When fans first glimpsed porgs in a behind-the-scenes featurette for The Last Jedi, we were immediately entranced by the adorable creatures, who went on to live up to their cuddly expectations in the finished film. Despite their cuteness, some scientists claim that porgs nesting in the Millennium Falcon could potentially lead to the complete downfall of an ecosystem’s harmony in the Star Wars galaxy.
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Here on earth, animals are considered native, non-native or an invasive species. Native species act in harmony in an ecosystem while a non-native species might have been introduced by an outside element, yet still acts in harmony with a native species. An invasive species, on the other hand, not only infiltrate a new ecosystem but also destroys a native species’ chance at survival, throwing everything out of balance.
Porgs are considered a native species to Ahch-To and, while it wasn’t a large number of individuals that hitchhiked on the Falcon, it could be enough to quickly populate in high numbers in a new ecosystem.
“The most likely candidates to become invasive species would be those found around space ports, as they are most likely to be picked up and transported somewhere new,” professor Tim Blackburn, an invasive species researcher at the Center for Biodiversity and Environment Research at University College London, explained to NewsAged. “Porgs might decimate some native fish if there were no porg-like predators already present.”
These are merely hypothetical predictions, as we’ve yet to discover how quickly porg reproduce, how much food they consume and what their natural predators are, other than Chewbacca. Were these details discovered, it could point towards porgs completely overpopulating and overrunning a planet, despite these creatures seemingly being nothing more than a nuisance.
Throughout the history of mankind, many species have been introduced into ecosystems and shattered the natural order. One example would be the introduction of cane toads, which are native to Hawaii and were introduced in Australia to keep beetle populations in check. Instead, the toads overpopulated areas while not eating beetles, in addition to predators eating the poisonous toads and removing important predators from the food chain.
If we discovered that porgs were poisonous to Wookiees, for example, the birds would decimate Kashyyyk.
What makes this concept about porgs all the more interesting is knowing that their origin was rooted in an efficient way of erasing a native species’ presence from scenes filmed on Skellig Michael.
“(We) had gone to shoot this sequence on Skellig Michael, which is the real island location that stands in for Ahch-To, and that island is covered in puffins,” designer Jake Lunt Davies told StarWars.com. “It’s a wildlife preserve and everywhere you look there are hundreds of birds dotted around the landscape.”
The abundance of the birds caused the production team to improvise.
“You physically can’t get rid of them, and digitally removing them is an issue and a lot of work, so let’s just roll with it, play with it,” Davies pointed out. “And so I think [writer/director Rian Johnson] thought, ‘Well, that’s great, let’s have our own indigenous species.’”
The Star Wars saga seems to pick and choose which rules of science apply to the films, so this issue might not be addressed in Episode IX, but don’t be surprised to find out the First Order was decimated by a porg infestation.
The Last Jedi is in theaters now.
[H/T NewsAged]
