Ask Ms. Jessica Issue 20 – Living like an animal (Patreon)

 (The content for Ask Ms. Jessica comes from real questions from real people sent to AskMsJessica@gmail.com)

Dear Ms. Jessica,

I have a question about mutants that look like animals. Do they have to live like animals? Can dog mutants have chocolate? Can mutants with wings fly? Do spider mutants have to suck blood and eat their boyfriends! Scary!!!

Well, first of all, spiders don’t suck blood. They actually tend to inject digestive enzyme into their prey via their fangs to liquefy them from the inside out, and then suck this liquefied substance through their prey’s exoskeleton. Other spiders will shred their prey with their mandibles and teeth before inserting digestive enzymes into the wound and then consuming the resulting digested mass.

… I have a feeling this hasn’t made them any less scary.

Anyway, the answer is yes and no. Animal mutants do tend to have greatly changed biological systems that sometimes mimic the animals they resemble, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their lives completely change.

For example, dogs cannot have chocolate because of their body mass. Chocolate has caffeine in it, and a dog’s smaller body simply cannot metabolize the caffeine quickly enough to survive it’s negative effects. However, a dog mutant has roughly the same body mass as a human, along with human sized organs. So they can eat chocolate and have a caffeine addiction like the rest of us. 

I should get myself another cup of coffee.

As for winged mutants, some can fly and some can’t. It largely depends on their body mass and how their wings are designed. It takes a LOT of force to lift human body weight off the ground through wind resistance. The mutant would have to be able to flap their wings hard enough to produce enough counter-force to get their entire body off the ground. 

This, as you can imagine, could be quite hard. Imagine doing a pull-up, but you are pulling yourself up on the air.

Oddly enough, the question really just comes down to fitness. A mutant that works out their wings can probably fly, or at the very least glide for long periods of time. A mutant that doesn’t… probably won’t be able to. If I had wings, I probably couldn’t be able to. I can’t do pull-ups for the life of me, even with all these arms!

Luckily, not everyone wants to fly, so many mutants don’t work out their wings and are absolutely fine with them being simply aesthetic.

Finally, we have spider mutants. Spiders eat the way they do because they have very small mouth parts and rely on their fangs and mandibles. They have no particular way to, say, chop up their prey and cook it, chew it, and swallow it. Spider mutants, on the other hand, do. They have a mouth, and teeth, and hands, and usually a decent set of cookware… or at the very least the number of a good take-out place on speed-dial. So they have no particular reason to inject venom into something, followed by digestive enzymes, and then suck up the liquefied mass. They do all that digesting on the inside, and for good reason! It’s just more efficient that way.

That’s not saying that a spider mutant COULDN’T inject enzymes into something and suck out the resulting liquefied mass but… I’m sure it wouldn’t taste very good. 

So that’s the basic answer. Animal mutants tend to have the best of both worlds. As I said before, mutations tend to be advantageous. So there’s very little reason a mutation would get rid of the benefits the human body already has.

… Now I want to get take-out…

Dr. Jessica Park

AskMsJessica@gmail.com