it's impossible to support more mass than an elephant terrestrially unless it were made of materials with a better structural support-to-weight ratio than bone.
I thought there were heavier dinosaurs.
There were many land-walking dinosaurs larger and heavier than elephants. So yes, NW_Kohaku is quite incorrect there.
Elephants are quite small in comparison to some creatures that once walked the earth.
The point I'm making isn't that it's impossible to be a larger creature than an elephant, but rather that it becomes increasingly inefficient to do so, as the nutritional requirements become more drastic. (That is, requiring they stock up on relatively rare minerals by presumably going through excessive amounts of food to find the relatively trace amounts of stronger metals within the food source.) That or, they need to be animals that are largely aquatic or significantly less dense than other creatures. (And most of those giant dinosaurs on that chart have at different times been argued to be partly or mostly amphibious - in the same sense as a hippo - to help support their bulk...)
After all, if being big is an advantage - and in terms of keeping predators at bay, or for that matter, any sort of creature that competes for mates based upon strength, it certainly is - why haven't any such giants evolved back into existence?
The environment was different back during the Mesozoic, including a higher oxygen content that produced a greater abundance of plantlife to support an ecosystem of larger animals. It meant that waste of producer-level food was more acceptable to be able to get to be a larger animal that could shrug off the giant predators.
Real-life giant creatures already tend to be eating almost constantly to support themselves, and usually have to be herbivores when on land, because of the energy inefficiency in each jump up the trophic levels. The largest whales, meanwhile, are constantly straining out plankton which are either producers or zooplankton that are only one trophic level higher.
(I mean, even in DF, elephants are already large enough that when grazing was put in, they basically always starved to death just because they can't eat fast enough to stay alive! It's a pretty crude model that can be arbitrarily tweaked, but even one as simple as that shows the problems with "just making it bigger". Since Toady is going towards trying to make all creatures eventually eat, maintaining animals will become a more tricky balancing act, although we're supposed to also have the capacity to feed them farmed crops eventually, as well.)
Conversely, islands tend to have smaller versions of very similar creatures to what exists on full continents, since a smaller ecosystem tends to encounter more food shocks. It's not that being large doesn't still help island animals, it's just that it's impossible to waste that much food looking for additional nutrients to support that structural rigidity.
Of course, if we're talking DF, then there's the fact that domesticated crops apparently not only grow wild, but make up something crazy like 20% of all plant matter in the game, which means that we have perhaps an abundance of food for large herbavores or omnivores... (Not that deserts are currently lacking in magafauna, either...)
In any event, this is getting off-topic...
More relevantly -
The main reason humans don't mill chitin into flower and make Exoskeleton Bread is that there aren't a ton of good sources of Chitin. Most arthropods have highly nutricious protein anyway, so typically we just eat that and throw the shell away instead of spending the effort to collect and store the potentially hundreds of exoskeletons needed to get enough chitin to make it worth our while, develop a process for turning that into a more palatable food and refining out undesirable elements, and then talk people into eating it. It's not about impossibility, it's about effort. As an athropology student, I should point out that only in marginally habitable environments is every possible calorie processed and consumed. We're an inherently lazy species; most hunter-gatherer groups have a capacity to create a surplus and don't because it's too much work. Just because we don't do it doesn't mean it's impossible.
I've seen plenty of mods which turn the current waste materials (feathers, chitin, scales) into crafting goods, but incorporating it into the base game is something I'd support. Each fort I've played has only used a small fraction of the available industries anyway, so more options really only makes the UI marginally more cluttered. It'd be worth it to give players options.
There are a variety of factors at play in the real world that this game really doesn't model. I mean, dwarves will happily eat a full barrel of dragonfly brains just as readily as a (cow) beef. In fact, thanks to the blind randomness of preferences, they're statistically more likely to prefer eating some random vermin like rat intestines or fly wings than steak. (Or for that matter, preferring a creature's meat that doesn't exist in the generated region, like giant red panda meat in a world without a savage temperate forest...)
If players can gather them, dwarves will eat them. Fish are already vermin that are ready for eating without terribly much work. If you made it so cricket farms existed in some manner similar to beehives, dwarves would have no qualms of making +cricket biscuits+ or just reaching down into an anthill with a stick and licking the ants off the stick, for that matter.
In the long term, however, dwarves need to have some sort of capacity to recognize quality or form saner preferences.
People in real life do evolutionarily insane things when it comes to food, since it is driven more by social custom and preference than cold mechanical efficiency in any case but staring down starvation.
There was a much-hyped documentary on just a few months ago about how much food is wasted in the United States. 40% total, and 25% of it in peoples' homes "because it went bad". Farms just plain won't pick many of their fruits from their orchards because they don't quite look like people think a peach should look, so they leave them on the tree. If people won't eat an apple that looks funny, do you really think you can sell them on eating powdered cricket because it's more efficient?
I remember a story (
link to a source) about how Imperial Japan before World War 2 had a problem feeding its soldiers properly. Specifically, for a very long time, simple plain white rice was a luxury most peasants could only dream of, since it took the extremely labor-intensive act of manually polishing the grains of rice to remove the outer layer of the grain, which naturally made it too expensive for anyone but the elites to eat it. When machines that could do this automatically were first introduced, the military got them first. When farm boys were given a chance to eat all the white rice they wanted, they wound up giving themselves things like scurvy or beriberi just eating rice and not eating their vegetable side dishes because Oh God, it's WHITE RICE! Nowadays, most people can't stand something as "boring" as white rice without coating it in sauce, and things like multi-grain brown rice is something wealthier people eat because it's more nutritional, but also slightly more expensive...
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Topic: Chitin should have a use (Read 9353 times)