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How do?

First in what may become an irregular series of topics, depending on responses.

And as the title makes clear? I want to hear your Head Canon on topics not clearly explained in 40k. So that means no alternate history type stuff I’m afraid. No re-writing stuff either. Nothing wrong with either, just not the scope of this thread.

Now. On with the topic! We all know the Tyranids. We know they’re extra Galactic. And we know that the Astronomicon is acting as a lure/magnet for the Hivemind, and that Pharos May have first caught it’s attention.

But.....their actual origins remain something of a mystery. And that mystery is open to Head Canon. And that’s what I want to hear. As ever, standard Dakka rules apply, because of course they do. But I’d also ask you to keep critique of the next poster’s Head Canon constructive. For instance, if there’s an obscure bit of info which might affect it? Totally cool to point that out. What is not cool are Posts such as “yOuR iDeA are DuMmZoRz”. Even if you don’t like it. Be constructive.

I always thought they were a bio-weapon gone out of control. Similar to how the Old Ones made the orks for their purposes, some other galaxy's ascendant civilization made their own species.

Nids are basically a large scale gray goo scenario so I feel like it's a fitting start. Plus strip mining everything you can reach isn't a long term viable strategy so I doubt they evolved naturally.

I don't see the Tyranids as having any deeper meaning or any special origin. Their true horror is the very lack of meaning for both themselves and their prey.

Of all the threats in 40K, the vast majority are threatening humanity with some form of enslavement or foreign domination. Whether it be to Orks, to Dark Eldar, to the C'tan, to the Chaos gods, or Tau, humanity would still survive albeit in some oppressed or degraded fashion. The manner of survival may be repugnant to the reader but the species as a whole would still survive even if the life of any one individual is short or brutal.

However Tyranids present a different sort of threat: that of total and utter extinction for the individual and the species. That is where their horror lies: they don't care about you. You are not even a plaything or slave to them. Other races and factions care enough to hate and oppose your ideals, or look down on you as primitive and barbaric or effete and wimpy. The Tyranids are like an implacable and uncaring force of nature, and puts individuals of all races in their place as insignificant specks in a hostile but most of all uncaring universe, to be swept away in an avalanche of claws and teeth.

After Alien: Covenant I've been somewhat less curious about the mysterious origin of pop culture beings. Especially space bugs.

Making them 40K's Honored Matres, an overwhelming force escaping an even bigger overwhelming force, doesn't thrill me. It turns them into Worf, and dangling that spooky mystery box for years with no satisfying revelation in sight, like some misbegotten lovechild of H.P. and JJ, just narks me off.

Having them be some machination of beings in this galaxy: well, see my first line above. I'm not the biggest fan of 'everything out there has to be connected with everything familiar' settings.

I'm fine with them being a natural species that somehow got bumped to a higher level of resource exploitation. Even as a runaway bio-weapon from somewhere else, made by beings that we'll know nothing about because they all got ate.

In other words, yeah, what Iracundus said.

I actually started writing up my explanation of this during my undergrad while studying evolutionary biology (can't see a connection there).

As with a lot of things in 40k it's always a backwards justification so trying to figure out what processes or capabilities could exist to allow for tyranids was a fun thought problem.

Like Iracundus, I don't think the tyranids have meaning or are special, I think they are an example of the one in a trillion chance that a life form evolves with a super predatory capacity.


HOW they did that is what I find the most interesting because there are a lot of hoops to jump through for an alien organism to do what the tyranids do.

The first one is genetic code, its ubiquity and universality and its translatability. It's not just the gene that's important, it's all the machinery needed to read the gene and then convert it to an amino acid/protein.

There's no guarantee that all life in the universe is built from the same genetic code as Earth life, and even if it did use the same chemistry, there's no guarantee that it would use it in the same way, or use exactly the chemicals we use.

So you've first got to start with making an assumption about genetics, is 40k genetics always DNA and RNA in the same way terran genetics works, so no matter where you go everything is at least using the same building materials and code book, do you go with 'yes nucleotides are naturally standard genetic tools, but no not all life uses the same 4(5) nucleotides, or if it does they don't get transcribed and translated in the same way terran genetics does', or do you go with made up genetics for all aliens with no consistency?

The first assumption makes Tyranids infinitely more workable because we have in our own ecosystem life that can transpose DNA into other life forms (retroviruses) and modern multicellularity is built on what appears to be several separate instances of symbiosis between cells (chloroplasts and mitochondria).

The second assumption is a little more realistic in the sense that we've detected amino acids in comets and know that through physical laws - thermodynamics, tendency towards equilibrium etc, that organic compounds will naturally form under certain conditions. So it's quite likely that the organic building blocks of Terran life are far more widely spread and could also be part of forming life on other planets, but that as it didn't go through the same processes our ancestors did, there's no guarantee that it would result in any level of similar genetics to us (in fact it would be far more likely not to be).
However it does mean that the tyranids would have to have a capacity retrotranslate foreign instructions into a set that their biology could understand.

The last assumption is perhaps not as plausible as the second but more likely than the first. It is also the least able to support an organism physically using genetic material and combining it together to function.

An analogy using language (as genetics is just instructions) is asumption 1 means all life is basically American vs British vs Australian vs Canadian vs Indian vs New Zealand English. All transferrable, understandable usable.
Assumption 2 would be most of Europe uses alphabets either identical to english or descended from Latin, making them all heavily related but unless you know the translation you don't know what the words are.
Assumption 3 is bascially every language for itself with no rosetta stones between.


40k hasn't gone into a lot of detail about genetics per se, although if eldar hybrids are possible it would imply their genetics and human genetics are of a level of compatibility higher than humans and chimpanzees, which the Xenology book would seemingly dispute.

However I can give this to the old ones using common materials in all their works for at least some compatibility.


I'm not sure which way GW goes on this, but I think there is some reference to VERY alien life forms that might be silicon based etc, which makes it unlikely that ALL life uses the same chemistry as Terran life. Which also leads into the question, is there life that Tyranids are incapable of absorbing into their reproductive cycle because their genetics are incompatible instructionally or chemically?


My thinking is that there's probably a commonality of building blocks, but little in equivalent uses - Adenine may not exist in every organism and even if it did it wouldn't necessarily code the same way. And there may be wholly unique organisms with genetics built out of completely different chemical pathways. Which means I also assume there will be some life the tyranids can't use genetically (biomass is still useful though).

So my rationale for the Tyranids evolving naturally is as follows:

A simple single celled parasitic organism which was the ancestor of the Tyranocyte (a term used a lot back in 3-4th not sure about now) evolved on a planet like any other. Through the vagaries of its planet it evolved the ability to steal genes from other organisms, a form of horizontal gene transfer that occurs in bacteria and some parasitic plants. It stole abilities similar to a retrovirus - the ability to insert some of its genome into other organisms via a complex system using a reverse transcriptase-type of function (retroviruses being RNA and needing to convert this to DNA to insert into host DNA). Examples of this in the real world include HIV.

At some point it also stole a gene complex that produced weak psychic ability in the primitive biped it came from.The result was a parasitic organism that spread across the planet, inserting a weak psychic gene into its hosts and stealing other genes as it went. This turbocharged its evolutionary development as it was able to collect whole swathes of new genes in generations rather than eons. But the biggest impact came from that psyker gene, as it spread across all life on the planet, it connected them together in a weak psychic web, a proto hive mind. As these organisms began to unconsciously 'think' together, the tyranocytes began to symbiotically merge with each organism, until the entire planet's ecosystem was connected psychically as well as genetically.

Any organism with higher brain functions would have acted as a problem solving computer for the gestalt and so the whole began to think in a more complex way and directed its reproduction more deliberately. The tyranocytes could transfer genes across every organism so it wouldn't take long for every organism to have the superior traits of every other one. It wouldn't take long for the entire world to consume all organic matter in its drive to reproduce from the psychic hunger of a trillion organisms driving their minds.

At this point they didn't get to space and there are a couple of ways that could have happened - basic instinct driving them to find a new feeding ground now that they ate everything at home. This could have been the first deliberate effort on the part of the proto hive mind to 'build' an organism to get them off the planet, an ark to escape what they'd wrought.

Another possibility is that visiting aliens, whether ships or space whale types inadvertently spread the tyranocyte species.

Either way they were able to leave their planet and started consuming everything. Their ability to read genetics relied on it being in a similar code to their own, but using retro transcriptase or translatase (where they retroengineered a protein back thorugh amino acid to RNA) allowed them to 'translate' the genetic code of everything they consumed. They never used the native code - I' ve seen some funny pictures of DNA helixes with other different shaped 'DNA' Literally just bolted on which is ridiculous and pointless. But as they couldn't just invent new genes they were forced to find inspiration everywhere they went and so had to translate that sequence into something their own biology could read and use.



So that was how I tried to explain a 'natural' beginning to the Tyranids. I'm not a fan of everything having to be created for some nefarious purpose - silent king inferences etc.

I've always liked the idea they were a biological weapon that got out of control in a different galaxy. There's so many of those in 40k you could have a club.

Im sure i read somewhere that the opening of the great rift threw hive fleets through time and space.
Ever since then i always liked the idea that a fleet was thrown backwards in time and into another universe.

The thing that I always thought would be more interesting is that the Nids were naturally evolved. If they evolved completely by adapt, migrate or die, it really adds to their unknowable motivations.

It's like they started on planet (X), evolved to the peak of their pile, then just kept on keeping on. After polishing off their own galaxy, they evolved to the point they're at now and set off towards the closest watering hole and ot just happened to be Tyran.

Racerguy180 wrote:
The thing that I always thought would be more interesting is that the Nids were naturally evolved. If they evolved completely by adapt, migrate or die, it really adds to their unknowable motivations.

It's like they started on planet (X), evolved to the peak of their pile, then just kept on keeping on. After polishing off their own galaxy, they evolved to the point they're at now and set off towards the closest watering hole and ot just happened to be Tyran.

Yeah I much prefer that, too. Something about bio weapon gone crazy seems like a cop-out. But some specis that had a group consciousness and at some point formed a way of reorganizing it's own genetics is pretty interesting. Bioweapon is just 'Alien'.

The key with the Tyranids is the same as it is for many cult films and popular anime series. It's the question without an answer.

Whilst they remain without an answer it remains a point of discussion and debate surrounding them and their lore. Each revelation of information teased out is pulled apart; guesses and deductions are made and thoughts exchanged. It becomes part of the post-reading-interest of the faction. You read their story, but its incomplete and thus up to you to work out what might be possible.

If you give Tyranids a full story that aspect and draw to them is lost - thus I hope that we never learn of their origins. Much like how - whilst I'd love stories about Tyranids - I'd never want them to have a proper "voice" since then we'd quicky learn all there was to know about their activities and motivations and then they'd lose some aspect of mystery.




So what are the Tyranids origins - their very origin is the mystery that surrounds them. A thick fog that confuses and clouds like a thick spore fall from hiveships upon a planet. Their backstory is the empty nothing of deep space beyond the Galaxy. They come from the nothing, a neverending story of possibilities with one terrifying potential truth that nothing is where they come from. That there is no origin, that they simply are.


Lets not forget whatever their story its measured in timespans that likely make galaxies look young.

It is even possible that the Hive Mind might not remember its own origins, if it got into space before it developed full self awareness. It could have developed intelligence before self-awareness.

The old short story Hive Fleet Horror though from an unreliable fallible human POV does claim the Tyranids' purpose is survive and survive forever, and that things like emotion and honor in other species are understood but discarded as irrelevant and ultimately mistakes, that are never absorbed or incorporated into the Tyranids.

You can find highly complex ordered and seemingly intelligent actions in colonial organisms or even just a multicellular organism without any intelligence behind it. Ants function on a pretty limited set of rules but they manage complex group actions anyway.

It's feasible that Tyranids are still entirely instinctual but that the scope and number of moving parts creates limitless variety of action.

The game of go in animal form

Hellebore wrote:
You can find highly complex ordered and seemingly intelligent actions in colonial organisms or even just a multicellular organism without any intelligence behind it. Ants function on a pretty limited set of rules but they manage complex group actions anyway.

It's feasible that Tyranids are still entirely instinctual but that the scope and number of moving parts creates limitless variety of action.

The game of go in animal form

That has been one in-universe and even out of universe theory over the years, but GW has Iyanna in Wraithsight being disabused of that notion of the Tyranids being mindless with only the illusion of intelligence when she viewed the Hive Mind with her witchsight.

The Hive Mind has intelligence. But even intelligence cannot recall back beyond its birth. Similarly the Hive Mind might not be able to recall its own origins if by the time it became self-aware that origin was already in the past, just as people generally cannot consciously recall memories from before the age of about 3.

My own personal Headcanon it's they are just a biological Von-Neumann probe.

And the end of the War in Heaven the last of the Old Ones were badly injured in their fight with the necrontyr and the Silent King and they returned to their home galaxy in a desperate atempt to survive.

So they programed the original Tyranids to gather biomass and heal them up while they kept themselves in estasis but something went awry and they died.

So now the Hive mind is stuck in gather Biomass since the healed/resuscitated Old ones are pretty much brainless zombies and can't stop the Hive mind initial purpose.

Also it explains the reason the Silent King left the galaxy just trailing behind the last ones to finally end the War in Heaven and how he found the Tyranids in the galactic void.

Iracundus wrote:

Hellebore wrote:
You can find highly complex ordered and seemingly intelligent actions in colonial organisms or even just a multicellular organism without any intelligence behind it. Ants function on a pretty limited set of rules but they manage complex group actions anyway.

It's feasible that Tyranids are still entirely instinctual but that the scope and number of moving parts creates limitless variety of action.

The game of go in animal form

That has been one in-universe and even out of universe theory over the years, but GW has Iyanna in Wraithsight being disabused of that notion of the Tyranids being mindless with only the illusion of intelligence when she viewed the Hive Mind with her witchsight.

The Hive Mind has intelligence. But even intelligence cannot recall back beyond its birth. Similarly the Hive Mind might not be able to recall its own origins if by the time it became self-aware that origin was already in the past, just as people generally cannot consciously recall memories from before the age of about 3.

This is backed up by the notion that the hive mind has a vendetta against the blood angels specifically. Out of universe the Swarm Lord and this modern description of the HM seem very trying to 'character-fy' the faction in the same way the retconn of the necrons did. I'm not sure that it necessarily does the tyranids any favours though, because you lose a bit of that existential horror of something not caring about you or capable of comprehending your personal existence, if it can now hold grudges. Universal endless consumption seems slightly at odds with a higher self aware intellect because now it chooses to consume over simply doing.


In my head canon I don't think the hive mind is self aware in the same way sapient organisms are, but that its vast scale means it is hyper reactive. It's capacity for action is so great that it might appear conventionally self aware, but it's just a reflection of how large and varied its capacity to react to its environment is. This might be splitting hairs, but I'm not a fan of the idea that Bob the Hive Mind is a god gestalt that consciously and separately controls everything like a person.

Apart from anything else it seems to be bringing tyranids too close to the zerg and what's her face.

Hyper instinctual is my preferred method. It fits within the biological framework I posted previously better. I'm also not a fan of the massive retcon to tyranid warp travel and the invention of Narvhals out of thin air either. Tyranids pre 5th ed were probably my favourite as they align with this hyper instinct predator concept more.

I don't mind the Hive Mind being a self aware individual, though I don't like it holding vendettas or the Swarmlord, which I agree is an attempt to add human scale character.

Just many of a human's physiological functions occur beneath conscious attention, I see most of the Tyranids' activities (and those they attack) as beneath the conscious awareness of the Hive Mind. Maybe the Hive Mind is aware of societies that oppose it...in the way a human might be aware of mould on a piece of bread, but the scale of an individual I view as below the Hive Mind's "resolution". A human after all does not care at all to even pay attention to the protests of an individual bacterium or fungus cell on a piece of bread.

The Hive Mind in so far as I see it being aware of others, only sees societies (prey) and other god level entities (competing predators). Since the Hive Mind has no society and has only known either prey or competitors, that could explain why it places no value on social skills in itself or in its component Tyranid creatures (I presume Zoats have been retconned out of that role). I also see the Hive Mind as intelligent but having no purpose beyond survival, having concluded that all other considerations are secondary at best or irrelevant to that one goal. To survive so that it can survive further forever appears to be a satisfactory answer to the purpose of existence for the Hive Mind. Maybe it even views the question of purpose or the various abstract ideas that other races wrestle with as mistakes, logic traps, or a form of memetic warfare.

I like the idea that the Tyranids were a bio-attack from one galaxy to another - not intended to survive forever, just to eat one galaxy and starve.

I think that the the Old Ones (which we know were capable of all sorts of magickry) may have started a war with another galaxy, and then that galaxy sent the tryanids as a bio-attack on the Old Ones. The Old Ones then built the Orks as their counter-attack, but were scuppered by the War in Heaven with the Necrons (which, if this bit of fluff survived the retcon, were the Necrontyr, hated the old ones and the old ones basically ignored them until it was too late).

The Orks (a bio-engineered race which thrives on warfare and endlessly regenerates unless an exterminatus is performed on the planet) had been spread throughout the galaxy as a defence network to engage the tyranids and halt their progress - hence why Orks are found everywhere, even in unexplored parts of the galaxy.

So yea, I think the Nids are a bio-engineered superweapon for wiping out potentially hostile galaxies. Maybe they are autonomous, released by an ancient "peacekeeping" race in a distant part of the universe to wipe out potential dangers before they occur. This would explain why several fleets arrived from different directions to a galaxy where there is only war! it would have drawn them all in like a moth to a flame!

Hmmm, further tyranid headcanon.

Zoats were actually some of the earliest genestealer cult attempts by the hive fleet. They took an advanced alien race they encountered on first entering the galaxy and attempted a genetic merging for mind control purposes to see if they could use them as infiltrators for other worlds in the galaxy, acting in the guise of diplomats to infect the people they were negotiating with.

The tyranids had no concept of specieism however so when the zoats were met with hostility or outright murder, they abandoned the plan and went with the slower burning genestealer infestation route.

I've never been able to fully flesh out a "reasonable" in-game explanation for the Tyranid. They're said to be extra-galactic and presumed to have consumed other galaxies prior to arriving in our fair corner of the 40k Universe and have demonstrated the ability to rapidly evolve to counter various threats but for some reason, they're still vulnerable to basic things that would likely have been deployed by the countless other sentient races they'd have encountered in other galaxies?

Flamers, radiation weapons, lasers etc...are based on universal physical principles and probably wouldn't be unique to a single galaxy. Heck bolters and other projectile weapons aren't really anything more than really advanced rock flingers which is also likely a thing most physical species would use at some point in their history, even in other galaxies.

The fact that they weren't already basically immune to a lot of this stuff (and that they bother fighting other species at all, rather than just showering worlds with something like a Life Eater virus and vacuuming up the resulting sludge) leads me to think they're not quite what we're led to believe.

They may have originated or been created just outside our galaxy or on the fringes, and loosed here for a purpose yet unknown (or forgotten).

What that is, I haven't devised a satisfactory answer for yet.

Why Tyranids are still vulnerable to relatively standard weapons. A brain fart by Mad Doc Grotsnik, aged 39.9999

In short? Efficiency and Resource management.

Background wise, there are tales, and therefore possible evidence that they can adapt to specific weapons, notably Tau Pulse weapons.

But, you need to look at what a Hive Fleet is trying to achieve. Total consumption of all biomass on a given planet. That involves overwhelming all native flora and fauna, whether it’s sentient or not.

To do so requires expenditure of previously gathered biomass in the form of weapon beasts. Fortunately, in a successful attack that’s mostly all recovered, barring when hit by weapons that disintegrate or trans substantiate (such as Plasma shells turning the target, or parts of it, into Plasma).

The more resistant an organism, the more resources it would take to create it. And for more esoteric resistances, likely ever more specialised (and presumably rare) resources.

When they first entered the Galaxy, it would make sense to use the more basic takes on organisms. No point developing highly specialised stuff until you know you’ll need it.

Now, the vast, vast majority of weapons in the Galaxy are Orky Shootas and Sluggas ( large bored, relatively primitive ballistic weapons) and Lasguns (bit more sophisticated than Shootas, used for their reliability and ease of maintenance rather than sheer stopping power).

When you can simply dump billions of bugs, which you can recover one way or another, is there much sense in developing specific resistances, and using even more resources in doing so? Given they seem to be doing just fine with Quantity order Quality, I’d say it doesn’t.

Now, the thicker armour seen on Carnifexes and other support Bugs? Yeah. That’s probably not just ever thicker chitin. They’re more likely to have more complex protection (like ballistic goo between layers to better absorb impact, maybe some form of crystalline outer cover to disperse laser fire?)

But the little bugs? They’re role simply isn’t to survive. It’s to overwhelm any prey through sheer numbers. Against Prey That Fights, they’re ammo sinks. Just deadly enough you can’t ignore them in favour of the bigger stuff, too numerous to reliably repel.

There's something particularily horrifying in the idea that they are a completly naturally evolved species. No big scheme by advanced aliens, no plan of gods, no all mighty psykers engineering beasts. Just life struggling to survive and evolving to be the apex predator on a galactic scale. A mind utterly alien and powerfull beyond understanding. Personally I love that idea. It poses many questions. Is it the eventual destiny of humanity to similarly move to other galaxies to consume resources once they have run out in the milky way? Can the great powers of technology, sorcery or godlike powers actually challenge sheer perfect biological resource management?

As an additional headcannon I like the idea that the Tyranids are actually busy across the universe but once the Astronomican was lit they all took noticed, dropped what they where doing and started heading over here. We know they have been around for at least 20.000 years in the milky way (Lictors and other fauna has been dated to this in various books). Therefore probably there's a bunch of galaxies breathing a huge sigh of relief as their impending doom is, at least momentarily, distracted. What the Tyranids didn't count on was that the center of the big light is actually the heart of the most militaristic and powerfull empire they've come across. As such resistance of unprecedented scale has forced the nids into new tactics and methods. We see this in the evolution of psychic 'nids, the construction of the great tyranid structure and the bigger push for geene stealer cults. Also comming across corrupting interdimensional beings (deamons), mechanical creatures that's a net loss in materia to consume (necrons) and a military might to rival the hive fleets (everyone else) has forced them into a war unlike any they've experienced before.

Also a quick mention, we know the hive fleets are not unified. Some are clearly allies and others are rivals or even bitter enemies. There's that one that only engages deamons, sparring other hive fleets the corruption. There's fluff about hive fleets that ruin other hive fleets synaptic connections in order to destroy them. Whatever the case there's something approaching a civilization between the various fleets. And they are all comming togheter.

@ Mad Doc Grotsnik I hope you make this into a series. Headcannon is one of the wheels that keeps this hobby turning imo.

 Nerak wrote:

Also a quick mention, we know the hive fleets are not unified. Some are clearly allies and others are rivals or even bitter enemies. There's that one that only engages deamons, sparring other hive fleets the corruption. There's fluff about hive fleets that ruin other hive fleets synaptic connections in order to destroy them

Hive fleets VS Hive fleets is a variable area of reasoning. In truth the Imperium likely doesn't know why different Hive Fleets fight each other. It's supposed that the Tyranids use it as basically a giant weapons-test. Pitting Tyranid against Tyranid in an extreme display of "survival of the fittest". We've also no real concept what so ever at the autonomy within the swarm that higher level Tyranids have. We sort of get a hint at this through Genestealer Cults, but they are, by their very design, not "pure" until their latter generations and often can operate for long periods without the will of the Swarm at large.

It might well be that the Tyranids are a bit like the Zerg in that whilst there's an overriding control over all - the Overmind - Hive Mind - there are individual personalities within it (we sort of see this with the Swarmlord) which are capable of understanding the concept of self and of self advance. Thus presenting the notion that whilst the Swarm all aims for the same end result through the mind unity of the Hive Mind; there is wriggling room for different voices to be heard more loudly within that teeming mass of voices. For some to drown others out by destruction or consumption of their swarm. Though to what end an individual Norn Queen might want to advance itself is hard to say. Perhaps there's a continual cycle going on where each Queen wishes to be the singular voice of the multitude, but at the same time each Queen contributes its own to the unified voice so its a never ending cycle of internal competition designed to preserve and promote the most ruthless and perfected Queens.

Indeed anything above a Hive Tyrant is generally quite lore light in detail. We don't really know much about Queens, nor even really about the Biotitans and their role and position. Hive Tyrants have long been seen as leaders along with the Dominatrix (often described back in the Epic 40K days as the King and Queen of the ground forces). Whilst Norn Queens are the queens above within the great ships. The creatures capable of design and birth of new Tyranids and one of the driving forces of their evolution. However we've also never learned if the Queens are one and the same to a Hive Ship or if the Queen is but a rider within a yet higher power - the Ship itself.

There’s also something of an assumption that the Hive Mind is fully sapient, and indeed sane.

That’s a whole topic unto itself!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There’s also something of an assumption that the Hive Mind is fully sapient, and indeed sane.

That’s a whole topic unto itself!

My long biology ramble above was built around psychic genes rather than intellect. Things like the gyrinx and the Crotalid are non sentient animals with psychic abilities so there's no need for a gestalt to form around a sapient consciousness.

The scale of the network means that even a basic system like that employed by ants can react in a highly complex but instinctual way. Being interconnected just acts as a force multiplier and coordinates the response.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There’s also something of an assumption that the Hive Mind is fully sapient, and indeed sane.

That’s a whole topic unto itself!

I don't see why one would say the Hive Mind is insane. It might be very anti-social but that isn't insanity. Its anti-sociality may be because it was never socialized and knows only competitors or prey and no peers. So it might have no ability or feel any need to do anything like diplomacy or communicating with anyone else, and everything remains geared towards meeting basic needs of survival and growth. From the perspective of the Hive Mind, it is singular and may not be able to comprehend the existence of other individuals as truly separate beings.

I love this thread. Reminds me of a great short story I read decades ago about an alien hive mind that normally wasn’t sentient, but hatched an intelligent drone to deal with an intruding human: intelligence isn’t actually useful most of the time, and mindless things survive much longer, the drone told the human, pointing to degenerate descendants of the previous would-be invaders, reduced to scavenging the hive’s waste fluids.....
I personally like the idea that the Hive Mind is highly intelligent but not at all conscious. That is, it can solve all sorts of staggeringly complex problems, but it doesn’t have any sense of self, any capacity to say “this is me” or “I think, therefore I am” or even “I want to kill you”— it totally wants to kill you, of course, that’s not the issue, but it has no concept of “I”.... It’s a bit like the academic concept of a “philosophical zombie.” When the Hive
Mind outmaneuvers you and wipes your planet, it’s not like being defeated by a person, it’s like being defeated by a computer— nothing personal about it at all, to the extent that the thing that out-thought you isn’t actually a person.

My only gripe with them being a naturally evolved apex-predator hive species is space travel, specifically organic space travel.

I get that they are rapidly evolving, but evolving to the point that you have wiped out all of the biomass on wherever they started off, and then suddenly being capable of getting all of that biomass into orbit and out into the void of space seems a bit much.

I like to think that they started off as an apex-predator species, but someone out there started tinkering with them. Not necessarily to make a bioweapon, but in the same way that humans just sometimes experiment on animals just to see what they can do to them. Some bright spark deciding to make an ancestor of the modern Tyranid capable of surviving in space and then it all just getting horrendously out of hand.