MovieChat Forums > Riddick (2013) Discussion > What do these giant scorpions eat?

What do these giant scorpions eat?


When the rains come, we see there are thousands of them. They come after the humanoids, presumably to eat them. (Why else would they be so aggressive?) So, what's their food supply when mercs and Riddicks aren't visiting the planet? Those big suckers would need a lot of food!


Martha Washington was a hip, hip, hip lady, man.

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Maybe they don't need reason to be so aggressive! Maybe they are territorial, Maybe they looking for the ransom for the death of Riddck! who knows? !! Maybe... as there are thousands of them and they probably eat a lot as they only comes out and it rains and the 'food' is getting rarer so they are hungry and angry (don't they fight between themselve at one moment in the movie??!)

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I also wondered about this. Maybe they are cannibalistic and eat each other, but go for other prey if available.

Anyway, not very likely that such a large predatory species would evolve to come out rarely during a wet season when there is so little life on the planet (that we see in the movie). There must be other creatures they prey upon that aren't shown on-screen.

I was also curious how there are full adults and also young aliens that come out in the rain. Do they all bury and go to sleep, waiting for the next rainfall?

There are a lot of questions that could be raised about these creatures.
- What do they eat?
- Where do they go when it stops raining, do they lay eggs and die or somehow hibernate until the next storm?
- If they hibernate, how do they survive? That would mean they would have to eat a LOT to have some reserves to burn through while they wait (but there seems to be nothing to eat)
- If they lay eggs and die, why are their big adult-looking aliens right away along with small baby-like aliens?
- Where are their eyes, how do they see or perceive their surroundings?
- How do the dingo/dog animals survive these rain storm scorpion onslaughts? They must run like hell every time they see clouds in the sky...

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All good questions. I know the answer(s) a lot of people offer is: It's a movie. But films that create (literally) incredible enivronments/premises -- without any attempt at explanation -- are annoying to me. Fantasy is fine, but give me some underpinning of logic.

Martha Washington was a hip, hip, hip lady, man.

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Do you know why you want at least some kind of underpinning logic?

I'm curious, as it makes little sense to me.

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to answer your question, go to extreme in that direction. imagine movie without any logic at all. would it be interesting to see when nothing makes sense? not for me

basically we can suspend one or more beliefs for the sake of fiction and to make it more interesting but all other things should stay realistic in order for us to still relate to movie somehow

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Maybe they are cannibalistic


There was a scene where one of them eat its own bowels after Riddick slashed it open

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Well clearly, they eat those dogs we saw one kill. Locusts and african ants tend to scour the land from time to time, eating everything in sight until its barren. They may also just be migrating with the storm.

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Crocodiles can live upto 3 years without food...unlike warm blooded mammals, they don't need food to regulate their body temperature....nature can be amazing!

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wat are you lookin' at...

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Funnily enough nobody ask this question with for example the xeomorphs from the Alien movies.

Light travels faster than sound,
that's why people seem bright,
until you hear them.

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Well since the movie is a flat out rehash of Pitch Black, its safe to assume that like the winged creatures of PB, the scorpions are cannabalistic

"We stayed up all night dry humping, it was awful, I think she gave me poison ivy."

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Riddick said he saw a lot of them buried in the sand, maybe when the rain goes away they dry up into some sort of weird hibernation and can only be revived by water.

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Who knows?

If this environment on this planet can support large scorpion-like creatures, and large dogs, it must be able to support other large animals. Of course we don't see them, but this is only a small part of a planet we're seeing. There's probably tons of other crap out there...

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There is a lot of life on that planet: remember the birdlike creatures, the eels in the pool, jackal-dogs. In the script there was also trison hunt scene. And one point in the movie we see a skeleton in a trap, that doesn't match anything we've seen alive. That big leg riddick was dragging and eating, had to come from some sort of massive beast. There was also some sort of intelligent life on that planet, who else created the cave drawings and the area where Riddick slept that one night under a pillar.

And we got to remember that we only saw a small area of a planet, lot of different species can live in other areas, like on Earth.

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