Dead And Crunchy

Neo-Andean Architecture

Designed by Freddy Mamani

They're smart fuckin birds, I believe in them

ok @homosexual--mothman twist my arm why don't you!

Mal wears his gray jeans in The Train Job and then again in Trash; it's like his go-to "undercover" outfit. Saffron then makes him strip in the shuttle and he re-boards Serenity naked and presumably goes directly to his cabin and puts on his usual tan trousers etc. So everything he was wearing is in the shuttle for at least a little while.

Two episodes later, in Heart of Gold, Simon is wearing the baggiest gray jeans. You can't really get a good look at him because the camera angle puts him directly behind Inara, but you can see him in the BTS shots. Poor guy is drowning in his clothes.

Whether you want to go full MalSimon shipping "they're sharing clothes" OR Simon is adjusting to life on a smuggling/scavenging ship and simply decided these pants he found in the shuttle are his now is up to you. But I just like to imagine it's the same pair of pants.

And yes Simon is wearing gray jeans in the Trash "Jayne in a neckbrace" scene which could throw a wrench in this continuity but these look like they're more slim fit/actually his size. So this scenario is still canon compliant lol

They WERE Mal's, but after six months in the black, no one would swear to that except Mal himself, and he's being gaslit daily on the ownership of The Pants. By Kaylee, who wears them rolled to the knee with suspenders that he's pretty sure are ALSO his. Allegedly, she says. Book taught her that word.

If Jayne catches them with the pants, he may just take them off of that crewmate like a bully older brother, if he's bored enough. The only person immune to this treatment is Zoe, because she can/will/has fishhooked him for misbehaving. He's gotten Mal exactly once, and he straight up continued about his day with his dick out to make this everyone else's problem. He HAD pants, now he doesn't. The others get a walk/sprint of shame back to their bunks.

One day the pants disappear and stay gone for a week. People are fighting mad, convinced the pants suffered some damage in a crewmate's care and they tossed them rather than fess up. There's a ship wide hunt for the carcass of the pants, they even make Wash pull the airlock logs. It's nearly come to blows when Inara rolls her eyes and hikes her skirts, and she's wearing them under her sari because she'd been rearranging her shuttle and you just don't DO that in a silk this fine.

niche partioning is a concept from ecology wherein groups within a species expand into different ecological niches so they're not competing with one another, right? so for example, sexual niche partitioning happens when sexual dimorphism means that one sex eats different things / occupies different spaces / etc. as another within the same species. you have one species that occupies multiple niches within the ecosystem.

ontogenetic niche partitioning is when this happens as a result of developmental changes. paternal care tends to obliterate this partitioning--hard to have your juveniles eating something different from your adults if the adults are feeding them!--so we just don't see it very often in mammals or birds, but it's quite common in other species, especially invertebrates. for example, a caterpillar and a butterfly are examples of classic niche partitioning, even though every butterfly will occupy both niches over the course of its life. you don't have to have a big fancy chrysalis transformation to engage in ontogenetic niche partitioning, but those transformations are a pretty big sign that it's happening in a given species.

anyway, it's most common in vertebrates among fish, lizards and snakes these days, especially monitor lizards, where juveniles will occupy a different (often arboreal or otherwise sheltered) niche from adults and hunt different prey until they get big enough that the juvenile niche. there are some good reasons to think that some dinosaurs might have engaged in ontogenetic niche partitioning, especially the bigger species, too. we think sea turtles might do it, although that's hard to say because we don't know very much about sea turtle development once the hatchlings go back to the sea.

the neat thing about ontogenetic niche partitioning is that it allows a given ecology to host a much larger population size for a given species than would otherwise be the case, because the total space occupied by that species is spread across a lot wider niche space. this is especially relevant for, say, a large carnivore that eats livestock.

basically, what if dragons are just the very oldest, reproductively mature members of their species, and the common wall lizard or whatever is just a juvenile that might or might not survive long enough to reproduce? imagine if dragon eggs are very small with big clutches of little insectivorous hatchlings that are eaten by anything that comes by, any of which might have the potential to become a great fire-breathing monster if it lives long enough.

imagine that dragon society. do people know that the hatchlings and the dragons are the same species? (they might not: there are real examples of people mistaking ontogenetically niche separated groups for independent species in their own right.) if dragons are sapient but the sapience takes time to develop, what does that say about the nature of sapience itself? how does a society work and transfer wealth if you remove parental care?