The Monstrefact: The Xenomorph Queen

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the xenomorph queen from the “Alien” universe…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamban. This is The Monster Fact,
a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. Previously
on The Monster Fact, I devoted an eight part series
to the various xenomorphic organisms of the alien universe, along

(00:31):
with bonus episodes on the creatures of Alien Earth and
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

(00:56):
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

(01:20):
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

(01:40):
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

(02:01):
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,

(02:23):
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

(02:46):
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,

(03:08):
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.

(03:29):
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

(03:49):
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

(04:11):
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

(04:33):
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

(04:54):
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,

(05:15):
the Artifact, or Animalius Dependium each week. As always, you
can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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