: Ive already states this, but the Chrimeia got killed by
: Killing Duck and his friends so Im going to resubmit
: it for debate: I think that the banded wasps are
: actually sentient because they are refered to as a
: "peaceful race", or prehaps only the hive
: mother is as she is refered as "commanding"
: the wasps to attack fir'Bolg villages.
They're certainly smarter than ordinary wasps, given their brain size. Probably (because it's a tradition with fictional intelligent insect races) they're a group mind, centered around the hive mother.
: With that in mind, one of the spider flavors (I think it
: may have been the queens?) that I found in TFL
: confirmed my belief that all the smaller spiders are
: males, the queen spiders are females. Now are the
: queen spiders just bigger versions of spiders who mate
: with males and create babies? Or are there actually
: spider colonies? I think that there may be spider
: colonies since spiders seem to work together fairly
: well.
Given the superior combat abilities of spider queens, I don't think they have very stable colonies. In most arthropod species with strong and stable societies, like bees and ordinary ants, the queens are sluggish and not very good at fighting--they don't need to be, since less valuable society members like the sterile workers will fight for them. The strength and venom of spider queens suggests that they can't rely on other spiders for protection.
It may also be that spider societies have a two-phase history; young queens strike out on their own with a small group, then become sedentary and start laying eggs when they reach new territory. The spiders you meet may be extremely aggressive because they're still in an exploratory phase, and their queens are still built for combat rather than reproduction.
Finally, remember that the spiders aren't an entirely natural species; from the Myth comic we see that they're apparently connected to some kind of spider-gods in a parallel world. You'll probably want to take that into account when analyzing their biological and social properties. It'd be cool if you could figure out what they eat, too. I'm counting on you, now. :)
--SiliconDream
