What does an alien xenomorph eat?

[lizardbeth]

People? Waste? Rats? Whatever it wants?

This is the question I'm overthinking at the moment. I'm doing Aliens for reel_sg1 (no time soon, it just got me thinking) and I started to wonder, what the hell they eat. I don't remember seeing them eat anything at all in any of the movies (though it's been awhile, so if I've forgotten something obvious, let me know). They certainly don't seem to be very concerned about eating themselves out of prey, since they kill entire populations in addition to making them hosts. They just seem to attack and kill people, not eat them. So how do they grow from wee chestbursters to drones so quickly, if they're not eating anything? That doesn't make sense to me -- even a bioengineered "weapon" if it's alive it has to take in nutrients somehow. But how?

Anyone an Aliens fan and have an answer to this? I know there's lots of expanded universe canon, but I'm not familiar with any of it. And wikipedia has failed me. :(

Comments

[surreallis.livejournal.com]

I... have no idea. I mean, I'm assuming that they maybe eat what the host eats when they're 'incubating' inside a person, but they don't seem to actually eat the person once they burst out. Unless, maybe normally they *do*, but whenever we see it onscreen it's always in a group of people who freak out when it happens so the aliens run away or attack instead of chowing down?

They're sort of too big to be scavengers or to subsist totally on rodents, unless the rodents are more like Nutria, in which case, eww.

I think you're going to be able to make something up and it'll fly just fine.

[lizardbeth-j.livejournal.com]

oh I am SO far from doing fic yet... I have no idea if I'll even go there, but I was feeling thinky.

But yeah, it makes sense that the drone would eat its former host. The implanting and cocooning reminds me of those wasps that do that, even if the aliens are pretty messy about it. The bursters that scamper away must hunt something/someone else once they use up whatever they got from their hosts. Although apparently they don't like cats very much (or Jonesy just got VERY lucky).

This is a rather ewwww discussion isn't it? sorry. *g*

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

I.... gods, I'm wanting to say that they do eat the human bodies, afterwards (aside from using them as hosts, this would explain the lack of bodies all over in the first movie, I s'pose).

But I don't think canon's ever bothered to establish it. *g*

[lizardbeth-j.livejournal.com]

good, it's not just my lack of memory.

I guess as long as I assume they're eating people when we're not watching, it works. Until they run out of food and then they all die except for the eggs. And they wait until some hapless group of explorers gets too close to an egg. Which seems kind of inefficient, but it works better than a lot of made up space creatures biology, so I suppose I shouldn't bitch about it.