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PostSubject: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeSat Nov 19, 2011 11:45 am

Hello. It was boring, so I decided to overthink something else for the hell of it. In this case, how often should ya worry about giant predators.

Imma using tigers as a base here for a fully carnivore critter. Tigresses, actually, so our numbers will be more accurate. A 167 kg tigress needs 20 square kilometers to be comfy. If we apply direct linear increases, let's say Milly measures 440 tons. Come on, it's a sensible estimate! If she would weigh 130 pounds at 5 feet 6, that's what she'd weigh at 104 feet. Now, 440000/167 =2634. Milly weighs what 2634 tigresses. So she'd need 52694 square kilometers.

52694 square kilometers is a lot. Divide by pi, square root... sweet merry molly, a 130 km radius! Can she even WALK that far in a day?

If we use gaurs instead (they're totally herbivore!), we've got herds that gather in territories of up to 0.6 square kilometers per animal. And each of those animals weighs 650 kg (minimum adult weight for females; I'm assuming at maximum population density we'd have minimum weight figures, and gaurs are all girls and little boys, single male per herd). Now, in this case, let's assume a gaurtaur... at present time, most predators are around x18 times the size of a human. So this gaurtaur would be x18 times the size of a gaur too, with a mass equal to 5832 times the mass of a gaur- plus 220 tons for half of a giantess' body. Thankfully, we all know where a woman's center of gravity is, so we can tell that cutting off right there will yield exactly half of her mass above and half below. 220 tons, at 0.6 sqkm/650 kg, yields an extra 200 square kilometers. The remaining 5832 gaurmasses will leave us at 3499,2 square kilometers. So we're dealing with a territory of 3700 square kilometers.

That's still a lot. Divide by pi, square root. A theoretical gaurtaur's territory would have a radius of 34,3 kilometers.

This is one of the things that keep my interest piqued in Felarya. How do you feed that monstrous number of predators? I know it might seem like I'm missing the point here, but this is actually a little more important than it looks. We always say predators are rare, we never specify beyond that, and then someone comes in and we say there's so many preds all over the land that you can't do anything, even at night. I know we don't mean just the giant ones- but the ones we ought to be concerned about are the ones you can't beat with rifles. Or swords. Or net and trident.

On a sidenote... allometric laws for flying bodies [citation needed] say that optimal flight cruising speed is a function of the sixth root of the mass, which is in itself a third power of the dimension [I'm not overthinking: I just don't have a clue of what else to go on with]. Imma take a wild guess that comfortable cruising land speed is around the same function of scale, so if a fairly athletic young lady cruises at 5 km/h, a giantess will cruise at 21 km/h. If they don't, well, I guess we'll have to do the maths all over again.

Now... since everything is built okay for that size, I figure we can use the same allometric proportion to get an idea of how fertile the land is compared to ours (if we use the one for metabolism, mass to 3/4, we'll have beans for brains). 4,24 times seems fair to me. We can reduce the radius of their territories by a factor of 2.06. So a pure carnivore could make do with a radius of 65 km, and a pure herbivore could make do with a radius of 17 km. A fair compromise between those values would be a radius of 47 km. Which would, to a 21 km/h cruiser, measure 2 hours and 15 minutes to reach the edge. Now, since a day has only 24 hours, there's no way a huntress is going to scan it all over. Even going round the perimeter takes 4 hours 30 minutes times pi, or half a day.

So, in other words, if you meet a predator, you've got to be really unlucky. This also depends on the predator's "control area", the distance at which it can feel you somehow (be it through sound, scent, sight, or predator sense): the larger the control area, the less likely you're going to evade it. For now, here's a gross oversimplification: let's assume a pred is running up and down the larger diameter of its territory. That's a line that measures 94 km. They can detect you when you cross it: you're 2X/94 likely to cross through that line, where X is their range of detection in kilometers, ignoring border effects and trajectory.

Again, this is a gross oversimplification, and shows you just how unlikely they are to just stumble upon you. I take it most predators follow trails, or spend longer where their ranges of detection are broader due to conditions. But well, I think the territory size estimates aren't unfair- and neither is the likelihood of stumbling upon one. 47 km radius seem fair to you, guys?
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PostSubject: Re: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeSat Nov 19, 2011 3:38 pm

Well of course, realistically, since Felarya is a giant land suited for giant creatures, there'd be more giant creatures to feast off of. An adventurer may not run into a beautiful giant taur, but they will have a higher chance to just run into something else that's not a taur, but still a giant predatory creature.

Likewise, we've stated that a lot of predatory creatures are omnivores, some are purely carnivores, but not all. Also I'm wondering, shouldn't a predator's area only be what they can travel to in a day? Not to mention, that since Felarya's sun/planet situation isn't exactly a...sun/planet relationship (XD) they don't have the weakness that a planet does. EX: a planet has to be within a certain distance of the star it revolves around to get enough warmth, limiting it's year cycle, and needs to rotate fast enough for whatever reason- Felarya doesn't need to rotate and revolve, so days are a lot weirder, which will govern travel distance by day, and many other things.
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PostSubject: Re: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeSat Nov 19, 2011 5:47 pm

I fully support weighing giant things by units of tigers.
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PostSubject: Re: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeSat Nov 19, 2011 7:35 pm

Archmage_Bael wrote:
Also I'm wondering, shouldn't a predator's area only be what they can travel to in a day?
No, because think about how far they travel the next day. If a small area is used every single day because the pred only roams that area, it'll get exhausted or they'll get bored.

Anyway, I second /Fish/'s motion.

A range of 47 to 67 sounds alright to me.
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PostSubject: Re: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeSun Nov 20, 2011 1:24 am

Felaryan sapient predators being omnivores, their required territory is indeed logically smaller than a pure carnivore's. They don't need to go as far to find food when they can pluck some of what they need from the ground and from branches instead of having to hunt it down. Easier to find, too, one presumes.

Whether a particular person's territory extends beyond what they can walk in a day (or half a day) would depend, I would think, on how nomadic they are. For instance, Milly rarely sleep outdoors. She's not utterly averse to it, but she prefers a roof over her head, which means she heads back to her hut by nightfall if she can. That logically gives her a somewhat smaller habitual territory than, for example, Ajab, who roams about within his loosely defined territory and has no specific preferred sleeping spot. He can go further in a day, settle down for the night where he happens to be, and move on from there the next morning. While we're onto habits, Ajab lives by foraging and hunting, while Milly now has the rudiments of agriculture (a vegetable garden), which slightly reduces her reliance on her hunting/foraging territory. She still uses her territory's resources, but slightly less extensively, which may also mean she has less far to go on average to find food.

A predator's daily journey may also depend simply on how good they are at finding food. Poor Jora's limited ability to fulfil her needed protein intake, for instance, probably involves a lot more wandering around than for a hunter of average skill. Regarding Milly, the advantage provided by her garden in terms of vegetables and fruit is counter-balanced by the fact that she finds it harder than, for example, Jade to find meat, and presumably spends quite a bit more time than Jade does out hunting.

Then there's the fact that a predator's territory is rarely exclusive. Territories overlap to some extent. Predators do meet each other now and then, after all. They rarely overlap completely, of course - except in cases like Crisis/Anna/Katrika, who not only live at the same spot but "share" it with a colony of harpies. Even there, though, the three nagas' dietary preferences aren't quite the same, which reduces overexploitation of particular resources - and the harpies probably often hunt further out than they do.

Most of the time, it seems to me that friends actually don't share exactly the same territory - which makes perfect sense. (Crisis lives close to her fairy family but they probably do have to travel a little bit to meet up. Likewise Jora and Jade. Likewise Hiral and Medes (who don't feed on the same prey for the most part, in any case). Likewise Milly and Jissy. Etc...) When you visit a friend, you often venture into the overlap between your respective hunting grounds.

It's an interesting topic, in any case. And I agree that human-sized people in Felarya can spend a lot of time in the jungle without encountering any giant sapient preds. (Otherwise, for one thing, the native neko tribes would probably all be extinct!)
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PostSubject: Re: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeTue Nov 22, 2011 6:06 am

We can/are going to have to fudge the numbers anyway; very large creatures are physically impossible/highly improbable on Earth for reasons other than the square cube law (IE: energy consumption).
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PostSubject: Re: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeTue Nov 22, 2011 3:22 pm

Oldman40k2003 wrote:
We can/are going to have to fudge the numbers anyway; very large creatures are physically impossible/highly improbable on Earth for reasons other than the square cube law (IE: energy consumption).

Uh, about that... I... you know, I discovered that fudging a few numbers, you can get a reasonable power budget. If you're willing to compromise that their accelleration isn't much higher than the one small creatures have, then you can have them reach superior speeds simply by maintaining a state of acelleration for longer than you do. Since most of us consume energy while running, not just while acellerating, we can obviate the longer amount of time spending the energy required for acelleration. Decelleration might be a problem, though.

Allometric measurements also indicate basal methabolism increases only to the 3/4th power of the mass rather than directly with it; it's not directly proportional, but it's 70% of your energy consumption, with the remaining 20% coming from physical activity and the remaining 10% from thermogenesis, postprandial* or not. Mass being a 3rd power of the scale, X^(3/4)/X=X^-(1/4). X is worth 18^3, so 18^(-3/4), that's 8,73 times less energy than predicted.

We can also make model jokes and say they're all on a cruel diet that probably gives them 500 kcal while making them walk around all day just to keep the line, and that'd reduce the energy to minimum levels. We can go even farther with the model jokes and obviate the amount of energy consumed by the brain [if you don't want to be mean to models, let's say it's because smaller brains do just as much] and you can reduce the energy by 20%.

So... yeah, I know what you meant. If we were to preserve the scale in the fourth dimension as well, then since they need to move 18 times faster, they'd need an amount of energy increasing to the fifth power of the scale, rather than to the third, or actually a little below that value. It's pretty odd, I figure, but those are the numbers I got- not as bad as you'd think.

Spoiler:

*Granny, what a warm stomach you have...
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PostSubject: Re: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeTue Nov 22, 2011 4:55 pm

Stabs wrote:
Spoiler:


Not at her current mature height, no.

But a 10~50 ft tall miniaturized version? Oh, I think we could indeed. We would then call them pocket... oh wait. Damnable copyrights.
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PostSubject: Re: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeTue Nov 22, 2011 8:56 pm

Keep in mind that the Felaryan jungle is constantly being restocked with fresh prey from other universes via dimensional anomalies. On Earth a predator needs a large enough territory that their rate of consumption does not exceed the prey population's rate of regrowth, but if the same land were being constantly restocked with prey the predator would need far less land to be satisfied. This is much of the reason why tigers in zoos can survive despite having a habitat of less than one square kilometer.
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PostSubject: Re: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeTue Nov 22, 2011 9:06 pm

Parameciumkid, It's not really that rapid, the jungle is not crawling with humans and smaller sentients. Humans aren't a major part of a predator's diet. They're like sweets, eaten occasionally, not something that constitutes a main meal.
The majority of a predators' diet is smaller animals and fruit.
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PostSubject: Re: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeWed Nov 23, 2011 1:06 pm

Furthermore, one should consider that - as they're portrayed now - Giant Predators are the typical "Alpha" Predator of their area (barring a few exceptions, for instance the Dryads in the Carnivorous Grove). You cannot have an ecosystem saturated with such unless you're either artificially stocking it (and as far as I'm aware Karbo has said nothing about Guardians constantly jacking the reproduction rates) or want said ecosystem to crumble in a short period of time (especially since, with disease and aging removed from them, the top-dogs aren't going to be dying out from natural causes barring competition or picking fights they can't win).

The proposed "ranges" for Giant Predators sound far to us, but consider that if you return to scale (which is often used to justify GP strength, speed, reaction times, etcetera) what's 47km radius to us is about 2.2km to them, and many territories probably do overlap to some degree or another (for instance they might share the same river). Also doesn't hurt that the borders are probably fluid, since they're essentially "What the Giant Predator bothers to actually patrol and can keep authority over": If one gets injured their territories might shrink inward while another that just learned the power of "Abracadabra" pushes out as far as their neighbors will tolerate / can defend).

The Giant Predator population density, barring a few types (Fairies and Dridders being the most obvious) simply cannot be that high. Fairies can cheat by shrinking down in size (and if I recall right they typically go giant for hunting or fighting, not standard living), and Dridders are considered "barbaric" because they'll eat pretty much anything of any size courtesy of their venom (as opposed to some other Predators who consider anything too big to stuff in their mouth whole either "Fruit" or "Not edible"), but for the typical Giant Predator? Unless in an area of extremely high dimensional instability, they need a bit of roaming range to fulfill their diets.
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PostSubject: Re: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeWed Nov 23, 2011 1:55 pm

Eh, I dun goofed.


I didn't do equal mass for carnivores and herbivores while calculating their ranges, the pure carnivore weighs 440 tons and the pure herbivore weighs 4000 tons. I cheated! I should've equaled their masses before averaging their territory.

52694 km^2 for 440 tons, times 9 for around 3960 tons (50 tons below the calculated weight. Can you tell she's slimmer than last calculation? <3 ), that's 474246 km^2. Makes those other 3700 km^2 negligible in comparison, so let's take that value alone and divide by 2. 237123 km^2. Divide by 4,24, that is 55925 km^2. The recalculated range is 133 km radius.

Divide by 18, that's 7,4 km as far as the great predators are concerned. Except they travel it only 4,24 times faster than we'd do, so to dem, it's 31,36 km.


That's how big Crisis finds her territory. Funny, huh?
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PostSubject: Re: Territory and frequency   Territory and frequency Icon_minitimeTue Feb 14, 2012 3:18 pm

More Fun with Calculations.

So I was all like "hey, nagas gotta be really, really heavy if snakes are really, really slender". I was thinking that snakes had a perimeter of 3 inches, because, well, I don't spend long around snakes. But then I asked myself if that was right, and went to Wikipedia to look for a snake's dimensions.

So I was like "okay, let's assume a snake is roughly the density of water. What's the perimeter of a snake?" and then I was like "If we model a snake as a cylinder, we should probably have a fairly okay estimate". And then I was like "This probably isn't funny. Let's try to be clear."

In any case, I tried to estimate a snake's perimeter on average by modeling a snake as a circular cross-section cylinder with roughly the density of water. Knowing its mass and length, the only incognita was its radius, which led us, through 2*pi*r, to the perimeter of its side. I took the most massive snake known for the sake of getting an extreme result.

numbers:

Another green anaconda, one that wasn't the fattest ever, measured 7 m and weighed 90 kg. I think we can handle the estimate being rough...

moar numbers:

The reticulated python, on the other hand, can measure up to 30 feet, but I can't seem to find any dependable data on their mass. At least, not if Wikipedia is to be believed that the largest recorded green anaconda measured 97,5 kg and it was the world's biggest snake.

======

On the other hand, I get data that the biggest girth for a green anaconda was 44 inches, and the biggest reticulated python was 37 and a half inches in girth. Even accomodating for tapering on both ends, assuming that the center has twice the girth of the average, we'd get 26,96 inches for the fattest green anaconda, 22,26 inches for not-the-fattest, and if I had data on reticulated pythons, I'm sure I still wouldn't get a result of 37 and a half inches. So, I figure, Wikipedia information for boa murinus is outdated.

Well, if I follow those patterns, reticulated pythons and green anacondas don't really add all that much mass to the frame of a human woman. Well, half a human woman. If we match the girth at the hips with the largest girth of the snake, we can easily match to XX-24-36 BWH measures (I won't go into whether they're healthy or not; I'm not that health-conscious), and add only half a snake, similarly to how each naga only contains half a woman.

Assuming maximum weight for a boa murinus, 550 pounds, maximum weight for a supermodel, 125 pounds, and only half a snake to match the hips to the top girth, the sum of their masses divided by half is 342,5 pounds. As it turns out, I was wrong regarding the mass of a naga. A naga would only weigh about two and a half times what a giantess of a similarly sized torso- and if we go for 440 tons for the giantess, that's just 1110 tons for the naga. At most, we can put it at 617 pounds, considering it's around the mass of a headless snake and half a woman- leaving the naga at roughly 2000 tons.

So, eh, I was wrong about the mass of a naga. They wouldn't be around 24000 tons, they'd weigh only around 2000 tons, at most. Matter of fact, if I used more precise values for the mass of a woman... which I'm about to do.

I was told it was 125 pounds for a 5 foot 6 woman... scale up 20 times, that's a 110 foot woman. Crisis is a little under that value, Jade is somewhat above that value, Mennysan really goes over that value. This scaling gives us the following results for the following scale values. They're solely anecdotic: you'll see the calculations later.

Scale value x18, x19, x20:

I know, man, I know, it's one hell of an assumption to think that all preds are tailored to the same scale relative to normal human size- if there is such a thing as normal human size, and I know there's no real reason why it'd be that way even if there were. It's just... aesthetics, you know, kinda odd that Mennysan and Arale tower 21 feet over Iridan, though I figger it's got some charm to it, right?

In any case, let's say it's x20 and make our lives a little easier. x20 scale is x8000 mass. 125 pounds x 8000 turn into a million pounds. Heee hee hee haa haa haw. In Felarya supermodels weigh like a million pounds lol. A million pounds are 453 tons, quite exactly, and applying the same proportion to the half-woman, half-snake as before, that's x342,5/125. And the result is 1150000 kg. Two and a bit over half a million pounds. I'll do the tigers later, let's just say x20 is fair for most nagas and they're a fair bit over a thousand tons- maybe somewhat less, as not all snakes reach 550 pounds. Let's go for 1000 tons.

On the other hand, my theoretical gaurtaur based off a 650 kg specimen would be 5200 tons, not 4000. Excel, Y U no here?

P.S: In tigers, the ideal naga would measure around 6 kilotigers. Or 60 hectotigers.

======

So in the end, weighing 1000 tons instead of 4000, the territory of a naga of around this size ought to be around 67 km in radius. Half the radius- one quarter of the area.
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