp. When the eggs hatch, they burst out of the polyp, and now you have a much larger group of much tinier gituk running around the interior of your bioship. Also, gituk don’t dump their entire egg store into a single poyp; they usually use anywhere between five and a dozen. Also also, natural selection has made it so that the infected polyps do not change heat-wise at all until the babies have burst forth and the polyp has died.

Gituk are extraordinarily difficult to detect with pit organs. They give off the exact same heat signature as polyps do. So a paski couldn’t scan the walls and see cat-sized alien scorpions crawling around. What they could detect are the growing cold patches as polyps die.

They can also survive in vacuum for an hour or two. When paski decide to engage in biowarfare, they can either bring a box of gituk along with a boarding party, or (carefully) chuck a few across the gap between their bioships. Any gituk that survive the float and land on the hull can certainly find their way in.

This doesn’t work against human ships at all. Metal does nothing for these things. But an untreated infestation can literally kill every living thing on board a bioship, starting with the ship itself.

Because I like dogs*, I figured there was absolutely no reason that dogs couldn’t continue to outperform any and all detection machinery invented by man or paski. Deaglan earns his keep on the Raaja ship when he smells/hears an infestation and starts barking his head off at the strange smell/noise.

A human (probably Julian) knowledgeable about dogs went, huh, and fetched a paski engineer, and they found the infestation. Deckie got tons of cookies and kisses and whosa good doggies, and from then on, he has been the self-appointed Gituk Hunter.

Earthlings are totally immune to gituk poison. Coral are killed by it, and paski are affected in some way I have not decided on yet, but while humans (and dogs) can get stabbed by the stinger, the poison does nothing to them. This is because I don’t want Deckie to be killed when/if he tangles with one. XD  Dachshunds were bred to go down tiny holes and fight badgers, so squeezing between the walls and going after cat scorpions would totally be His Thing.

Canine saliva is poisonous to gituk. If that got out into Commune space, instead of (currently) being confined to a single Raaja warship, it could start a whole new pharmaceutical industry on the spot.

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greecelt said: Do Paski have their own version of the mouse? Something that would get into their food stores and mess with their homes. And what would they use to control it?

Probably the closest thing they have are sheekee, which are little chinchilla-sized things with ugly faces that enjoy eating whatever they can get their little mouths around. Bedding, clothing, toys, and food stores are all popular choices to snack on. They nest basically wherever a group can cram themselves together-- in walls, baskets, plant pots, packs and bags, inside beds...

They aren’t super bright, but their little hands are dexterous enough to open things they shouldn’t, and they’re determined enough that they can squish inside just about anywhere. Their little fluffy tails are used for communication, and many a paski found they had an infestation when they walked into a room and were greeted by the sight of a great many wildly flipping tails running like hell for safety.

Paski generally control sheekee by eating whatever they’re able to catch.

Another-- much more dangerous-- pest is the gituk (GEE-took). I have discovered/decided that paskiland has arthropods, and they are scorpion-like things that are the size of the average housecat. They don’t have eyes, instead possessing six photoreceptors that I might make sensitive to ultraviolet.

They prey on coral. Gituk originated in the ocean, but when coral were genetically engineered to survive on land, and then in vacuum, gituk evolved to follow their main source of nutrients into space. They can survive for a short time in vacuum. Paski sometimes will use them as biowarfare. Drop a dozen or so on a ship you want taken down, and if the engineering crew isn’t paying attention or is unable to eradicate the pests, the gituk can straight-up kill all the coral in the bioship. And when the bioship goes, so does the crew.

Paski deal with them with extreme prejudice. Usually stomping.

I’m undecided if they’re poisonous or not. I’m leaning towards yes for coral, possibly for paski. It might be interesting to give Earthlings total immunity.