The Monstrefact: The Wampas of Hoth

well as the occasional extraplanetary visitor. One even managed to get its pause on Jedi in training Luke Skywalker and very nearly succeeded in killing the legendary warrior. The Star Wars Alien Archive, one of my favorite books, is light on Wampa details, but an earlier book, The Wildlife of Star Wars, A Field Guide by Terrell Whitlatch and Bob caraw provides a great deal more information. Both of these authors, by the way, are interesting figures in the history of

Star Wars. Carau Co wrote nineteen eighty four's The Ewok Adventure, and Whitlatch, an illustrator with a background in zoology, served as principal creature designer for Star Wars episode one, The Phantom Menace, a film that is just absolutely overflowing with amazing creatures. The book in question, however, is from two

thousand and one. It's still available from used booksellers and well worth picking up if you're into Star Wars and or bestiaries, and in addition to providing robust details on the creatures of Naboo, it also covers the likes of the rain Corps and the Wampa. The authors describe the wampa as an apex ambush predator, as its body is

not ideal for prolonged chases against speedy ton tons. No, its locomotion seems similar to that of a mountain gorilla, capable of bipedal and quadrupedal movement, but it's going to need to wait and ambush its prey to leap out

and overpower it in the Empire strikes back. Luke, of course, his frozen feet first in the ceiling of a wampa's ice cave, seemingly via the creature's saliva, so we imagine it must have taken a comatose Luke, licked his boots up real good and then stuck him up there and allowed the saliva to set and turn to ice, though we don't get to witness this process in the film, of course. Now, while this method seems to work for small prey like humans, whitlatch and caraal present a far

more grizzly storage method. For the wampa's primary prey, the ton ton quote prey is impaled on large icicles or stuck to cavern ceilings with saliva to keep the meat fresh. Saliva acts as an anesthetic in victims. Indeed, one of the book's three wampa illustrations depicts a mother wampa tending to her younglings in a cave where no fewer than four ton tons hang, pierced through the lower legs by

meat hook like upward thrusting ice spikes. This behavior, of course, brings to mind terrestrial butcher birds, which use plant thorns to tear and store the impaled bodies of insects and small rodents, as well as to detoxify certain insects by letting them cure on the spike, if you will. The authors don't explore this, but I can't help but wonder if tontons, given their famous odor, are not to some degree toxic, and their bodies must cure a while on

the ice spikes before they can be consumed. Or perhaps wampas simply have to make the best out of surplus kills and store up the meat, especially for the growing

little ones. As for the ice spikes, well, various terrestrial mammals, birds, and fish do manipulate ice or snow in their environments, and is pointed out by Gloria Dickey in a twenty twenty one Science News article, polar bears have been observed to throw blocks of ice at seals, and indigenous accounts report that polar bears sometimes use blocks of stone or

ice to bash in the heads of walruses. As the article explains, scientists take this possibility very seriously, especially given similar behavior concerning ice observed in wild and captive polar bears. So if shaggy apex predators in our own frozen environments are using ice as a tool, then perhaps it's not too much of a fantasy to imagine wampas using ice spikes as meat hooks in a galaxy far far away. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week,

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