The Monstrefact: The Kalisk

five's Predator bad Lands. Here's something I never thought I'd say, Hey, the cute alien and odd couple humor in this latest Predator movie. It really worked. But hey, here we are. I have a lot of nostalgia for Predators one and two. I enjoyed most of the sequels at least on some level, and I thought twenty twenty two Prey was just a

great take on the original concept. Its director Dan Tracktenberg apparently considered a slasher style follow up to Prey in which we cheer the Predators on against Nazis, which would have been something. But I'm ultimately glad they gave us this fresh action adventure approach that we got with bad Lands Again, just something different that is also a lot of fun. The movie follows a young cast aside predator runt named Deck as he seeks the ultimate prey on

an alien planet. At the same time as an all android Wayland Utani research mission is also active on that planet seeking the same target. Yes, the film is something of a soft alien versus predator film, but without literal AVP action, instead pitting the alien franchisees, corporate villains, and multiple synths against our yacht jah protagonist and a damage synth named Thea. Again, it's a lot of fun. I

had a lot of fun with this one. I'm still not sure if I want to see another film in which predators actually take on xenomorphs, at least not anytime soon. But hey, Predators Versus Synths was still pretty great. But let's come back to that crazy alien planet. It's presented here as a hyper dangerous ecosystem in which just about every form of fauna and flora is trying to kill you. Even its grass is razor sharp, and as you might imagine,

the planet's apex predator is darned near unkillable. And this is the callusk, prized by the Yatcha as the ultimate prey and sought after by waylay Nutani for its incredible regenerative abilities. I describe the callusk as roughly a cross between a hippo, a lion, and Sonic the hedgehog. There

might be a little gorilla in there as well. This towering creature, almost like a kaiju, is incredibly vicious and durable, and it boasts powers of regeneration so intense that it can bounce back in seconds from evisceration, dismemberment, decapitation, and

seemingly anything short of total body fragmentation. The natural world, of course, features some regeneration star players of its own, such as tiny hydras and flat worms, and even some larger regenerators like the axolotel, but none of these organisms are capable of the sort of stealth head reattachment while Predator's back is turned action we see in the film. Even with the hydro, we're talking eighteen to seventy two hours to regrow header body. But the hydra is also

worth bringing up here. In some ways it also lines up with the callous because some scientists have made the case that it's biologically immortal, not unkillable, not invulnerable minds you, but possibly immune to aging. The late sci fi author Ian M. Banks touched on this topic in his nineteen eighty seven culture novel Consider Flebus, which features an alien race called the Idherons, who are biologically immortal due to

the savage, hyper competitive environment of their home world. Here's a quick quote from that novel, which is among one of my favorites. Quote. The Durans themselves had evolved on their planet Ideir as the top monster from a whole planet full of monsters. The frenetic and savage ecology of Adir in its early days had long since disappeared, and so had all the other home world monsters except those

in zoos. But the Adherans had retained the intelligence that made them winners, as well as the biological immortality, which, due to the viciousness of the fight for survival back then. Not to mention, Idir's high radiation levels had been an evolutionary advantage rather than a recipe for stagnation. It's a really cool idea, and I wouldn't be surprised if it at least partially inspired the invention of the callus, but it actually runs counter to one of our leading hypotheses

of aging, Thomas Kirkwood's disposable soma theory or DST. According to DST, it would be low environmentally induced mortality, not high that delays reproduction and aging. The evolutionary response to a high risk world like this, hypothetically would be to speed things up and waste few resources on long term maintenance. Plus, on a biological level, everything about the fictional callusk is

just expensive. It's body size, its spines, it's tough hide, and of course that high speed and nearly all inclusive regeneration. I feel like we need a lot more information on their life cycle to understand just how all of this would fit together. Perhaps, though the callusk isn't truly biologically immortal at all, it is actually incredibly short lived, just extremely impossibly durable in the short term, and this might actually line up well with the rapid growth we see

in the cask juvenile named Bud. But hey, anyway you slice it, the Callusk is still a super fun monster and a fitting obsession for both sci fi biomedical labs and alien hunters. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact the artifact or Animalius to Pendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.