Animal Doodles

Some animal doodles and thoughts, I guess. The canary is something I'm proud of: in a world where a natural gas causes the dead to rise (and also kills the living), miners protect themselves with dead canaries that become reanimated in its presence.

The bees are another kind of fun idea: bees are basically nasty flying syringes full of poison. The honey that bees produce changes slightly depending on the vegetation the bees pollinate, and honey is a food source within a bee hive. As a result, seeding a local hive's collection base with special flowers would change the properties of the honey, the diet of the bees and the makeup of the compound in their poison sacks. Thus bees and their honey both have medicinal qualities. Different strains of medibees would visit different flowers, brewing different honey and thus different medicine in their stings; the same breeding might be used to alter the bees in such a way that their various medical payloads can be discerned. Coloration, tonality of flight drone, hive construction, flight patterns, all might be used to identify a medibee. Without the flowers, however, medibees will behave as ordinary bees, returning their sting to its natural poisonous state.

The armadillos and sloths are part of my "new world fantasy" idea. Fantasy stories kind of have an accepted pantheon of mundane animals, and they're all Eurasian; wolves and bears, horses and sheep, and so on and so forth. Sometimes someone will get really crazy and throw a goat into the mix. I want to shake it up a little by creating a world populated heavily (or exclusively) by new world animals, and was pleased to discover that the xenarthran family (armadillos, anteathers, sloths) are exclusive to the Americas. I'll include some domesticated North American animals (with bison, llamas and turkey replacing cows, sheep and chickens respectively), perhaps.