#wildsnake

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WildSnake

WILDSNAKE

This is the kind of implausible biology I come to fantasy games for. Forget efficient body planning, we have *aesthetic* to uphold. The Wildsnake is just that: wild. Instead of a hood, it has a big ol' hole in its body, which leads us to so many complications that I have to get right into them. 

There's a reason that creatures with digestive tracts aren't donut shaped. When we eat, any distance that's spent just transferring the food is both wasted space and metabolically expensive. Instead, we want all food to take one streamlined path from start to finish so that we can harvest as many nutrients and as much energy as possible while losing the least amount to the actual process of digestion. It's safe to say that having a fork in that road doesn't improve efficiency. According to the bestiary entry on the related creature the Viper, snakes of this family have a stomach on *both sides* of their hood assembly. Talk about overkill. Any predatory species that does well enough to require two (separate!!) stomachs just to hold all the food it gets deserves an award. Many predators struggle just to fill the one. Having a second stomach is WAY EXPENSIVE from a biological standpoint; not only do you have to connect the esophagus and the duodenum, you have to have a special organ like the epiglottis for both the lungs and the two stomachs to properly route food. This is nothing compared to the constant ongoing cost of generating the "strong digestive juices". Anyone who's eaten a large meal knows how your stomach goes into overdrive and sends you into what's called a "postprandial somnolence", more commonly known as a "food coma". I can only imagine the paralytic effects of trying to digest a nest of Cockatrice eggs in one stomach; two might kill a creature not ready for the energy demands. 

The most bizarre part of all of this is the suggestion that the Wildsnake is an *ambush predator*. Sure, yes, there are tons of snakes that use their superior speed and powerful bite to ambush prey. I don't take issue with that. I want to know what the hell the Wildsnake is ambushing that is both possible to instantly incapacitate and also provides enough food for two ravenous stomachs. They appear in the Giza Plains during the Dry, meaning their choices are pretty slim. There are no slow, meaty choices like the Great Tortoise. Things like the Urstrix, Werewolf, and and Sleipnir seem like they'd end with the Wildsnake dead as often as it would win. The Giza Rabbits and Hyenas likely wouldn't satisfy its hunger for long. The only real option is the Slaven, and as much as I don't mind that happening, I assume it has the same defenses as the real world Elephant (which is that it Is Very Large And Stomps On Snakes). My best guess for the actual sustenance the Wildsnake subsists on is Cockatrice eggs. The Gizans keep Cockatrices as livestock, ostensibly as a monstrous version of a regular farm chicken, which suggests that they lay eggs with regularity. Wild Cockatrice nests, then, must be well stocked for a cunning Wildsnake to pillage at its leisure. 

All of this is not to say that I dislike the Wildsnake. Its utterly alien morphology makes me so excited to speculate about all the possible ways such a thing could have come about. In Ivalice, the Wildsnake's original form must have already been highly successful so that it could make use of the second stomach mutation when it occurred. Such a mutation is incredibly rare on Earth, so seeing it in the controlled environment of Ivalice is an enjoyable way to entertain the thought experiment of "what if".