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Fantasy setting where there is an enforced upper limit on how much wealth and power someone can attain because if they get too much, a dragon will eat them and steal all their stuff.

Dragons like treasure hoards absolutely but they also looove to eat the rich. Trying to hide your wealth in various smaller deposits and behind false identities and the like doesn't work because it's magic, the magic still knows you have wealth/power, and the dragon smells it on you and decides you are tasty.

Being magical themselves, dragons don't actually need to eat. If nothing arouses their hunger they will just sleep for however long in their lairs, with their previously accumulated treasures all heaped up around them, maybe coming out once every few hundred years to breed or move house. Brave adventurers can try and steal treasures from sleeping dragons, but it's a risky move not because it's hard to steal from the sleeping dragon, but because if you succeed too well you will immediately start to smell tasty in their vicinity and they will wake up. How tasty you smell depends on how good of a thief you are, so it's a major catch, and there is a lot of speculation on what the max upper limit of wealth you can take from a dragon is before they'll wake up.

Rational approaches often don't work, however, because treasure that's been exposed to dragons for any significant length of time usually gets cursed. You might embark on the quest thinking you'll only take one or two golden goblets and be able to retire comfortably off of the resale, but then you get into the dragon's lair and your brain fries at the mountains of treasure and the next thing you know you're trying to escape with a trunk load of rubies and strings of pearls all wrapped around you and golden coin pouches weighing down your pack, and the dragon's eyes are opening, and, well. That's you done for.

Anyway, every now and again there's some aspiring emperor or proto fantasy capitalist who gets the idea of hiring dragon slayers to go kill all the sleeping dragons and rid the world of this menace, etc etc, but the only thing that wakes a dragon up faster than the smell of a tasty morsel is someone actually attacking them. So, it's never gone well.

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Reblogged dreamwaffles
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pom pom crabs are some of the most unethical animals in the ocean

this man is a serial abuser

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His pom poms are two sessile invertebrates he holds in his hands and starves so he can punch stuff with anemones who are so desperate to eat that they’ll use maximum sting on anything that gets close to him. When they starve to death he just finds more

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ACTUALLY, IT IS WORSE

The crabs will force the anemones to clone themselves if one dies OR steal others’ anemones if both die

They haven’t found these anemones in their free-living form, so, as far as we know, this anemone species is these crabs’ slave species—it’s only known in association with pom pom crabs

Cool paper on this: Schnytzer, Y., Giman, Y., Karplus, I., & Achituv, Y. (2017). Boxer crabs induce asexual reproduction of their associated sea anemones by splitting and intraspecific theft. PeerJ, 5, e2954. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2954

Boxer crabs induce asexual reproduction of their associated sea anemones by splitting and intraspecific theft
Crabs of the genus Lybia have the remarkable habit of holding a sea anemone in each of their claws. This partnership appears to be obligate,
PeerJ
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So if I understand this right, "slave species" is a biology term only used for this ONE SPECIFIC CREATURE OF ALL THE COUNTLESS LIVING ORGANISMS ON THIS ENTIRE PLANET?!

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Oh, the slave species thing is outdated information from the original study in the 90’s. To be fair, that study is still very very respected, it was just wrong about this specific thing.

Their anemones aren’t a unique species, they are only visually distinct because the crab farms them in a very specific way - making a fragment of a larger hawaiian anemone, or finding a newly spawned one. When they carry it around, they force the anemone to adapt to an entire new lifestyle. The crab’s nocturnal behavior slowly kills the anemone’s photosynthetic symbionts, from which it gets its color. After that, the crab can control how much food the anemone actually gets by using it to mop up food off the sea floor, and take excess out of its mouth. Since it doesnt have to reach for sunlight, or reach to catch food, this encourages dense, but short tentacles.

The shortcoming of this study was just that its very hard to get the anemone away from the crab without killing both, and its equally hard to get an anemone to bounce back from this state.

Due to their introduction into home aquaria, we now know any anemone they take will end up in this state, (bubble tips, aipistasia, haitian anemones, the list goes on) and we also know they are not bound to carrying anemone’s specifically. They’ve been seen collecting zoanthids, palythoa, and euphyllia (though euphyllians usually don’t survive).

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