#westerosi ecology

[bisquid]

It's particularly exasperating because just extending the seasons wouldn't be much of an issue - having six months of every season would probably look a lot like our three-month seasons, and the ecology would probably look similar, although I would imagine things - particularly photosynthetic vascular plants - would be bigger, since they'd have twice as long to grow in the spring/summer. Also it would have interesting effects on pregnancy, somehow, I think, because the trade-offs between 'time pregnancy in relation to when there's Most Food' (which is most annually breeding species' method) and 'amount of time it takes to Make Offspring' and 'how much development can happen in utero before birth becomes too dangerous' would be different. Maybe multiples are more common? Maybe a lot more large mammals have two pregnancies a year? Maybe things would be very similar to earth except Bigger? Who knows!

As long as the climatic variation is regular you'd probably be able to get away with ecology not unlike earth's, more or less.

But when you take that regularity away, and have erratic and seemingly unpredictable warm-cold cycles, over evolutionary timescales...? Weird evolutionary trends would happen. You might well see life histories much more like certain arthropods have, where they undergo metamorphosis in response to environmental changes, and/or produce offspring with a phenotype more adapted to the changing climate... I would imagine phenotypic plasticity (.... essentially, how 'easy' it is to have physically and/or behaviourally different traits from the same basic genotype) to be extremely evolutionarily valuable. And I'd expect to see waaaay more hibernation, too, honestly.

There's also things like, if the Long Night is literal (global darkness for at least one human generation)... That is going to be ecologically apocalyptic if it only happens once every, what, 8-10 thousand years? Yeah. That's incredibly strong selection pressure, but also incredibly rare selection pressure. Sort of like trying to evolve resistance to meteor strikes.

And given that canon implies that there's been at least one such time...westerosi - indeed, planetary - ecology, bizarre and lopsided though it is, should be way less coherent than it is. You're telling me that following the absence of any sunlight for at least fifteen years, there's still a fairly intact community not only of photosynthetic organisms but also everything that relies on them??? I could just about believe that a sufficiently robust seedbank could theoretically repopulate an area with a fairly intact floral community, but I'm sorry I just cannot accept that everything from aurochs to elephants to fucking giant elk managed to cling on in the face of no new vegetative growth for getting on for two decades?? No.

And if it's not a global phenomenon.... Frankly at that point I have other questions. What the fuck does the rest of the planet think about that one continent of weirdos with the incredibly fucked up weather? How the fuck would things evolve with that kind of climatic fuckery?

I've seen suggestions that the fucked up weather is a comparatively new phenomenon - it's caused by the night's king and has only been around for like 8k years - and that's why westeros has normal years and harvests and whatnot, it's just the new weirdness has been imposed upon them, which. It's a cool idea but there's some, uh, well. As we are becoming increasingly aware, globally, 'organisms adapted for these seasons in these temperature ranges begin to experience Different climatic/weather behaviour' tends not to go... spectacularly. Is 8k years enough for some microevolution to mitigate the worst of this? Difficult to say, but not impossible. Is it likely to have all gone smoothly with few to no ecologically significant extinctions? ....I doubt it. I really really doubt it.

(also, pet peeve: if it is global, the long winters should absolutely have an effect on sea level. One hundred percent. A decade plus of little to no glacial melt and a great deal of snow boosting albedo? There should be so much arctic ice. I would not be surprised if the 'drowning of the neck' and the 'breaking of the arm of dorne' were actually the result of sea levels rising following a particularly long/cold winter. There has probably been an ice bridge between parts of the Far North and the continent of Essos. The Night's King doesn't need to break the wall, he just needs to freeze the bay of seals and walk around it )

In the version of westeros I have in my head, that makes some vague kind of ecological sense, planetos has normal seasons - although generally to a lesser extent than on earth, with a smaller difference between winter and summer - which themselves exist in the context of essentially incredibly variable miniature glacial and interglacial periods; apparently random mini ice ages, basically. That way you still get a recognisable ecological rhythm and a valid reason for humans to give a shit about solar years, without breaking the importance and urgency of 'Winter is coming', and without running into the ridiculousness of 'no harvests for multi year winters'. You do need to store up food and firewood and warm clothes, because you've effectively just moved a long way north and now are living in an arctic or subarctic environment, with the issues that brings. (There is probably, particularly in the North, an entirely separate set of food crop and possibly livestock breeds preferentially used in metawinters and metasummers)

Seriously though, trying to figure out how much herbivore biomass the Kingswood could conceivably support when questions like 'is it winter or summer? Are they laying down autumn fat reserves to deal with winter? Is it a mast year?' are either impossible to answer or not applicable? Exhausting

Similarly trying to figure out population dynamics when shit like 'winter die-offs' and 'migration times' and 'breeding seasons' aren't really calculable is. Well. Attempts Are Being Made

How it started:

How it's going:

@systlin made the mistake of adding a couple of quick lines about overpopulation in the King's Landing Kingswood to A Crossing of Fires and then I compounded the issue by doing maths about it and now the entire rest of the fic has been derailed

[gamebird]

I’ve taken it as a given that Westerosi “years” do not correlate with Earth years. We have people who are 14-16 years old in the books who conduct themselves and are generally treated as full adults, including riding into war and holding their own in physical contests against people a decade older (and thus, presumably fully physically mature).

The seasons very obviously don’t follow Earth conventions. There’s no spring/summer/fall/winter cycle. There seems to be just ... summer. A summer that doesn’t necessarily get super-hot. It just goes on and on for tens, maybe hundreds of months. No spring. No fall. Definitely no winter. Just years of summer.

Occasionally there is a “mild” winter, preceded by a normal fall and followed by a normal spring, then back to the months and months of summer. So that generations might live and die without ever seeing the sort of Winter with a capital W that the northerners warn of.

Without the cycle of the seasons, how do people even judge “years”? What does it mean in terms of days when they say someone is 10 years old? Are they 3650 days old? Or 7000? Or 17,000?

Many fundamental aspects of the ecology will be just as fundamentally borked.

The last book touched on food storage more than any of the others, with an emphasis on the Night’s Watch stuff in frozen storage. That was nice to see. But I agree with everyone here that for such a critical plot point, it is woefully under-explained.

Help someone got me ranting on how Westeros’s economy and agriculture make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER before bedtime

how am I supposed to go to sleep now

[bisquid]

These are things that keep me up at night, yes

However

Given that a) westerosi ecology is presumably adapted to the absolutely bullshit seasonality, and b) any area that size (possibly as much as THREE! THREE! times the size of motherfucking Scotland) is going to experience heterogeneous population densities, and therefore bits will occasionally have lower grazing pressure, c) there's not 'no new growth' because nothing's growing but because it's all getting eaten and finally d) the Kingswood soil is the kind of incredibly rich you would expect from a temperate rainforest,,,,, it is possible that you could get that many fucking deer-and-associated hanging out in there eating anything and everything that dares grow a leaf below browsing height. Not necessarily likely, I'll grant you, but frankly no less likely than anything else in westeros right now.

The main limits on primary productivity - vegetative growth - are a) light and b) water with c) warmth coming in a somewhat more distant third

The stormlands has all three of those in spades, so it can grow things at approximately the speed of light. I really cannot overstate how much greenery somewhere like that can generate, it's just that normally it'll hit maximum resource use and slow down as things start overshading each other and shit. In an environment where any new growth gets immediately eaten and then shat out as high volumes of - essentially - compost??? Yeah. So much.

While I suspect any ground plants that need to set seed to survive are in shorter supply, there are always seeds and whatnot coming on from outside Outliers Forest, and - as any gardener will tell you, at length and at high volume - there are always pioneer species (weeds) that seem to fuckin SPAWN whenever there's a clear patch of earth left unattended for more than about five seconds. The Kingswood seedbank might be beginning to run low, but ~gestures helplessly~ they can apparently happily reseed after a fuckin MULTI YEAR WINTER so I would not be taking any bets there 🙃

(what this seemingly inexhaustible supply of large herbivores is doing to the *rest* of westeros's ecology is another, differently horrifying thought experiment, although it does explain how Nymeria can collect a wolfpack ostensibly nearing or exceeding 100 without them just obliterating the Riverlands' ecology, since presumably there's basically infinite deer emigrating North from the Kingswood. There must be. So many predators outside the Kingswood. (None of this makes any sense, we're trying to apply logic and science to a world invented by someone who fundamentally Does Not Understand ecology or SCALE! A royal hunting reserve THE SIZE OF A COUNTRY?!?!) I'm amazed the wolves only became a problem once Nymeria got involved! Fuck knows what the VALE is doing, with their ludicrous geographic border defence. Westerosi ecology is just. Such Bullshit)

Deer tend not to debark old trees - it's too tough and dry for their needs/tastes - so any of the young trees they can debark have already been debarked, which is one of the reasons Garrit is going so feral: between the immediate consumption of new seedlings and the death of any existing saplings below a certain age, there's possibly upwards of a fifty year gap in tree age. Which is, as almost any forester will tell you, an absolute fucking disaster, even when you're not part of a society that depends on wood for everything from fuel to building supplies to shoemaking

The Kingswood foresters have been staring down absolute disaster as it barrels at them at full speed, fully aware that they or their descendants are going to be blamed for it when someone in power actually deigns to notice it, because never in history has 'we tried to tell you but you ignored us!' worked as an explanation on nobles like Tywin Fucking Lannister.

Forget the Seven, Garrit and co now worship Those Three What Fucking Believed Us from now until the heat death of the universe

How it started:

How it's going:

@systlin made the mistake of adding a couple of quick lines about overpopulation in the King's Landing Kingswood to A Crossing of Fires and then I compounded the issue by doing maths about it and now the entire rest of the fic has been derailed

[bisquid]

He also ... Really didn't account for how 'take Britain, make Big' would affect things like, oh, latitude, and therefore local ecology. I also possess a deep and seething hatred for his going 'the seasons are Weird' without even paying lip service to how this would result in Interesting adaptations.

The Kingswood is canonically a large mixed woodland of broadleaved deciduous species like oak and beech, with a handful of evergreens - including fictional 'sentinel pines' which iirc also grow North of the wall. Irl temperate rainforests can have similar tree communities, more or less, although often (but not always) they are primarily coniferous. So far so plausible, right?

It's also between 30° and 40° North - approximately the same latitude as the Mediterranean. The line defining 'subtropics' from 'temperate'? 35°. Now, there are irl a handful of temperate rainforests at this latitude, so it's not impossible, but it does mean that the vast majority of the literature is based on rainforests in cooler climes.

Temperate rainforests also by definition experience significant seasonal temperature variation, which in turn dictates much of their ecological structure, and is one of the primary reasons they don't simply resemble cooler versions of tropical rainforests. Which the Kingswood... Doesn't. Not on any reasonable scale, anyway. So you have a temperate climate and a more-or-less temperate ecological community... With tropical seasonality.

This is basically impossible to research with any serious confidence - there is no literature studying a temperate rainforest community structure that does not also experience seasonality, particularly wrt wet and dry seasons - and is also incredibly unlikely to occur naturally. The existence of broadleaved deciduous trees in an environment as irregular as westeros is honestly questionable - things like leaf dropping and winter torpor are generally pretty dependent on being predictable, (which is incidentally one of the ways climate change is fucking up a lot of ecology) because, well. Otherwise it would be a crapshoot, adaptively speaking. Dropping all your leaves and essentially hibernating for what may end up being only a few months of winter? Unfortunate. Dropping all your leaves and hibernating for what may end up being such a long winter you run out of stored resources? Even more unfortunate.

That's not to say something like that couldn't evolve to deal with westerosi seasons, but it almost certainly wouldn't look like any tree we recognise from home.

Why does westeros even have years?? Why do people care?? Presumably they're defined by the stars, since seasons are not indicative, but the reason we on earth are so aware of the years is because of the seasons! Harvests have been crucial for most of modern human history, and are inextricably linked to seasonality and the year cycle. Damn near every culture I can think of north or south of the tropics has some form of midwinter festival! What's the point of that in a world where the seasons are entirely decoupled from the years?? (Honestly if anyone living in the tropics has a possible answer for this I am deeply interested, please let me know!)

Why does westeros have species that on earth migrate, and yet have no reason to on planetos? Or rather, they would have reason to migrate, but on a seemingly random timescale, and yet there's no indication that this has any effect on their reproductive pattern (99% of all migrations that I can think of are directly linked to breeding)!

Sorry

Rant over

How it started:

How it's going:

@systlin made the mistake of adding a couple of quick lines about overpopulation in the King's Landing Kingswood to A Crossing of Fires and then I compounded the issue by doing maths about it and now the entire rest of the fic has been derailed