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More Predators Than Prey
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In order to make an environment more hazardous, creators of fiction will often include aggressive predatory beasts that occur in far larger numbers than should be possible given the environmental conditions shown. In Real Life, the larger a creature is, the more energy in the form of food from a suitable source it must consume in order to both grow so large in the first place and to sustain itself on a daily basis. If it is very active it will need even more calories just to survive. As a general rule, 100 prey animals are required to sustain the presence of just one individual predator. Despite this, there will often be a veritable horde of wild, aggressive beasts that roam a desolate wasteland or almost lifeless underground tunnels without having prey to feed on and without attacking each other. Such beasts will often be absurdly persistent when encountering humans, attacking them seemingly out of hunger that overcomes all sense of self-preservation. This occurs even if their fellows fall like flies around them, and most will never pause to gorge themselves on these fresh bodies that should appear a ready and far less risky food source to them. If they do pause to eat their own dead, it'll be played for horror, to make them seem even more ravenous. Such ecosystems do exist, usually where humans have not caused any impact: coral reefs in Real Life, when kept perfectly pristine, play this trope to a T, to the point 85% of all biomass are sharks. Common in post-apocalyptic fiction and on Death Worlds; in contrast to many (because the oceans are major exceptions) Real Life cases, large predators in these kinds of works seem to be less susceptible to the kind of events that should cause them to be severely depleted or go extinct than the smaller creatures they normally feed on. In fact, they often mutate into something far more powerful than their original form while at the same time getting by with less sustenance. Some works might try to justify it either In-Universe or All There in the Manual, with the proper food sources simply being unseen. Note that not everything that attacks humans needs necessarily be carnivorous. Some larger herbivores like cape buffalo, rhinoceroses and hippopotami are territorial and aggressively defensive. Many creatures will attack something they think is threatening their young. The ecological equivalent to More Criminals Than Targets, a very similar situation in fictional crime settings. |
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Reign of Fire, wherein the entire non-microbial population of the world seems to be humans and non-cannibalistic dragons the size of whales. However, the dragons are shown to start eating each other later in the movie. Also Lampshaded, as it was stated that the dragons would eventually start to starve and go back into hibernation, which is apparently what happened the first time around with the dinosaurs. | |
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King Kong: Skull Island tends to suffer from this. Carnivorous dinosaurs, other monstrous reptiles and giant insects are everywhere, and the only herbivores are Kong (who, in some versions, is rather an omnivore, as he eats people) who is The Last of His Kind (although in both The Son of Kong and King Kong Lives, another specimen of Kong's species shows up), the Stegosaurus in the 1933 movie, and the Brontosaurus herd in the 2005 movie (the 1933 film's Brontosaurus is either carnivorous or simply hyper-aggressive, as it chases down and kills people). The 2005 remake is a bit better about this, showing some actual predator-prey relations such as the raptor-like Venatosaurus hunting giant brontosaurs, but there are still far more predators than prey. The worst offender is the Piranhadon, a giant carnivorous freshwater fish that appears only in a Deleted Scene. Despite being nearly the size of a blue whale, somehow it has survived all this time in a tiny mangrove swamp. The companion book fleshes out the environment further by explaining that the entire island is in a constant free-for-all over food, with a lot of the lower-level links in the food chain having specifically evolved to eat carrion, and more herbivores are described than what appears in the film. The island is also gradually sinking and pushing the ecosystem into decline, which could account for the overabundance of predators; a similar spike happened during the Cretaceous period due to an overabundance of sick and dying herbivores, followed by a huge crash when prey was exhausted. Kong: Skull Island similarly zigzags it. On the one hand, giant gaurs are clearly shown to be herbivorous and to be a convenient food supply for the giant predators (sans Kong himself, who treats them more like friends or pets than prey) on Skull Island. On the other hand, it's still populated by an insane number of predaceous organisms from flocks of piranha-like leatherwings to giant daddy longleg spiders and swamp squid. Not to mention the hoards of hypercarnivorous Skullcrawlers dwelling just beneath the surface. In the latter case, it's established that the Skullcrawlers hibernate or lie dormant until aroused, at which point, they'll invade the surface on a massive feeding frenzy. Their periods of dormancy and Kong(and/or his kind's) ability to keep them in check for ages past are the only reason they haven't decimated Skull Island's already tenuous ecosystem. |
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Monster Hunter isn't a perfect example, since you do see herbivores and you do see predators eating each other, but the food chain still seems pretty unbalanced. What are all these giant monsters eating? At least in World, this is averted, where there are a number of prey animals scattered about. Additionally, with previous games, a number of the powerful monsters are, in fact, herbivores. Diabolos in particular is merely a very territorial and aggressive plant eater that could kill foolish or desperate carnivores trying to prey on it, providing food for scavengers. As for predators hunting other ones, only a small amount of monsters are known to actually do that, meaning they're more opportunistic and prey on weakened monsters rather than actively hunt them. This can also be explained away by the fact hunters actively search out their targets, meaning the large amounts of carnivores are seen not because they have inherently high populations, but because they are specifically chosen and sought out. Furthermore, you are placed on a map with only their target and occasional invaders in terms of large monsters (World and Rise include two other large monsters on the map whether counted as invaders or not, and unless specifically required by the quest it cannot be the same species) whilst multiple small monsters (herbivores or carnivores) spawn on the map at any time, showing they aren't nearly as common as their prey. |
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In the underground ecosystem of the Railsea, herbivores are stated to be a small, unhappy minority. Everything else tries to eat everything else, including people who touch the open dirt between the rails for any longer than a split second. This is Hand Waved as the result of ancient humans polluting the soil with all sorts of nasty chemical runoff, causing animals to mutate into huge and vicious new forms. | |
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In The Lurking Fear, the mutated deformed cannibals number in the dozens, if not hundreds, while their abode is rather isolated and the number of people who fall victim to them is small. However, it's hinted that they have no problem with preying on each other... | |
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Averted in The Sapling. Predators will never outnumber prey unless players do so deliberately, and the population will eventually stabilize to more realistic levels once left to its own devices. | |
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65: Almost every animal appearing in the film is a carnivore, including theropods, pterosaurs and animals that look like early archosaurs (namely Lagosuchus). The only herbivores that appear are the remains of a dead hadrosaur and a juvenile, bipedal ankylosaur. | |
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Most Xen wildlife in Half-Life is carnivorous. Headcrabs, at least, are confirmed in the sequel to be omnivorous. And you have to wonder what those several billion ocean leeches in Half-Life 2 are eating to sustain their population... Actually averted in Opposing Force. Shock Troopers are herbivores. You can find the plants they get their fruit from scattered around the facility, and can even use a baby tadpole Shock Trooper as a weapon by having it launch exploding acidic balls. How do you reload it? Feed it more fruit. |
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Dragon Age: Inquisition: The amount of prey animals required to nourish the wolf packs and bears the Inquisitor will encounter in the same (relatively) small areas of territory would strip the environment bare and cause rapid environmental collapse. There's even a gigantic dinosaur-sized "Great Bear" found in the Emerald Graves and Emprise du Lion that, while much less common than the other predatory enemies in the game, is still far too abundant for a macropredator of its caliber thanks to the nature of the game's enemy respawn system. Naturally, all of these are unrelentingly aggressive to the Inquisitor and crew to an unrealistic degree, but it's suggested in passing that their aggression is due to corruption from demons and the open rifts. Alternatively, they could have come from the Fade, since it's possible to summon animals from there. | |
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The world outside of the walls in Attack on Titan is considered a hellish environment due to the overwhelming abundance of the Titans, who only consume humans (with a single-minded persistence), but don't actually acquire nutrition from it, meaning their vast numbers have been untroubled by a lack of prey for a century. We get an answer to this eventually: namely, that the predators were the prey. | |
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World of Warcraft has some serious cases of this; a good example is the Hillsbrad Foothills. There's bears, yeti and giant spiders all over the place, but no major herbivorous beasts to feed them. There's a lot of areas like this in WoW. Most zones in WoW have "critters" which are small creatures (usually herbivores) that players cannot gain loot or experience from. One may think that critters are an intentional aversion of this trope (predatory beasts can occasionally be seen killing them), but they are never present in anywhere near large enough numbers to feed the vast hordes of predators which populate many zones. |
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Homestuck: On Alternia, everything is considered unsuspecting prey by everything else. | |
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Daybreakers. The whole point of the movie is that Vampires make up most of the population, and not enough humans. The only humans left are either bred for special blood banks, or rebels that try to avoid that. | |
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In ARK: Survival Evolved, this trope is one of the things that tips off Helena Walker that the Island is an artificial and actively maintained environment. | |
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Subnautica's world, and some of its biomes in particular, can seem rather top heavy, what with the massive leviathan-class predators roaming around and a general lack of variety when it comes to prey creatures and especially herbivores. Subaquatic biomes are known for being quite like this, however, so there is some justification. And around half of the leviathan-class predators are actually filter-feeders that consume plankton... the Ghost Leviathans in particular are dangerous because they're incredibly territorial, not because they're trying to eat you. | |
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The planet in Deathworld seems to have this problem of more predators than prey, and the predators are super-adaptive, adjusting to everything the humans throw at them. Then Jason goes exploring and finds that it's only that bad near the one city; there's a more even balance out where the forest-based humans live, where the humans are willing to live and let live. Turns out, all those predators aren't an ecosystem; they're the planet's immune system, doing exactly what such systems try to do to invaders. | |
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Averted in Skyrim. For every bear, sabercat and wolf pack you come across, you see a lot more deer and rabbits. Whether mammoths are preyed on is unsure, what with giants keeping and protecting them as livestock. Though given that no predators seem to hunt in packs, it's unlikely anything that would try to prey on a stray mammoth would actually succeed in taking it down. | |
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In Path of Exile Wraeclast is infested with huge numbers of predators and a local expert notes their number and ferocity would have rendered it barren long ago if not for its unnatural fecundity, hypothesizing the existence of a being that desires death on a massive scale. | |
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Gary Gygax recognized that Dungeons & Dragons had this problem and tried to justify it in the 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide. Early D&D also had climate-appropriate herbivores on its random encounter tables. If they were removed it was presumably trimming, there not being much one can do with camels aside from staring at them. On the other hand, getting in the way of a herd of bison is all sorts of exciting. Justified in the lower planes - most fiends don't need to eat at all and seek prey For the Evulz - so an infernal environment could have Hungry Jungle with nothing but predators. |
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In Fallout 3, monsters of different species will fight each other, up to and including Albino Radscorpions killing Super Mutant Behemoths if they spawn near each other. On the other hand, the number of predators seems proportional to the player character's level— Giant Mole Rats seem to die out around level 15. This would also happen in random encounters in the previous titles- it was possible to run into a group of wolves fighting with some radscorpions, for example. It just didn't happen as often because the games didn't feature an open sandbox world and the various predatory critters tended to have specific parts of the map that they'd be encountered in- you wouldn't run into both mole rats and Deathclaws in the same area, for example. | |
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Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures: A Fourth-Wall Mail Slot session states that Furrae's vampires went extinct long ago for exactly this reason — demons, cubi, undead that aren't sensitive to daylight, and dragons are all more effective predators competing for the same food source. | |
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Played to extremes in the Borderlands games, because there are no prey animals on Pandora. Everything on the planet is an Extreme Omnivore, and gleefully feeds on everything else on the planet. The closest thing you get to prey on Pandora is humanity, who is just as capable of slaughtering and eating them. | |
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The Legend of Zelda: Every living being in the Dark World and Lorule in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is some sort of monster out for blood, making you wonder what the heck they actually feed on. It's also a case of More Criminals Than Targets (in both worlds), so how either remain somewhat stable is unknown. | |
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Blindsight had an interesting quasi-example in the case of vampires — the human population couldn't expand fast enough to support a population of vampires, so vampires evolved the ability to enter long-term hibernation in between feeding periods so that the human population would have a chance to replenish itself. | |
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Metro 2033 has a very strange ecology at work: The surface world has been in the grip of nuclear winter for twenty years, nothing grows there and the air is toxic. The remnants of humanity hide out in old metro stations where the only food sources are domesticated pigs and cultivated mushrooms. The tunnels between the stations are typically infested with hideous mutants that 1) are mostly larger than humans and also faster and stronger, 2) constantly attack humans in order to eat them, 3) never seem to attack each other, despite the fact that there is more meat on their fellows than on humans. A particularly silly example is how the winged beasts called demons will swoop down on human prey that is capable of shooting at it, but leave the far more numerous nosalises (who only have their claws and teeth) alone, even ignoring the bodies of the ones you have already killed. | |
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The Palaververse: One of the numerous unusual things about the Death World that is Saddle Arabia is that seemingly every creature there is predatory or parasitic, and typically highly aggressive in the bargain. | |
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The Fallout series of games have numerous examples of this: nuclear war and subsequent collapse of society has left most of the world a barren desolate wasteland with deadly radiation occurring here and there. Despite the fact that there is little prey for them, giant versions of real critters like scorpions or even flies run around, seemingly attacking only the player character and never any other creatures. In Fallout 3, monsters of different species will fight each other, up to and including Albino Radscorpions killing Super Mutant Behemoths if they spawn near each other. On the other hand, the number of predators seems proportional to the player character's level— Giant Mole Rats seem to die out around level 15. This would also happen in random encounters in the previous titles- it was possible to run into a group of wolves fighting with some radscorpions, for example. It just didn't happen as often because the games didn't feature an open sandbox world and the various predatory critters tended to have specific parts of the map that they'd be encountered in- you wouldn't run into both mole rats and Deathclaws in the same area, for example. There is a reason for this. Since being irradiated heals mutant creatures, it can safely be assumed that they're radiotrophic (like the real-life Radiotrophic fungus found at Chernobyl). They don't need to worry about living in a low-biomass environment like the desert because they get most of their energy from background radiation, which they're in no danger of running out of anytime soon. |
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The 2005 remake is a bit better about this, showing some actual predator-prey relations such as the raptor-like Venatosaurus hunting giant brontosaurs, but there are still far more predators than prey. The worst offender is the Piranhadon, a giant carnivorous freshwater fish that appears only in a Deleted Scene. Despite being nearly the size of a blue whale, somehow it has survived all this time in a tiny mangrove swamp. The companion book fleshes out the environment further by explaining that the entire island is in a constant free-for-all over food, with a lot of the lower-level links in the food chain having specifically evolved to eat carrion, and more herbivores are described than what appears in the film. The island is also gradually sinking and pushing the ecosystem into decline, which could account for the overabundance of predators; a similar spike happened during the Cretaceous period due to an overabundance of sick and dying herbivores, followed by a huge crash when prey was exhausted. | |
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In The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, this is used as a key piece of evidence for the theory that fantasy worlds' ecosystems have been recently ravaged (another is the way piles of refuse around oppressed peasants' huts don't just rot away.) The conclusion reached is that the systems are re-establishing themselves with humans at the bottom, and everything will be fine. | |
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This can also be explained away by the fact hunters actively search out their targets, meaning the large amounts of carnivores are seen not because they have inherently high populations, but because they are specifically chosen and sought out. Furthermore, you are placed on a map with only their target and occasional invaders in terms of large monsters (World and Rise include two other large monsters on the map whether counted as invaders or not, and unless specifically required by the quest it cannot be the same species) whilst multiple small monsters (herbivores or carnivores) spawn on the map at any time, showing they aren't nearly as common as their prey. | |
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Star Trek: The Original Series manages to invert this trope; in "The Trouble With Tribbles", the titular species lives on a Death World, and their defense mechanism is to reproduce a lot. The plot involves the crew dealing with the prey instead of the predators. | |
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Dragon's Dogma: There are not nearly enough rabbits and deer to support the many wolves you fight. Which is probably why all the wolves are so emaciated and eager to attack you in the first place. | |
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The Elder Scrolls: Played straight in Morrowind, although a couple of comments and world details imply that there are more types of prey roaming Vvardenfell, the vast majority of wildlife you encounter on Vvardenfell and Solstheim are hostile predators. Averted in Skyrim. For every bear, sabercat and wolf pack you come across, you see a lot more deer and rabbits. Whether mammoths are preyed on is unsure, what with giants keeping and protecting them as livestock. Though given that no predators seem to hunt in packs, it's unlikely anything that would try to prey on a stray mammoth would actually succeed in taking it down. In The Elder Scrolls Online the Clockwork City's "wildlife" only consists of scavengers and predators. The in-game explanation for it is that there's very little actual plant life in the City (the trees, grass etc. are all metal imitations), and the "animals" are actually Magitek cyborgs (fabricants) or outright robots (like skeevatons or brasslisks) that only exist because the City is meant to be a simulacrum of Tamriel, and Tamriel has animals so Seht put some in. |
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Nearly all animals in the Forest of Septimus Heap are carnivorous (or man-eating). Other animals almost never mentioned. | |
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Magic: The Gathering: The imbalance of Red mana on the shard of Jund means that almost every creature is a predator of some sort, with the lower end being occupied by small but poisonous lizards, goblins, and fungal mutants, and the top of the food chain being reigned over by dragons. This is represented mechanically by the Devour ability, which allows you to make a large creature even larger when you cast it by feeding it with other creatures you control, several of which were designed for just such a fate. The ecosystem of Jund is so vicious and efficient that undead do not exist despite the powerful Black mana on the shard because no corpse lasts long enough to become undead. The neighboring shard of Grixis is an even nastier example of this trope. Cut off from green and white mana, Grixis has no sources of new life, no way of adding energy to the system. Everything is forced to try and feed off and parasitize everything else, fighting over the dwindling and irreplaceable reserves of vis. In New Phyrexia the Praetor Vorinclex fetishises predation to such an extent that all organisms compleated into Green-aligned phyrexians are now predators. Herbivores get hooves replaced by claws, species with no sharp teeth get loads of them, all adaptations redundant to kill are removed. This is semi-justified in that Phyrexians really are just a parody of biological life and technically don't need the food chain to operate, but they are also insane social darwinists who probably wouldn't care about that detail. |
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In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, on Telos, there are Cannocks (and Bounty Hunters), which are at the very least hostile and omnivorous, but no "peaceful" or herbivorous creatures. If you point this out to Bao-Dur, he reminds you that the planet's being terraformed and the cannocks were introduced to control herbivore numbers. Then Czerka Corp hijacked the project, released too many cannocks and sent the ecosystem down the tubes. Dxun has no such excuse, though. | |
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Played straight in Morrowind, although a couple of comments and world details imply that there are more types of prey roaming Vvardenfell, the vast majority of wildlife you encounter on Vvardenfell and Solstheim are hostile predators. | |
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In The Elder Scrolls Online the Clockwork City's "wildlife" only consists of scavengers and predators. The in-game explanation for it is that there's very little actual plant life in the City (the trees, grass etc. are all metal imitations), and the "animals" are actually Magitek cyborgs (fabricants) or outright robots (like skeevatons or brasslisks) that only exist because the City is meant to be a simulacrum of Tamriel, and Tamriel has animals so Seht put some in. | |
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Pitch Black occurs on a Desert Planet, and one of the only two species the protagonists encounter are predators. They arrive to the surface in numbers that a desert biome couldn't possibly provide enough food for. To make things worse, the animals can only hunt in the dark, so their only opportunity to come to the surface for prey is one month in 22 years during an eclipse of the Binary Suns. However the world is littered with the skeletons of long-dead animals, some of which were massive, but has no current signs of life. It's strongly implied the unchecked predator population has rendered their surface prey extinct. Which also explains their rather keen interest in the humans. Eventually the creatures even begin turning on each other, apparently resorting to cannibalism to sate their hunger. | |
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Warhammer 40,000 has Catachan, a Death World where all animal species (and most plants) are carnivorous predators. This includes mobile Venus Fly Traps big enough to eat an adult human, centipedes the size of trains, and the Catachan Barking Toad, an amphibian that releases corrosive toxins when startled with a blast radius of one kilometer (killing itself in the process). | |
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The Tribe of Rushing Water came across this issue in Warrior Cats. It turns out that they lived in too comfortable an area. They weren't dying nearly as much as their forest-dwelling peers, so soon the area was overpopulated with cats. This led to the tribe splitting up. | |
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Pikmin: Every last enemy in the game is seemingly a predator to pikmin and pikmin alone. No enemy will ever try to eat another enemy, ever. Taking things even further, some enemies will go out of their way to kill pikmin but not eat them without displaying similarly territorial behavior towards other nearby wildlife. A possible explanation is that most of these enemies actually are herbivores, but view pikmin as plants. The territorial species like wollywogs might attack pikmin because they're a novel and invasive presence in their environment and they haven't acclimated to them. | |
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GURPS: Dungeon Fantasy averts this trope, advising GMs to give some consideration to the balance between predators and prey in an ecosystem. | |
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In Mass Effect: Andromeda, there's an insane amount of continuously-reappearing macropredators like adhi and fiends and very few prey species. It might be partially justified by the late revelation that the wildlife of Andromeda was largely bioengineered by the Jardann like the angara were and dispersed across each of the habitable planets to create ecosystems, which also explains why every planet on Andromeda has the same types of wildlife. However, it still doesn't explain why these predators are found in such absurd abundance unless their vast numbers are consequences of the ecological havoc caused by the Scourge - however, the Scourge happened many centuries ago, by which time the ecosystem should have collapsed due to the lack of plant-eaters. The best explanation is that these species are adaptable omnivores that also fill plant-eating niches and are aggressive towards the player out of hunger and desperation due to their depleted food sources. | |
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Final Fantasy XIII: The world of Gran Pulse is awash with dangerous predator-type animals, and the smaller number of herbivores includes the dinosaur/tortoise Adamantoises, which are big enough to step on anything which tries to eat them. | |
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Primeval: Zig-Zagged when the other sides of the time Anomalies are seen. The Silurian desert seems to have many more 25-foot-long carnivorous scorpions than it does three-feet-long millipedes, and there are absolutely no other lifeforms in sight for milesnote The latter part makes sense, since non-aquatic life in the Silurian was almost-entirely coastal. Likewise, the Cretaceous pine forest which Connor and Abby spend a year in seems to be inhabited almost exclusively by various flesh-eating theropods (including one of the largest theropods of all time), and the only apparent source of protein is the fish-inhabited waterfall. The series' best example of a solid ecosystem that averts this trope is probably the arid Permian lands behind the very first Anomaly: it's home to a couple of meat-eating Gorgonopsids and an entire herd of herbivorous Scutosaurus to keep those Gorgonopsids fed. | |
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The Silence (2019): The vesps, before swarming to the surface world, lived in an isolated cavern for millions of years. What a several thousands-strong swarm of ravenous meat-eaters was eating while stuck in an environment known for generally only being home to small numbers of minuscule animals, and what they were doing to reproduce when they need to lay their eggs in large, freshly killed carcasses, is anyone's guess. | |
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Kong: Skull Island similarly zigzags it. On the one hand, giant gaurs are clearly shown to be herbivorous and to be a convenient food supply for the giant predators (sans Kong himself, who treats them more like friends or pets than prey) on Skull Island. On the other hand, it's still populated by an insane number of predaceous organisms from flocks of piranha-like leatherwings to giant daddy longleg spiders and swamp squid. Not to mention the hoards of hypercarnivorous Skullcrawlers dwelling just beneath the surface. In the latter case, it's established that the Skullcrawlers hibernate or lie dormant until aroused, at which point, they'll invade the surface on a massive feeding frenzy. Their periods of dormancy and Kong(and/or his kind's) ability to keep them in check for ages past are the only reason they haven't decimated Skull Island's already tenuous ecosystem. | |
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Mortal Engines combines this with Artistic Licence – Economics to make a truly strange example involving mobile cities, of all things. Granted, it's a plot point in the books that such an ecosystem is on the verge of dying out and only originated in the first place thanks to an apocalyptic war causing such extensive and still-ongoing environmental damage that the survivors of humanity had essentially been forced into a nomadic lifestyle coupled with an invasion by an army that can only be described as "Mongols in caravans". | |
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