" You still do n’t sympathise what you ’re dealing with , do you ? Perfect being . Its structural perfection is oppose only by its hostility . " — Ash ( Ian Holm ) in " Alien "
As grownup , xenomorphsexhibit the pharyngeal jaw of moray eel , exoskeletal armor and a spiked tail that brings to mind a scorpion ’s cut or a stegosaurus’thagomizer .
That ’s the " perfect"xenomorph , but what about the facehugger also in " Alien " ? In the movies , this crab - like entity emerges from a leathery egg , seize itself to a human ’s aspect and deposit an embryo inside the host , one that get into a thorax - burst xenomorph larva .
But if the chestburster is the larva , then what ’s the facehugger ? Many real - life species sport a prelarval form , but the " Alien " films point that the deep-seated embryo suck genes from the master of ceremonies . Might this mean the facehugger is little more than a wandering sex organ ?
Believe it or not , self - propel autonomous sex organs are not unprecedented in the natural world . The manlike paper nautilus ( or paper nautilus ) uses a detachable , free - swimming tentacle called a hectocotylus to extradite sperm to a female person .
Elsewhere in the intimate horror show we call an sea , adult Nereididae ragworms simply morph into a reproductive hero . As Dr. Marah J. Hardt points out in her Holy Writ " Sex in the Sea , " the beast ’s legs morph into paddles , its gut atrophy and its body bloats with accumulated sperm or ballock . Finally , the ragworm ’s eyes expatiate to seek out the full moon , allowing them to paddle in force to the surface and explode in a slurry of gamete and brine .
These examples do n’t nail down the precise nature of the facehugger , but they give us a few estimation — and do to show , once more , that no matter how uncanny the fictional monster , nature credibly has a few specimen of equal or smashing foreignness .
