Domestic Animals for a Desert World ?

[rust]

[Although there is a similar thread in the Bestiary, I post this here under Mon-
goose Traveller because I am looking for informations for that system - I hope
that is okay.]

My Alden Colony setting's colonists brought with them a "genetic library" with
genetic material from a huge number of useful plants and animals, and they
will doubtless soon begin to clone the first plants and animals for their agro-
domes.

Looking back at a previous similar desert world setting, the animals we used
in that campaign were goats (can live on all kinds of vegetation and produce
milk) and vikunjas (small enough to be kept within a dome and produce animal
fibers for clothes and other purposes), together with the usual assortment of
small creatures like fish (in tanks, of course), rabbits, chickens and ... rats.

Since there are not yet any animal stats of domestic animals for MGT, I will
have to guess these, and while I am at it I would like to ask whether there
are other potentially useful animals from the real world or from other settings
- including of course the OTU - that I should consider.

In short: If you would have to choose the livestock for a farm under a dome
on a Mars like planet, which real or fictional creatures (plants, but especially
animals) would you think of [and how would you stat them, if you like] ?

Thank you very much.

 

[Whipsnade]

Rust,

A word about goats. (Some acquaintances of mine raise them for wool and "artisan" cheeses.)

If I were going to live in a dome on Mars, I'd definitely take along some goats. They're easy to feed, easy to raise, and will provide me with both milk and meat.

If I were going to try and create a biosphere, goats are the last animal I would bring along. Goats and their herders are responsible for a large part of the desertification of the Middle East and Sahel. Goats eat anything so when they "graze" they "raze". Let them lose on the plant life you're trying to spread and you'll have no plant life left very soon afterward.


Bill

 

[rust]

A word about goats.

Thank you very much, and you have also provided me with an idea for a
nice little "sideline adventure" for the future of the campaign: The Search
For The Escaped Goats (before they ruin the entire terraforming project).

 

[RKFM]

There is the very useful miniphant from a JTAS article (not sure the issue off hand). Basically small elephants that are very smart. Used as a draft animal on low tech Ag worlds.

 

[rust]

There is the very useful miniphant ...

Thank you very much, a nice idea.

I will search for it or design my own version.

 

[aramis]

whilst not pets, bees are a good bet if any flowering terrestrial plants are brought along.

 

[Whipsnade]

Thank you very much, and you have also provided me with an idea for a
nice little "sideline adventure" for the future of the campaign: The Search
For The Escaped Goats (before they ruin the entire terraforming project).

Rust,

Glad I could help. If I could suggest a tweak to the nifty sideline you mentioned above?

Tracking down a few escaped domesticated goats is child's play. Literally. People send children to do it. My friends usually don't know they've an escaped goat until the dopey thing wanders up to the house looking for them. Domesticated goats are used to being fed at certain times and, despite wandering around a bit, will stick close to home.

Feral goats are another matter entirely however.

Let's assume escaped or abandoned goats on your new colony world have managed to create a feral population. They've been out on the fringes of the settled/terraformed region for several goat generations now foraging on local plants and whatever crops they can get to.

The colony is now going to expand their terraforming effort into a new valley and the trouble is the feral goat population in the valley. Protecting the various terraforming seedlings and plants from the goats is going to be next to impossible, so the goats have to be dealt with. Simply shooting them out of hand isn't an option either and the goats, feral or not, represent a healthy fraction of all Terran-descended life on the colony world. Instead, the goats need to be captured then parceled out among various settlers.

That then is the job the players get stuck with, trooping around a dusty valley, setting traps, and chasing feral goats who have grown up there.

I know I wouldn't want to do it!


Regards,
Bill

 

[rust]

whilst not pets, bees are a good bet if any flowering terrestrial plants are brought along.

Thank you, bees are a good way to add something sweet to the colonist's se-
lection of foodstuffs.

If I could suggest a tweak to the nifty sideline you mentioned above? ...
Feral goats are another matter entirely however...

Thank you very much again, I really like that idea.

While some geneticist will doubtless adapt the goats to the thin air of the pla-
net during its early terraforming, genetic manipulations of humans are not al-
lowed under Solar Alliance law.
So the goats will be able to move normally in the highlands surrounding the
colonists' settlement, while the poor characters hunting them and climbing af-
ter them will have to wear environment suits and breathing gear - perfect for
some of the rules from the old CT Mountainous Environment supplement, I
think.

Yep, this promises to be a lot of fun - at least for me. :devil:

 

[saundby]

I'd want donkeys.

On goats--I owned one once, when I was young. I had ideas of it pulling a cart for me. It had other ideas. Read Mark Twain's sketch on the "Genuine Mexican Plug" for an idea of how it went.

I kept it tied up behind the house, near a fence at right angles to the back wall. It would run up to the fence, bounce off it, bounce off the back of the house, hit the top of the fence and end up on the roof of the house where it would happily chew up all the flashing it could reach.

If I hadn't managed to trade the thing to a friend for some bicycle parts it would have been stew. I spent some hot days up on that roof making repairs.

 

[rust]

I'd want donkeys.

Thank you very much, I have put donkeys onto my list.

As for the goats, it seems like they could be a perfect little GM's tool to
make a player character colonist's life a bit more ... interesting ... now
and then.

 

[Whipsnade]

Rust,

Depending on how much terrforming has been done and how "robust" the results have been, I'd dial back the number of large grazing animals the colony uses. Miniphants, donkeys, and the like are great ideas but they'll need to eat and that means they'll need to graze. If you limit their grazing, you'll then have to come up with fodder(1) and grain which will still require agricultural land.

Domesticated animals are useful as both food and manure sources, with manure being a big boon to your terraforming efforts. However, until you have large amounts of terraformed land you won't have much support for large domesticated animals.

Penned animals that can get by with little grazing or foraging like goats and pigs are your best bet. Goats and pigs can also be fed with more varied "waste" products than many other domesticated animals making local food sources for them more varied and thus more robust. As I noted earlier with respect to goats, escaped or feral pigs would play merry hell with a "fragile" terraformed biome. Feral hogs in the US southeast are so destructive that hunting seasons for them have been greatly extended and professional hunters employed by the various states and counties.


Regards,
Bill

1 - Hay is perhaps one of humanity's most important inventions. It allowed animal husbandry to extend further into less temperate climes and left more breeding stock alive through the winter which in turn meant more animal labor was available and more manure too. Making hay isn't as easy as one would initially think however.

Hay is basically just the grasses that grow ungrazed in a field until they reach a certain height and are cut. That's where the problems begin. The cut grass needs to dry before it can be bailed, rolled, or otherwise stored. If stored wet, hay can catch on fire. In order to dry, you either need 2 - 3 days of good sunshine as the hay lays on the ground or a series of drying barns and other structures. Very few people have drying barns anymore.

So far this summer, and for a portion of the last, our weather has been "wet". While we haven't received that much more rain than usual, it has been spread out and 2 to 3 sunny days in a row have been hard to come by. That's effected many of the local farms who supplement their incomes by "haying" several of their fields. In a good summer, they can "raise" two or three hay crops. This summer, no one has brought in a good "haying" yet so the stables and other customers are beginning to pay higher prices for hay.

Your colony's ability to make hay or other fodder may be very well impacted by seemingly minor shifts in weather patterns. There good be a few bad years for hay, followed by a good year, followed by an average year and so on. Unlike the stables around me, your colonists most likely won't be importing hay in order to feed their livestock. They butcher the animals they can't support while hopefully not effecting the colony's draft labor availability and manure production too much.

 

[rust]

Depending on how much terrforming has been done and how "robust" the results have been, I'd dial back the number of large grazing animals the colony uses.

Thank you very much for these ideas.

Yep, I am aware of the problem. Animals bigger than, for example, goats
are "on the list", but will only be introduced when both the terraforming
of the planet has reached a stage that allows to keep them in the open
and the geneticists of the colony have developed a way to adapt them to
the local conditions, for example to a then very thin air.

In this setting this will depend a lot upon the characters' decisions for the
allocation of the colony's resources, but even if they use all they have
for the terraforming, I would expect it to be at least several decades un-
til any bigger animals can be introduced.

Since our campaign will only play two or three adventures about the co-
lony's "axis events" per game time year, this somewhat distant future is
well within the reach of the campaign. Besides, it will be nice to show the
characters what animals will become available at which stage of the terra-
forming process.

As for the hay, I think the colony's geneticists will have to develop some
kind of unusually robust "desert grass" and give it a couple of years to
adapt to the environment before it really can be "harvested".
And this kind of harvest will indeed hold some surprises for the colonists,
who will be used to a somewhat more reliable "growth season" in their agro-
domes, and not keep in mind what a shortage of water or a major sand-
storm can do to their crops (plus, a bit later, the feral goats ).

 

[CosmicGamer]

When I think of domesticated desert animals, I think of camels. Transportation and beasts of burden, milk and milk products, wool, and meat.

There is currently research being done on creating a cama - a camel and llama hybrid. Perhaps your scientists will come up with other hybrids.

When I think of desert plants, I think of cactus. Many cacti bear edible fruit which can be eaten raw or processed in many items such as jam/jelly and wine. Some cacti have medicinal uses. Cacti with their needles are also used as natural protective fences for keeping animals out or in. A water proof paint can be created from the prickly pear cactus which also acts as a germicide and sealer. Cacti can be used to clean water by removing heavy chemicals such as arsenic.

Is there any native plant life the people can discover uses for?

 

[rust]

There is currently research being done on creating a cama - a camel and llama hybrid. Perhaps your scientists will come up with other hybrids.

Thank you very much, a really fascinating idea.

I wondered whether to use camels (bigger, stronger, more meat etc. per
animal) or llamas (adapted to high altitude, low temperatures, thin atmo-
sphere), but I never thought of the possibility of a hybrid, so this would
be a perfect solution for my purposes.

Is there any native plant life the people can discover uses for?

Not much, because my dice have decided that the native biochemistry is
incompatible with the biochemistry of Terran creatures - one can eat the
native plants, most of them are not toxic, but they have no nutrition value
at all.
However, plants that contain water are still useful, as well as plants that
can be used to produce fibers and thelike.

 

[atpollard]

On Native Plants and Transplanted Ecosystems

Florida has an interesting ecology. For about 4-6 months out of the year, many areas get as little rain as most deserts (less than 4 inches), and then it rains EVERY DAY for 4-6 months. Our lowest areas have water all of the time (like an oasis) and our scrub communities are built on ancient sand dunes where there is no “topsoil” and the ground is bone dry within minutes after it stops raining. Between these two extremes lies the flatwoods that flood for half the year and completely dry out for the other half. To keep life interesting, the flatwoods are swept by natural wildfires at 5-15 year intervals.

Our plants are almost all highly ‘drought resistant’ and many are both Drought and Flood and Fire and Salt resistant. That makes for one tough (and often ugly) plant.

One common adaptation includes a massive and slow growing root system that stores food (like a tuber) and is nearly impossible to kill, with fast growing needle-like leaves of strong fibers and sharp thorns that are frequently burned to the ground and re-sprout from the roots a few days after a fire passes. These plants form a dense mass often reaching 8 feet tall that covers the ground for miles. Beneath the shade and protection of this tough outer cover, an ecosystem of plants and animals thrive in the shaded microclimate.

In the scrub communities, the soil is nearly sterile and cannot hold moisture for any length of time (it is not uncommon for the groundwater to be 17 feet or more below the surface layer of coarse, dry sand). Here the tougher cousins of the ‘normal plants’ found elsewhere fight to survive. Common scrub adaptations include a slow growth rate (to conserve energy), small leaves, and short plants (even old trees are commonly less than 20 feet tall). Rather than a mono-culture like the flatwoods, scrub communities typically thrive on a vast variety of plants intermixed with each adapted for an environmental niche. Seeds tend to remain dormant for years and sprout only when conditions are just right. The plants also do not tend to cover the entire ground but rather you find a plants scattered in small depressions where a few leaves have collected to hold some moisture and large patches of bare sand between the plants. Less than 50% groundcover is typical.

There are many plants that have very short lifecycles. When there is no water available, they completely disappear, sometimes leaving fields of dead stems and withered leaves. When the rains come, the seeds quickly sprout, grow bloom and cast their seeds to the wind repeating the process as long as the rains last and then dying off until the next rain cycle. A few plants appear to die back to the ground and enter a dormant state (looking like a bush made of dead branches with no leaves), only to re-grow leaves literally over night when the rains come.

 

[rust]

Florida has an interesting ecology. ...

Thank you very much for this detailed description.

While I did some research on real world deserts, this is a kind of ecosystem
I missed - I always thought of Florida as being unusually wet.

It is a very good inspiration for the ecosystems of certain regions of my de-
sert world during the early stages of terraforming, when rain begins to beco-
me common, but the desert has not yet developed any kind of soil above the
sand and rocks, I think, and I will try to look up some details of Florida's flora
and fauna to modify some of the most interesting species into native life
forms of Alden.

 

[aramis]

The opposite end of the spectrum: desert tundra

Most of the "Faribanks bowl" is a nasty muddy mossland; much of the rest is evergreen forest. It's also a desert... about 6"-10" of precip annually.

The "bowl" is a wide (≥100mi) shallow valley ringed with mountains on about 5/6 sides.

In the short summers, grasses, flowering plants, and trees flourish in the long sunlight... up to 23.75 hours of direct sunlight! There is very little precip during the summer. Almost all of the water comes from snowmelt. And there is a LOT of snowmelt. Loads of humidity... very little escapes, and "morning dew" moves water back upslope. Daytime temps can hit 30°C, more often 20° to 25° C. Humidity i the center of the bowl is often 90% relative or higher; evening fog is not uncommon (but is often between 22:00-02:00, keeping in mind sunset ranges from 21:00 to "next week").

The winter is harsh; as little as 15 min of direct sunlight. Light snow. Cold temps (-5° to –40° C). Winter weather brings in replacement water for that which escaped in the summer. Blowing snow can cause drifts up to 5m in some open places.

Summer fires are common in the slightly drier forests. Massive wildlife numbers thrive; hay is a cash crop. The shallowness of the valley means that the river is slow moving; it's the major connection to the ocean, and is navigable.

It's a very different kind of desert, a wet ecosystem without significant rainfall. It would be wetter still if the nenana river didn't flo out of the mountains...

 

[rust]

The opposite end of the spectrum: desert tundra

Thank you very much for the informations about this second type of arctic
desert - until now I only had certain regions of Iceland on my list of exam-
ples, but the desert there is more a volcanic desert that happens to be in
the far north.

 

[aramis]

Keep in mind: the fairbanks bowl is wetlands because the water can't escape any faster.

 

[rust]

Keep in mind: the fairbanks bowl is wetlands because the water can't escape any faster.

Yep, thanks, I do.

There are several bowl-like places on Alden that are currently entirely dry,
but that could well turn into something like the Fairbanks Bowl as soon as the
terraforming has caused rain to fall and subterranean ice to melt.