curlicuecal:

curlicuecal:

Friendly reminder that de-aging is an actual canonical thing real insects can do. Like, there are beetles that in conditions of stress and food scarcity molt back a development stage rather than into adulthood so they can persist more efficiently.

You know all those homestuck fics where various trolls molt to adulthood on the meteor? And maybe there is conflict because they don’t have the right sopor medium or nobody knows how to deal with mature/immature troll interactions or the molted trolls are just generally more physically intimidating?

Now imagine the same fics but the resource issues mean the trolls spontaneously start going all bitty and space efficient.

Someone make this happen for me.

I wanna add one more thing because I was noodling in the tags and had a thought–

so let’s throw some more arthropod biology into this: LOBSTERS.

highblood/lowblood lifespans & immortality

lobsters (like naked mole rats) have this thing called ‘negligible senescence’ which means that, functionally, they don’t really age.  They just keep growing.  Couple this with the aging/de-aging and some metabolic differences among castes, and you could pretty easily get to a system where this is a thing highbloods do either to prolong their lifespans, to manipulate their own life cycle/growth, or because they have access to more resources.

Let’s say the Condesce has lived forever partly because she is cycling through a continuous aging/de-aging rebirth cycle, which also fits nicely with her Life aspect.

ANOTHER THING ABOUT LOBSTERS:

size difference

so, because lobsters don’t really age, they basically just keep growing forever. This actually leads to an interesting phenomenon where, inverse to most creatures, lobsters actually have a higher chance of survival the older they get.

okay, so, going back to trolls, imagine that highbloods, because they can live metabolically live longer and have more access to resources, can also hypothetically just keep molting and growing.  now we have age/caste/wealth related troll size differences like GHB.

on the other hand, see the thing where lobsters just keep growing.  Turns out that, they don’t really die of old age, but they do, hypothetically at least, die of growing to death.  They eventually get to big for their exoskeletons to sustain.

BUT.

couple this with the de-aging/de-molting, and what if: 

highblood adult size as personal choice (given access to adequate resources/time)

so rly old highbloods don’t grow to death by-and-large

because they choose not to become that ungainly and biologically limited.  (and also probably because you’d still have to live a long time.)  They just food/resource restrict a bit off and on when they get where they wanna be.  

What does happen if a very old, very rich and high-placed troll decides to just keep growing?

Hello, His Honorable Tyranny.  

How’s being too massive to interact normally in day to day life working out for you?  (He seems vry satisfied with it.)