The Monstrefact: The Xenomorph Queen

the events of the Aliens Versus Avengers Comics crossover. If you're new to the podcast, you can find these and other episodes in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind archive wherever you get your podcasts. So I covered a number of alien forms, but I skipped over one of the most iconic xenomorphs of all time, the Alien Queen. Perhaps because she's such a high profile and beloved monster, I figured there just might not be that much new to highlight,

and hey, maybe there isn't, but here we go. You'll, of course remember the Queen from nineteen eighty six's Aliens, in which Ripley and her fellow survivors find out exactly what's laying all of those eggs at the heart of the LV four twenty six terraforming colony. The xenomorph queen proves a deadly and highly intelligent adversary, capable of coordinating the other xenomorphs in her hive as well as exploiting

human technology. Basically, she resembles the various other alien morphs in her hive, only much larger in stature, with an enormous armored headcrest dorsal spikes on her back in a second set of arms I assume for egg manipulation or possibly resin manipulation, because, of course, when established at the center of a hive, she also boasts an egg sack so enormous and engorged with xenomorph eggs that she has to essentially be secured in place with resin tendrils that

are secreted by the worker morphs in the hud. This of course, closely resembles the bloated abamin of the termite queen, which can grow to many many times the size of her body, enabling her to lay tens of thousands of eggs per day, all while secured in her royal chamber. We have to consider this as the primary natural world analog here for the alien queen, as we discussed before, within the Alien universe lore, and I'm rather partial to the free League Alien RPG overview of everything here, but

you may differ. Xenomorphs can produce eggs without the aid of a queen. This ties into some deleted scenes from the original Alien motion picture that have been I believe been restored in some cuts. So a drone can secure a host with resin secretions and use its tail to inject the host with a cocktail of enzymes and hormones, thus causing the host to transform into an egg or ovo morph. This process, however, is of course slow, and a larger scale reproductive method is going to be necessary

when xenomorphs set up hives in host rich environments. Now, there are plenty of natural world analogs to look at here in which organisms employ different reproductive strategies depending on environmental conditions. You have facultative parthenogenesis. This is a great example in which animals that normally reproduce sexually with a partner can reproduce asexually generally due to lack of available partners. We see this in some birds, sharks, rays, and large

reptiles like the komodo dragon. Coming back to the high environment, we also see this in bees, in which some queens workers and solitary bees can reproduce without fertilization if need be in resource triggered switching or cyclic parthenogenesis. So an example of this would be water fleas a change can

take place due to available resources. Density can also determine sex determination in the case of the green spoon worm, as can social environment in the cases of the clownfish, and temperature as we see in sea turtles and crocodilians. We might also understand the queen's role by thinking about cases in which animals like rats and mice may ramp up their reproduction into a kind of plague mode due to an abundance of resources, either due to natural botanical

cycles or human agricultural abundance. In the case of the aliens, this landfall of resources is going to present itself in the form of, say, a fresh off world colony, and they're more than happy to make a plague of themselves. Granted, the xenomorpse life mission might lean more overtly destructive than natural world propagation. This could be due to it being an extraterrestrial invasive and therefore a naturally disruptive force in any given ecosystem that it did not evolve to thrive

within and find balance within. It could also have as much to do with the artificial human manipulated rorements it keeps turning up in, or, of course, they could constitute part of a rather apocalyptic biological weapons armory. Part of the fun of the Alien Universe is that it keeps us guessing. Tune in for additional episodes off the Monster, Fact, the Artifact, or Animalius Dependium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.