r/AskScienceFiction • u/Noxus8_Pommel • 1d ago
[Star Wars] Why aren't busy spaceports constantly introducing invasive species to other planets?
This occurred to me while watching the mynocks chewing on the Millennium Falcon.
The Star Wars galaxy has had routine interplanetary travel for thousands of years. Freighters constantly move between planets with completely different ecosystems, carrying food, livestock, machinery, passengers and whatever happens to be hiding in the cargo hold.
We know mynocks can survive in space and attach themselves to ships. We also know people transport genuinely dangerous live creatures between worlds. Han Solo was hauling three rathtars, for crying out loud.
So how is every major spaceport not an ecological disaster?
Imagine some trader accidentally bringing a handful of tiny creatures from Dagobah to Naboo. They escape into the local environment, have no natural predators, and start reproducing. Or a cargo ship arrives carrying parasites that nobody even knew were on board.
Multiply that by millions of ships and thousands of years.
Do planets actually have strict biological screening and quarantine procedures that we just don't see much of? Is there something about the biology of different worlds that prevents most organisms from surviving outside their native environment?
Or are places like Coruscant already full of invasive alien wildlife, and the inhabitants have simply learned to live with it?
I'm especially curious whether this is addressed anywhere in the novels, games or other lore, because it seems like it would be one of the biggest practical problems of running a galactic civilization.
324
u/SolomonOf47704 God Himself 1d ago
It's already all happened. All the invasive species have already been introduced everywhere they could have been, and the aftereffects have already been dealt with.
134
90
u/p4nic 1d ago
WEG accounted for this, before humans ever had the hyperdrive, the Bantha were on most planets already, so there was a precursor civilization that had already done this before hyperdrives were invented. It spawned the Dim U cult who seek to find out who the precursors were, I like to think it was the bantha themselves, and they just chilled for so long they rewilded.
39
u/toxicatedscientist 1d ago
Wait bantha as in the thing the sand ppl ride? Are “everywhere”?
61
u/DarthEinstein 1d ago
We only actually see them in the movies on Tatooine, but they are canonically the equivalent of cows/cattles in Star Wars, they are bred all over the place.
29
u/yurklenorf 1d ago
I'd argue that the nerf are closer to cattle, but both nerf and bantha fill the same ecological/economical niche as cattle.
14
u/NuclearTurtle 1d ago
I guess it makes sense that giant hairy yaks wouldn't be native to a desert planet
16
u/FaceDeer 1d ago
Also worth noting that Tattoine wasn't always a desert planet, it got glassed by the Rakata tens of thousands of years ago. It was pretty verdant before then.
I've often wondered why planets like this didn't get a bit of terraforming love by having ships shove comets into them. Ships are ultra cheap.
3
u/Victernus 1d ago
Tatooine was too far out to be worth terraforming when there are perfectly lush planets that exist already, much closer to where people actually live. That's why, since the Rakata, the most action you've got on Tatooine is mining operations and criminal hideouts.
•
1
u/FaceDeer 1d ago
I actually don't believe that, though. A single ship like the Millennium Falcon - a basic tramp cargo hauler - would be enough to redirect a bunch of comets. Luke indicated that the price of a ship isn't all that far beyond the price of a land speeder, seems like something that a handful of people who lived on Tattooine and wanted a better future there could afford.
Maybe there's some kind of cabal of moisture farmers who have pooled their resources to sabotage any efforts at this, somehow? Or the Jawas, having grown acclimatized to Tattooine as it is now, have ships out there lurking to shoot down anyone who tries changing it? Nothing I think of seems particularly plausible.
•
u/Victernus 23h ago
There's no need for a cabal. It could be done. But why would anyone? Tatooine is only important to us because we know a few people from there - to the larger galaxy, it would be like trying to go start a community in the Sahara instead of... literally anywhere else.
People only live there if they have no other choice, or if they're working for Jabba, head of the Hutt Cartel, who basically uses the planet as his personal summer home.
•
u/FaceDeer 22h ago
As I said, "a handful of people who lived on tattoine and wanted a better future" would do it.
The people who live there have access to spacecraft. There's at least one very active spaceport with ships regularly coming and going, and maintenance crews who live there and who have spacecraft of their own. Over the centuries none of them have thought to take a ship out for an in-system spin to land on a comet, give it a shove, and boost the planet's humidity?
→ More replies (0)39
u/MasterpieceBrief4442 1d ago
Coruscant by this point had everything. It has entire rak'ghoul settlements somewhere down there. Probably a fully functioning rakata civilization as well.
10
u/FaceDeer 1d ago
People very often fail to appreciate the sheer scale of Coruscant and other ecumenopoli like it. There was an entire Super Star Destroyer that got built and hidden underneath the cityscape without being noticed, intended as a sort of "emergency escape warship" for the Emperor. I'm sure entire civilization-scale regions exist down there that have absolutely no idea that the Empire ever existed. The surface world wouldn't be mythical - it's too easy for travellers to visit and confirm - but it'd be some distant place that's basically irrelevant, like how the Roman Empire knew about the Chinese but barely interacted with them.
4
u/MasterpieceBrief4442 1d ago
Coruscant is basically 40K Terra tbh. A bit less grimdark but not all that much. The planetary government and policing cares about the top and middle layers. The undercity is a lawless world all of its own that the residents of the Uppercity have effectively walked away. Nations of billions make war upon each other. Entire civilizations have been born and died there in the millennia. All without ever seeing a sun.
1
u/themonocledmenace 1d ago
Do you know where I'd go to read about these nations of billions making war on each other?
23
20
u/Stealth_Cow 1d ago
I'm pretty sure this is how the sarlacc got on Tatooine.
8
u/Ilwrath 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sarlac are a sporing species I think, their spores can travel through vacuum and thats how you end up with them on various planets. Theres even a scholarly debate if they are animals or plants but most people wont study them because they are too dangerous.
6
u/idontknow39027948898 1d ago
Is there no heavy excavation machinery in Star Wars, or is there way more to sarlaacs than I realize? It seems to me that it would be trivial to dig up a sarlaac and move it somewhere else for study. The biggest issue I can see is getting the equipment out there, and some of them seem to be close enough to civilization that it isn't much of a problem.
6
u/Ilwrath 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean they go down 100m into the ground with a MASSIVE body, and have tentacles that can reach far enough to pick up said equipment lol. The one on Tatooine was mostly docile since it was fed regularly by Jabba throwing people in, and it ended up with a few accidental deaths just being near it, much less digging it up. Plus you want to study these things alive usually and that would kill it i would think.
2
u/inspectoroverthemine 1d ago
I was thinking I read it was put there intentionally by someone. I don't know if the Hutts have controlled Tatooine long enough for it to have been them or not.
89
u/Villag3Idiot 1d ago
For most animals, it only matters if there's both a male or female. Otherwise the invasive species dies with their generation.
Most plants won't survive either since the soil, bacteria, atmosphere, light, etc are different.
But customs is largely a lost cause since smugglers and accidents would carry species to new worlds.
Also in the end, just about all the invasive species had already occurred. Remember the Old Republic is like 25,000 years. That's 25,000+ years of invasive species spreading around the galaxy.
The damage is already done.
13
u/BluetoothXIII 1d ago
the only planets that would matter for this question are those not known/visited or left alone for about the same time frame
1
34
u/YoungBeef03 1d ago
The galaxy’s been interconnected for centuries and centuries and centuries. The invasive species have probably already been dealt with or already invaded.
25
u/SuperiorLaw 1d ago
There's laws and rules over it, but for the most part invasive species do occasionally pop up on certain planets. But also it's a PLANET, not a country or island. It would take decades, possibly centuries for them to expand across the planet with no natural predators. Heck that's ignoring possible islands or outright uninhabital parts of planets and with star wars tech it shouldn't be too hard to locate and destroy any potential invasive/dangerous species
37
u/FamousWash1857 1d ago
Yeah, one of the biggest invasive species stories IRL, Cane Toads in Australia is interesting; while they're still a massive problem, they haven't even managed to spread all the way across the continent yet despite it being a full century since they were introduced, and several local species have already made serious headway into adapting to their presence (several animals have been observed flipping the toads over before eating them to avoid the glands, and several crow species have been seen killing toads and then simply leaving them to rot because the bugs that feed on the corpses are more edible), on top of the cane toads themselves starting to really suffer from the selection pressures caused by them needing to spread out from each other (Cane Toads furthest from the Queensland coast where they were introduced have developed a strong propensity for arthritis, joint and bone issues, etc. because the adaptations necessary to help them travel more are happening too quickly to compensate for the drawbacks of those adaptations).
That's not even getting into attempts at actual intervention; the Federation has far better technology than what the U.S. and Mexico used to push the Screw Worm out of North America.
6
u/No-cool-names-left 1d ago
the Federation
Did you mean the Republic or the Empire?
3
u/popejupiter 1d ago
They clearly meant the Trade Federation.
1
u/FaceDeer 1d ago
They'd be experts in dealing with the transfer of large amounts of cargo and travellers from planet to planet, after all.
1
u/Victernus 1d ago
And battle droids may be cheap and stupid compared to a human soldier, but I bet they'd be pretty good at killing toads!
19
u/FUS_RO_DANK 1d ago
As you said yourself, they've had galactic civilization for thousands of years. I don't keep up with what Disney still considers canon from the EU stuff but IIRC KOTOR references galactic civilization like 35,000 years before the films. So yeah the invasive species stuff already happened. It happened so long ago that no one even remembers what was native and what was invasive.
They can't even remember where humanity originally came from.
9
u/itsacutepanda 1d ago
The Imperial bureaucracy is very good at agricultural inspections. That’s tied into why stormtroopers are so bad, the cream of imperial talent actually goes into the Ministry of Agriculture
8
u/MaverickZod007 1d ago
After tens of thousands of years the damage has already been done. There probably isn't much more that could happen. Likely millions of animal and plant species were wiped out by early infestations and now they are just left with the ones that adapted.
And they would already know how to deal with it. Get too many critters, just import some critter eaters. And they then either die out naturally or are eaten by something else already on the planet.
7
u/wittyjokename92 1d ago
Coruscant is a weirdly unique planet in that most of it's natural species are completely extinct and anything present on the planet is either introduced, mutated, or escaped. Many other ecumenopolis worlds are in similar states. But for worlds with largely undeveloped places like kashyyk and dantooine there's a lot of territory for invasive species to cover and a lot of people willing to pay and get paid to prevent that. There's still the occasional outbreak of harder invasive species and weaponized releases of course. But few worlds are absolutely vital in pristine natural conditions so people adapt to the invasive species such as Rancors on dathomir or Anoobas on any world that has enough stray children and vagrants to feed them.
Some hardy species of pests like Mynocks are better adapted to space and don't thrive too far from power cables, and some like Gizka are easily remedied with a concerted effort. But most invasive species are simply accepted as the price of working in an interstellar community with a strong focus on protecting native wildlife like the Ghorman spiders or finding a use for the invasive species like juvenile sarlaac larvae and rontos.
And after 30,000 known years of interstellar travels outbreaks of wide scale destructive invasive species are almost unheard of since most have already happened millennia ago. A region of a planet might get infested and sometimes maybe a whole world, but very rarely does it extend to a problem worthy of concern for anyone off world.
6
u/EvergreenDwarf 1d ago
Happens frequently.
Most of the galaxy in any era after the Sith were mostly wiped out is basically run by a ton of different sci fi versions of the East India Trading Company.
Individual planets are run by a mix of monarchies and republics, though ultimately all but the ones on big trade routes are REALLY run by those companies, mostly to their detriment. Planets on the trade routes enjoy autonomy, and in some cases have almost no export and just live on taxing commerce.
The central government itself doesn’t actually have that much power outside the Empire era. They mostly just handle economic concerns, keeping the trade companies from warring on each other and ensuring once a planet is ensnared into the union they can’t leave and pay their taxes.
That’s a very long way to repeat that it happens frequently; the trade companies enjoy a lot of power and are focused on profit. Planets have little recourse if a species is accidentally introduced, or intentionally for anything from doing economic harm to creating a population for recreational hunting trips for the wealthy.
Even in cases where one intelligent species invades another planet with the intent of hunting and eating a second intelligent species the trade companies can prevent anything done about it. The backstory of General Grievous is resisting exactly that, a species that invaded his people because they considered children of his species to be a delicacy. Ironically the trade company that blocked Republic aid and sabotaged his ship with a bomb (hence why he is a cyborg) wound up prominent in the CIS he was later the military leader of.
The Jedi sort of serve as a volunteer private army that the Chancellor can request aid from; if a situation reached the Chancellor’s ears they might send the Jedi to fix the problem, but the New Republic in either canon would probably solve it with mercenaries and the Empire via the Imperial Army (note: Stormtroopers are not the Army).
But even Palpatine would look the other way if the trade companies pushed back hard enough.
8
u/Initech4_Sundial 1d ago
Mynocks are actually a really good example because they demonstrate both the problem and one possible reason it isn't worse. They're capable of surviving in vacuum, attaching themselves to spacecraft and feeding on electrical energy. That's practically the perfect organism for spreading along hyperspace trade routes. But being exceptionally good at surviving on a spaceship doesn't necessarily make you good at surviving in a planetary forest. A mynock doesn't automatically become an invasive species just because it reaches Naboo. It needs suitable food, somewhere to reproduce, and an environment it can tolerate. The same would apply to a lot of other creatures. A predator from one planet might find the local prey completely indigestible, or discover that its preferred habitat doesn't exist. So I'd expect spacecraft themselves to have a fairly serious pest problem, while successful biological invasions on planetary surfaces would be more selective.
1
u/inspectoroverthemine 1d ago
I imagine most species couldn't spread on the outside of ships. Even the ones that could survive a vacuum (or spores, etc), would have to deal with extreme temp swings too.
I'd hope that the starwars equivalent of rats on ships was handled a long time ago. Things like the trash compactor monster wasn't a stowaway, they're intentionally added to imperial ships (if I'm remembering canon correctly).
4
u/SouthernAd2853 1d ago
We see multiple cases of invasive species, with mynocks being notoriously widespread pests as a result. The Ebon Hawk also winds up infested with a more normal sort of pest that just can't be eradicated until on the final planet they just leave, although this is disabled content IIRC
In general, Star Wars science is at a level where it takes a truly exceptional species to survive a campaign to wipe it out on a planet it isn't native to so I expect it's not usually a major problem and when it is it's already happened thousands of years ago. Also, space ships do usually arrive at space ports so more obvious animal escapes can be controlled unless there's a major smuggling problem.
6
u/MithrilCoyote 1d ago
In the old EU books, one of the Lando or han solo trilogies iirc, there was a scene where a spaceport's scans showed mynoks and refused permission to let the falcon even enter the atmosphere. Resulting in someone having to go out on the hull in a spacesuit and clear the critters off. Only then was the ship given permission to approach for a landing.
Since that was a relative backwater world, I'd assume that most ports have similar policies in place. Odds are there would also be ground teams that investigate and fumigate ships to try and control the odds of anything getting brought in.
3
u/bhamv That guy who talks about Pern again 1d ago
In Legends, dianogas are actually an invasive species spread by spaceships.
A dianoga is one of those tentacled aquatic creatures that Luke, Leia, and Han encountered in the Death Star's trash compactor, the one with an eye stalk that can pop up through the surface of the water. The dianoga's larval form is microscopic in size, which means it can easily hitch a ride in any moisture found on a spaceship. Once the ship reaches its destination, the dianoga can then look for a suitable aquatic habitat to dwell in, such as a swamp or sewer (or, if the ship is big enough to have a suitable wet environment, like the Death Star, the dianoga will just stay aboard).
So, basically, yeah the scenario you're suggesting, of a species hitching a ride on a spaceship to a new environment on a different planet, has happened and does happen in the Legends continuity.
3
u/Cynis_Ganan 1d ago
Han was illegally smuggling rathtars. Which sorta implies that there are controls and channels to stop exactly this.
2
u/Hupablom 1d ago
We can see in Jedi Survivor on Koboh that it's full of Bogling, a species coming from Bogano, which appeared in Jedi: Fallen Order. Some of them seem to have caught a ride with the crew of the Stinger Mantis and then rapidly populated Koboh
2
u/NatashOverWorld 1d ago
The SW world is one where the initial ecological catastrophe has happened millions of years ago. Lots of species die out and the survivors, if any, adapt around the new arrivals.
In theory, the adapting ecosystem should be very resilient, and new invasives generally do less harm. Though it also means very few planets have their original ecosystem.
Because you're right. There are no environmental checks or quarantined usually, even when a ship comes from unexplored planets. And its not like smugglers would bother adhering to suck checks if planetary govt demands it.
2
u/grantimatter 1d ago
I think we're meant to understand this is how the thing in the trash compactor in A NEW HOPE got there. It's basically a larger-than-average space-zebra mussel.
2
u/thorsday121 1d ago
That has happened multiple times in the Star Wars universe. Rancors, for example, are an invasive species on multiple planets
2
u/NutsackEuphoria 1d ago
They already have, but space travel in star wars has been around for like what minimum of 20k years just for hyperdrives.
Sentients like Duros and Neimoidians at that time have already diverged from each other.
A lot of "near-humans" are speculated to be descendants from pre-hyperdrive humans, and adapted to their own environments.
The lothcats and tooka cats are from the same species, but have already diverged and naturalized to their own environments.
1
u/AlanithSBR 1d ago
I’d imagine that given their higher tech base, invasive species are also easier to deal with. An invasion of mynocks? Your department of environment preservation goes down to a warehouse outside of the capital, flips on the lights, and tugs the tarps off 5000 droids modified to purge invasive species, briefs/programs them, loads them up in hover trucks, and drives them to the location of the sightings. Then you tell the droid leader to call for pickup once he’s sure that the last of them has been dealt with. Or you could genetically engineer a disease that targets them, or just slap a credit reward on Mynock heads and rely on the local version of Luke looking to get rich.
1
u/BananaJelloXlii 1d ago
Even modern airports have screening and quarantine protocols. Why would spaceports be any different? I'm sure they have similar protocols in place. They would have to or smuggling would not be such a lucrative business.
2
u/Ahrimon77 1d ago
Droids and scanners are quite advanced. A small fleet of droids with scanners and shock prods or small blasters could easily patrol a spaceport and eliminate most space rats that try to get out of the spaceport. Other planets probably don't care because the odds of the creature surviving are pretty slim. Dropping some space rat onto Tatooine probably isn't an issue because they're not going to survive.
0
u/JarasM 1d ago
Invasive species? Try world-ending plagues. A single visit to/from a rarely visited planet should carry potential risk of spreading potentially deadly pathogens that could wipe out an entire species.
It just seems nobody really gives a shit in the Star Wars Galaxy about such fun problems such as droid sentience, first-contact with underdeveloped civilizations, uplifting lower species, pathogens, invasive species or the philosophical consequences of time travel, ghosts, afterlife, or semi-divine beings popping up here and there. All the invasive species have already invaded everything that was there to invade. It's common to encounter the same species of animal across different planets, nobody even bats an eye.
Space travel is as unregulated as riding a bike, and has been for thousands of years. I guess at this point "the ship has sailed", so to speak.
1
u/Villag3Idiot 1d ago
Most diseases don't affect other species outside the ones on the world it originated from, or they share common traits. The exception is if they're engineered.
This was the plot of the Krytos virus in EU.
1
u/GenericNameHere01 1d ago
Yep. If things went as Isard had planned, Krytos could have wiped out entire Star Wars demographics. (For reference, Krytos was a bio-engineered super-virus that is basically Space-Ebola.)
-1
•
u/AutoModerator 1d ago
Reminders for Commenters:
All responses must be A) sincere, B) polite, and C) strictly watsonian in nature. If "watsonian" or "doylist" is new to you, please review the full rules here.
No edition wars or gripings about creators/owners of works. Doylist griping about Star Wars in particular is subject to permanent ban on first offense.
We are not here to discuss or complain about the real world.
Questions about who would prevail in a conflict/competition (not just combat) fit better on r/whowouldwin. Questions about very open-ended hypotheticals fit better on r/whatiffiction.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.