Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from

stuff to blow your mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

Our journey through time.

Our journey through the alien universe this time brings us to the mysterious planet 4, the rotting

paradise of alien covenant.

Once an occupied world of the engineers, the planet suffered a mass extinction event at the

hands of the rogue Androy David.

Descending from the sky in a stolen Engineer spaceship, he unleashed a devastating bombardment

of the steatide ampules, eradicating most

non-botanical, non-fungal life

with the dreaded evolutionary accelerant agent A0 slash 3959 x.91

15. But as we've explored already the black goo doesn't destroy everything in such incidents.

No, it also creates new dangerous organisms to prowl the lifeless borders of devastation,

and it tends to find its way back to the basic form of a xenomorphic predator, in this case working its way up from fungal and possibly insect life.

The neomorph begins as a fungal growth that produces small pods or egg sacks

which release a swarm of moats upon disturbance. These moats are able to move

through the air by their own volition, sometimes synchronizing in murmurations to zero in on a potential

host organism's vulnerable orifices.

The moats are often compared to plant pollen, though of course pollen depends on vectors such as wind or other organisms to move from one plant to the next.

We might instead be tempted to compare these moats to fairy flies or fairy Wasps, the smallest known flying organisms.

As pointed out by Julius Schler in a 2024 article for the Sierra Club, Fairy Wasp body length can measure as little as 0.139 millimeters, equal

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