The Monstrefact: Alien, Part 6 – The Facehugger

in the comatose host organism, and then dies. The embryo, of course, develops into a standard xenomorph, which we'll explore in the next episode. There are a few different ways to look at the basics of the face Hugger. On one level, we can ground it in the dark surrealism of hr Giger, another twist on sexual reproduction, Freudian death drive,

and physiology. But just as we previously face the question of whether the xenomorph egg is an organism in and of itself, we must also consider this with the face Hugger to some degree. In HowStuffWorks dot COM's How the Alien Xenomorph Works from twenty twelve, I explored the idea that the face hugger might not constitute a true organism at all, but would rather be a delivery system for the embryo. No more an organism than a sperm cell is an organism, and of course this alone is a

comparison worth considering. A human sperm cell is not a human being, but it does metabolize sugar to produce energy, grow, and move on its own to reach the egg as part of human reproduction. But anyway, back in twenty twelve, the face hugger also brought to my mind at any rate, the male argonaut or paper nautilus, which has a detachable spermatophore filled arm called a hectocautulyus that it leaves with

its mate. So if the xenomorph egg could be considered an organism, we might consider the face hugger to be its hectocodulus of sorts, only one that moves on its own to seek out the host. However, there's an important point to be made here, and one that I don't think is properly reflected in that twenty twelve How Stuffworks article that I wrote. A hectocodulus is not free swimming like a sperm cell. Some creatures of the hectocodilust use

it as a sex organ that remains attached. In others, such as with the argonaut, it detaches and the male manually leaves it, with the female leaving it inside a special cavity in her mantle. In the Free League Alien RPG, the authors present three rival theories concerning the face hugger. The first, in line with what we've been discussing, is that it deposits an embryo of some sort, thus making

it another morph of the same species. The second idea is that it deposits not an embryo, but a cancerous growth that mutates into a chessbuster. This, I would imagine puts it more in line with the concept of the black goo in the alien universe. The third premises of the face hugger is its own species in a symbiotic relationship with the prime xenomorph species, and that it injects bacteria into the host that leads to the development of

the chess burster. Part of the confusion here is due to the fact that the developing embryo or chess burster inside the host takes on at least some of the host's genetics, be it the chessbuster we see emerge from the quadruped host in Alien three, or if we're considering Ash's comments in the original Alien that the xenomorph that emerges from Nostromo Executive Officer Caine is essentially quote Cain's Sun. And even this is not entirely outside the boundaries of

the natural world, as recent studies have shown that horsehair worms steal genes from host organisms in order to control their behavior, and we see plenty of other examples of horizontal gene transfer, the non sexual transfer of genetic information between genomes. But let's get back to the face hugger itself. I turned to the paper Science Fiction The Biology of the Alien in Alien by Armand im Curis and Mona Wi Leo, published just last year in the Portland Press.

They classify the face hugger as a quote hoaxed attack larval stage and conclude that quote unattacking larva injecting the next larval stage is realistic for Earthling parasites. For a natural world example of something related, they turn to Seculina Carcini, the crab Hacker Barnacle, one of the parasitic Rhizocephala crab

castrator barnacles. One of the organism's early motes is a specialized juvenile form known as a kinragon, which boasts only the antennuals necessary to attach to its crab host, and is otherwise a living hypodermic needle that exists only to inject a cell mass known as a vermigon into the crab, and the vermigon is described here by the authors as

microscopic and worm like. The injected vermigon then proceeds to grow like roots through the host organism, branching through its organs, leaving it unable to reproduce and completely controlling its physiology and behavior. Absolutely fascinating and another example of how the natural world is always willing to match even our most

bizarre sci fi and fantasy inventions. We might well think of the face hugger as a kind of kentragon and its reproductive payload as a vermigon, And indeed, the vermigon's role in the natural world is to grow and establish the adult form of the organism within the body of the hosts. Only in the case of the xenomorph, that final form must burst free. As we'll discuss in the next Monster Fact episode, so tune in for additional episodes

of the Monster Fact each week. We'll be wrapping up our series concerning the alien's xenomorph in the next week or two leading up to the debut of the new Alien Romulus film, and if there's anything new and noteworthy in that film, I may do an extra Monster Fact where I just chat about that a little bit. As always, you can email us with feedback and requests at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.