What to Bring to a Colony World

[melannen]

Okay. You, and a bunch of your friends, are going off to colonize an alien planet.

You know that this planet has:

Gravity, heat, light, temporal cycles, elemental resources, and weather that are close enough to Earth's that most reasonably adaptable Earth species can survive and breed there.

A functioning carbohydrate-based planetary ecosystem that does basic things like keep the atmosphere oxygenated and soils fertile and dead things rotting and oceans thawed and all the other cycles rolling, and has been around long enough that much of the geology is fossilized (so there are probably coal and petroleum and carbonite deposits, etc.)

A fairly large landmass with a subtropical/Mediterranean-like climate with warm temperatures year-round, no major extreme weather, and ample seasonal rainfall, where you are planning to settle.

However, the planet's biology is not close enough to Earth's that Earth life can interact with it on any complex level. You can count on being able to use native life for things like fibers and building material and fuel and maybe latex and dyes, but anything you want to eat or use for medicine you'll have to bring with you. Along with pollinators and symbiotic fungi and any other life needed to keep that life going. And you're going to need to be self-sufficient within a year or two of arrival, with a fairly small initial population and very limited technological resources. On the plus side, local diseases, pests, and predators are mostly going to ignore anything Earth-based.

If you could have your pick of all species currently alive anywhere on Earth(and maybe a few that are recently extinct, and maybe a few that need a tiny bit of gene-tinkering first), what among Earth life would you bring with you? I am especially interested for species that aren't currently common food products in Europe/North America.

Comments

[bliumchik]

Remember that for every animal species you transport, you're going to have to bring its equivalent food chain branch right down to the level where genetic incompatibility is no longer an issue. Depending on your GM capacity you can probably avoid bringing over predators to prevent overpopulation, humanity can always step in in that role if necessary, but bats gotta eat.

That also means vegetable life has to come first, as a bottom feeder, and that brings with it the issue of which native plants you're displacing to make room for stuff your bats can digest. If you're looking for environmental conflict in your story a miscalculation in this area is a good non-epic problem to introduce.

[melannen]

Yes, there is definitely going to be a step of looking at my list and figuring out what I need in order to support the stuff on the list. I tend to prefer to work top-down - okay, I'm bringing guinea fowl, what do they need - rather than ground-up, because every time I bring in another level I'd need to work back down again. (And even many plants need fungi. And many fungi are predators of soil-dwelling worms. And the worms need specific large animals to breed. It's turtles all the way down.)

I'm mostly going to be writing about the period several generations after a colony's well established, so luckily I don't need to work out all the details - just a basic idea of what they might have around, with an ecology that isn't utterly broken.