History Main / BizarreAlienReproduction

** The Skrit Na are even stranger. The "Skrit" look sort of like giant roaches and are fairly stupid. At some point during their lives they spin a cocoon, die, but then out of their dead body a Na (basically [[TheGreys a Grey)]] pops out. It's never explained where new Skrit come from, but the Na certainly have a weird way of coming into this (or some other) world.

* The Nac Mac Feegle in ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' has one female to a tribe, who is the Kelda and is married to the most powerful warrior. [[WomenAreWiser It's her job to do the thinking for the entire tribe]] and, although she's their ruler, she's also, in a way, a prisoner. Female births are very rare and girls are expected, upon reaching adulthood, to either find a tribe whose Kelda has recently died or collect a few men from nearby tribes to form a new tribe. In either case, she takes some of her brothers with her to keep her company until she gets to know her new people. Incidentally, Creator/TerryPratchett was quite interested in bees and their swarming behaviours.

** Nihilego, an [[EldritchAbomination Ultra Beast]], does not breed like regular Pokemon, but [[https://i.imgur.com/wMYYOh2.jpg Concept art]] shows that it breeds by spawning polyps that grow into larvae and then adults. Basically, it reproduces like a real jellyfish. Other Ultra Beasts may have other methods of propagating that are different from the standard "male-and-female produce an egg in a daycare", such as Celesteela sprouting from the ground in its home world.

** Forging is also shown to have some strange limitations on it. For example, following the departure of most of the Thirteen Primes, sparks from Cybertron and its moons just... stopped forging more than one assigned sex, leading to a Cybertron so dominated by male-presenting robots that post-war some of them have trouble remembering that there ''are'' feminine pronouns. The thing where artists would put in the occasional {{Fembot}} in flashbacks and pre-War stories was eventually resolved by having them all be transgender (and [[AuthorsSavingThrow frantically patching]] the parts of Arcee's background that had UnfortunateImplications to lock her in as a proud trans woman whose murderous rampage was related to Jhiaxus's terrible aftercare). Some of the colonies have their own quirks: Camiens have blue [[AlienBlood energon]] instead of pink due to different spark frequencies, Devisiens are born as twins who form a combined altmode, Eukariens all have beast forms and so on.

** Eusociality isn't limited to insects, either. Naked mole rats are eusocial mammals.

* ''Literature/BosunsReturn'': Bogmoths are a clade of insects with a decidedly unusual reproductive strategy. Their grub-like reproductive adults, divided between haploid males[[note]]with a single set of chromosomes[[/note]] and diploid females[[note]]two sets[[/note]] lack external sexual organs, and instead mate by cocooning together and fusing into a single being, with a cluster of eggs being produced from their cocoon; adults that fail to reproduce pupate on their own and reproduce asexually. After the larvae hatch, the metamorphosed fused or singleton adults emerge as a post-adult, sterile stage called the senescent sentinel, or "senesentinel", whose exact form and role depends on the pair or individual that formed them. Solitary males, which don't produce eggs, become small predators that keep their environment clear of pests. Solitary females and male-male pairs produce diploid senesentinels, which are winged and transport larvae and adults around to start new colonies. Male-female pairs produce triploid senesentinels, large predators that serve to both kill off larger threats and to carry around larger quantities of younger specimes. Finally, female-female pairs produce tetraploid senesentinels, huge spiky hulks that physically guard younger bogmoths.

* ''WebOriginal/BosunsReturn'': Bogmoths are a clade of insects with a decidedly unusual reproductive strategy. Their grub-like reproductive adults, divided between haploid males[[note]]with a single set of chromosomes[[/note]] and diploid females[[note]]two sets[[/note]] lack external sexual organs, and instead mate by cocooning together and fusing into a single being, with a cluster of eggs being produced from their cocoon; adults that fail to reproduce pupate on their own and reproduce asexually. After the larvae hatch, the metamorphosed fused or singleton adults emerge as a post-adult, sterile stage called the senescent sentinel, or "senesentinel", whose exact form and role depends on the pair or individual that formed them. Solitary males, which don't produce eggs, become small predators that keep their environment clear of pests. Solitary females and male-male pairs produce diploid senesentinels, which are winged and transport larvae and adults around to start new colonies. Male-female pairs produce triploid senesentinels, large predators that serve to both kill off larger threats and to carry around larger quantities of younger specimes. Finally, female-female pairs produce tetraploid senesentinels, huge spiky hulks that physically guard younger bogmoths.
* DistantSequel: The bulk of ''Bosun's Journal'' takes place over a timespan of a hundred and thirty-odd million years, sufficient to see posthuman life on the ship fall into savagery and then animalism, evolve and diversify into various clades, and then produce a number of new sapient species and their own descendants. ''Bosun's Return'' is instead set some time after the first series' DistantEpilogue, placing it comfortably six billion years in the future. By this time, Earth has undergone so many geological, technological, and biological changes that it is almost entirely unrecognizable, rendering it almost an alien world for the expedition sent to its ruins.

* In "Body Shifters Universe", the aliens are human-sized bacteria that shapeshift into whatever form a person finds most attractive, absorbs the DNA and divides into two more shifters who continue to mate with the nonshifter parent.

* The French/Czech animated film ''WesternAnimation/FantasticPlanet'' features the Draags. When the Draags wish to reproduce, they go into a meditative trance, which causes a spherical forcefield bubble to form around a small representation of themselves which then float up into the sky toward their planet's moon. Upon reaching the moon, they land on gigantic, headless Greco-Roman statues, which proceed to dance the waltz (no, really, that's all they do). In all fairness, that could have just been foreplay -- the Oms (humans) did sort of start destroying the statues mid-dance. Also, despite the Draags exhibiting sexual dimorphism (there are Draags with breasts and ones without), all Draags form pink bubbles and land on the female statues. The male statues have blue bubbles which are stated as coming from some other species "from other galaxies". It's implied in one of the history lessons that there have been Draags for longer than there has been meditation, so the entire thing may really just be literally foreplay with aliens before they actually reproduce amongst themselves.

* The French/Czech cartoon ''Animation/FantasticPlanet'' features the Draags. When the Draags wish to reproduce, they go into a meditative trance, which causes a spherical forcefield bubble to form around a small representation of themselves which then float up into the sky toward their planet's moon. Upon reaching the moon, they land on gigantic, headless Greco-Roman statues, which proceed to dance the waltz (no, really, that's all they do). In all fairness, that could have just been foreplay -- the Oms (humans) did sort of start destroying the statues mid-dance. Also, despite the Draags exhibiting sexual dimorphism (there are Draags with breasts and ones without), all Draags form pink bubbles and land on the female statues. The male statues have blue bubbles which are stated as coming from some other species "from other galaxies". It's implied in one of the history lessons that there have been Draags for longer than there has been meditation, so the entire thing may really just be literally foreplay with aliens before they actually reproduce amongst themselves.

** Zeltrons, [[GreenSkinnedSpaceBabe Pink Skinned Space Babes]] that they are, have a sexual attraction to Force-sensitives. If there's one thing the ExpandedUniverse has driven home, it's that a ''lot'' of people have been attracted to Luke even before he married [[HeroesWantRedheads Mara]] -- though for his part, he was [[CelibateHero politely disinterested]] in most of them.

* In Creator/RobertJSawyer's ''Literature/IllegalAlien'', the Tosoks' females have four wombs, so that group sex is the norm for them, with four males impregnating each. Half-siblings are also far more common as a result. Occasionally though just one male inseminates all four of a female's wombs. Their term for God possibly even reflects that -- one human, learning about all this, reflects how they thought the Tosoks were saying "Foremother" but it may have really been "''Four''mother".

* The Xel'naga of ''VideoGame/{{Starcraft}}'' reproduce via two separate species, one with purity of form (psionic power) and one with purity of essence (CannibalismSuperpower), merging together and being granted the essence of the previous generation of Xel'naga. Then they find a new universe, seed it with life, and hibernate in the void between universes until the next two races find them.

** Sex or more specifically semen is required for impregnation as with humans, but succubi can willfully control when they want to get pregnant, obviously useful for a race of nymphomaniacs. Additionally, semen can be absorbed anywhere on the succubus body. Males from any species can conceive with succubi as can orcs (who are otherwise sterile) or succubi utilizing “futa” spells and regardless of the father, the children are always succubi. Succubi using “futa” spells on women of any other species doesn’t work, however. So, a bit like a sexier version of how the [[Franchise/MassEffect asari]] do it.

* Prokaryotes physically merge when mating, in a process called [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_conjugation bacterial conjugation.]] Mating also has little, if anything, to do with reproduction; they reproduce asexually. As a result, traits and genes can jump species and ever across ''kingdoms''. This is why the non-eukaryotic parts of the evolutionary tree are more like a tangle of roots.

** This trope is also deconstructed; this form of reproduction is ''so'' bizarre and impractical that when the life-creating pulsewaves from Vector Sigma started dwindling to a stop, it put the cybertronian race in serious concern about the future of their existence. By the time of the comics, all of the hot spots on Cybertron have stopped creating sparks (there ''are'' hot spots on some [[LostColony metrotitan-created colonies]] but it's not said if they're still working). This, alongside the Great War, has greatly reduced the Cybertronian population, making them an endangered species in galactic terms. [[spoiler:Until the end of ''ComicBook/TheTransformersMoreThanMeetsTheEye''. Between the shell-shocked alternate-universe transplants from Functionist Cybertron and the newborn wave of sparks spawned on Luna-1 by Rung's HeroicSacrifice, eventhe loss of Cybertron and most of its colonies to Unicron's hunger hasn't pushed them that much closer to extinction.]]

** ''ComicBook/WonderWoman1987'': The kreel used to be gender benders as a race, capable of changing their physical sex in their later lives, but the church of the Sangtee Empire started working on making women utterly despised and socially unacceptable to the point that they are killed, enslaved or hidden away until they're able to present themselves as male and the race has relied on cloning to reproduce. Unfortunately for the raging misogynists their natural ability to change sex later in life means that cloning a man might result in a girl.

* ''Film/TheLordOfTheRings'' movies show the über-orc Uruk-Hai growing out of weird pit full of presumably magical mud stired by regular Orcs, the Uruk-Hai is born fully grown and even some times kills the stirer. This is movie-only, as reproduction of Orcs is never established in the books (and is still today subject of a lot of fan debate) but is presumably a way to represent how the Uruk-Hai were created by Saruman.

** In ''Literature/TheGodsThemselves'', the inhabitants of the parallel universe are "Soft ones", photosythetic gas creatures who have three sexes, of which one provides the seed, one the energy for the conception, and one the womb (referred to as Rational/left, Emotional/mid, and Parental/right) which reproduce by temporarily fusing at a molecular level ("melting"). After bearing three children, they "pass on". [[spoiler:permanently fusing into adult "Hard ones", a ruler caste that act as mentors to the Soft ones and pretend they're another species]].

** Jotoki hatch as wormlike, nonsapient tadpoles. As they mature, a group of these combinies into a five-limbed, five-brained alien that achieves higher intelligence through its components collective brainpower but has a habit of arguing with itself.

* The Entians in ''Literature/WizjaLokalna'' are BirdPeople evolved from PlantAliens. They have live birth, but insemination is accomplished by the female breathing in pollen from several males. The effect this has on their culture and their inability to understand humans with their way of reproducing is examined at lenght.

* ''Series/AlienNation'': Three Newcomers are required to make a baby: a male, a female, and a binnaum who catalyzes the impregnated female. Part way through the pregnancy, the female [[MisterSeahorse transfers the fetus to the male]], where it slips inside his belly somehow and attaches an umbilicus to one of the male's nipples. It is the pregnant male who gets to have the wacky BornInAnElevator scene at the end.

* ''Series/AmericanHorrorStoryDoubleFeature'': the [[TheGreys aliens]] are a DyingRace and abduct humans in order to create alien-human hybrids. However, their scientific techniques are quite otherwordly: the biological sex of the host [[MisterSeahorse does not matter]], the pregnancy bears all the typical aspects of a human pregnancy (sensitivity in the chest, strange cravings, morning sickness) except that it is inhumanly fast, lasting for a few days/weeks ; and as for the delivery... Well, as the alien doctors say, [[ChestBurster "life finds its way"...]] (though it should be noted that not all human hosts die upon delivering their babies, some are able to fall pregnant several times without any threat to their life)

** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS37E5TheTsurangaConundrum The Tsuranga Conundrum]]": Among Gifftans both sexes get pregnant, with males giving birth to males and females giving birth to females. We don't see how female pregnancies work, but males are pregnant for only a week, have a "birthing sac" that must be painlessly cut open to have the baby, and the babies are born with two umbilical cords.

** 90% of Taresians are born female. They claim to reproduce by implanting embryos in the wombs of females of other species, but the child will be fully Tersian. The truth is even weirder: They spread a retrovirus that turns males of other species into pseudo-Teresians, and then he's driven to return to the planet where they'll extract his DNA, fatally.
** Female Ocampa go through "Elogium", a puberty-like stage where they can successfully conceive a child (in a growth on their back), but it only happens once. Also leads to a very large bit of FridgeLogic, every Ocampa female can only conceive once, and multiples births seem to be rare to non-existent... so if every female Ocampa can only produce one child in their entire life... how is the species not extinct already? The FridgeLogic factor of Ocampan reproduction goes far further than that: Despite only being able to reproduce once and only living for nine years, the females have constantly engorged breasts. The reason why humans have breasts and dogs don't is because we can reproduce whenever we feel like it -- there is no biological reason why they should grow breasts a good ''four'' years before they can conceive. Secondly, they reproduce through a bizarre system of massaging feet and gluing their hands together ''for an entire week'' using a thick, sticky mucus -- in the wild no creature could do this without being eaten by predators. This would logically mean both the males and females have nothing between their legs and are around about the same size -- if this was real life and not being played by human actors and actresses the only way to determine a male from a female would be those anomalous breasts.
*** The "one mating = extinction" dilemma, at least, can be resolved if Ocampa are a sperm-sequestering species, such that one mating provides the male genetic contribution for multiple pregnancies over the female's lifetime. If said subsequent pregnancies happen in quick succession, the constantly-engorged breasts would make sense too: they don't have time to shrink between babies. However the only example we have of an Ocampan family is the alternate future from [[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS3E20BeforeAndAfter one episode]] where Kes had one daughter in her lifetime and the daughter also had only one child.
** The J'naii are supposed to be genderless (although they all look very similar to female Humans). However, nothing about J'naii reproduction makes any sense, as the script muddles together three totally different kinds of genderlessness. The asexual cast to their society would make sense if they reproduced by cloning, but they do reproduce sexually, in which case being a OneGenderRace should make their interactions ''more'' sexual, not less. The persecution of those who prefer a gender would make sense for a race of hermaphrodites (where everyone is both sexes simultaneously) but Soren describes their sex act as a precisely symmetrical affair (i.e. the J'naii are all one single sex—they're isogametes.) An isogamete preferring one sex over another makes about as much sense as a Cyclops preferring one eye over another. [[spoiler:It makes more sense after it's revealed that they weren't always this way, and slowly evolved to change. As such, having a vestige of their old sexual habits and retaining these preferences, in however small, tangential a way, does make a lot of sense.]]

* The ComicBook/XMen have fought The Brood, a race of intelligent {{Captain Ersatz}}es of the creature from ''Franchise/{{Alien}}''. A human implanted with a Brood egg will eventually be physically (and mentally) transformed into a Brood member, and will retain any genetic-based abilities (e.g. mutant powers) the victim had.
* In Creator/PhilFoglio's ''ComicBook/BuckGodotZapGunForHire'''s "The Gallimaufry" storyline, a male alien Pog member named Qvakk states that he loved Oort, another male of his species/race, and was "gonna take him home, make lots of eggs".
* Transformers in IDW's ''Transformers'' comic have a truly bizarre reproductive cycle that doesn't even involve sex of any kind. There are "hot spots" on Cybertron and its moons where [[OurSoulsAreDifferent sparks]] form and are then "ignited" by an energy pulse from Vector Sigma, the life-giving core of Cybertron. This is known as 'forging'. Once the sparks are lit they are carefully removed from the ground and placed within a special kind of incubator known as the 'protoform', which it merges with. It then begins to take a form usually based on the person whom it has the most contact with as a protoform, and rapidly begins to develop the parts it needs for its future alt-mode. This all takes less than an hour, and the development from 'sparkling' into a full-size adult takes about two weeks.
** They can also artificially reproduce through "cold construction," which [[spoiler:supposedly]] involves surgically removing a portion of the spark from another cybertronian and using it to grow a new one. There was much [[FantasticRacism bigotry]] towards cold constructed bots in Cybertron's old days (to the point of there being a Cybertronian apartheid) as they were seen as blasphemy towards [[RobotReligion Primus]] but it's more or less died out after the Great War.
** Forging is also shown to have some strange limitations on it. For example, following the departure of most of the Thirteen Primes, sparks from Cybertron and its moons just...stopped forging more than one assigned sex, leading to a Cybertron so dominated by male-presenting robots that post-war some of them have trouble remembering that there ''are'' feminine pronouns. The thing where artists would put in the occasional {{Fembot}} in flashbacks and pre-War stories was eventually resolved by having them all be transgender (and [[AuthorsSavingThrow frantically patching]] the parts of Arcee's background that had UnfortunateImplications to lock her in as a proud trans woman whose murderous rampage was related to Jhiaxus's terrible aftercare). Some of the colonies have their own quirks: Camiens have blue [[AlienBlood energon]] instead of pink due to different spark frequencies, Devisiens are born as twins who form a combined altmode, Eukariens all have beast forms and so on.
** This trope is also deconstructed; this form of reproduction is so bizarre and impractical that when the life-creating pulsewaves from Vector Sigma started dwindling to a stop, it put the cybertronian race in serious concern about the future of their existence. By the time of the comics all of the hot spots on Cybertron have stopped creating sparks (there ''are'' hot spots on some [[LostColony metrotitan-created colonies]] but it's not said if they're still working). This, alongside the Great War, has greatly reduced the Cybertronian population, making them an endangered species in galactic terms. [[spoiler:Until the end of ''ComicBook/TheTransformersMoreThanMeetsTheEye''. Between the shell-shocked alternate-universe transplants from Functionist Cybertron and the newborn wave of sparks spawned on Luna-1 by Rung's HeroicSacrifice, eventhe loss of Cybertron and most of its colonies to Unicron's hunger hasn't pushed them that much closer to extinction.]]
** We later learn in ''More Than Meets The Eye'' that cold construction [[spoiler:actually involves taking essence from the Matrix (an ancient artifact) and using it to grow sparks in a lab, making transformer biology even ''weirder''.]]

* The [[WidgetSeries French/Czech cartoon]] ''Animation/FantasticPlanet'' features the Draags. When the Draags wish to reproduce, they go into a meditative trance, which causes a spherical forcefield bubble to form around a small representation of themselves which then float up into the sky toward their planet's moon. Upon reaching the moon, they land on gigantic, headless Greco-Roman statues, which proceed to dance the waltz (no, really, that's all they do). In all fairness, that could have just been foreplay -- the Oms (humans) did sort of start destroying the statues mid-dance. Also, despite the Draags exhibiting sexual dimorphism (there are Draags with breasts and ones without), all Draags form pink bubbles and land on the female statues. The male statues have blue bubbles which are stated as coming from some other species "from other galaxies". It's implied in one of the history lessons that there have been Draags for longer than there has been meditation, so the entire thing may really just be literally foreplay with aliens before they actually reproduce amongst themselves.

* ''VideoGame/{{Myst}}'': One of Atrus's journals describe an other-Agely creature called a "ting", which seals itself in a rock crevice, from which a bunch of lizard-like "solastings" emerge a couple of months later. It's unstated how the solastings give rise to the next generation of tings.

** Seamen start out as '''Mushroomers''', a larval form that more closely resemble floating eyeballs with tiny tails for locomotion. The only way for Mushroomers to survive after hatching is to be ingested by a host creature -- in this game's case, a nautilus -- which they feed on from the inside out before [[ChestBurster bursting out of the host's body]], fully formed in their next form...

*** The only exception is Manaphy, which will always produce an Egg conatining a Phione (which cannot evolve into Manaphy).

** Nihilego, an [[EldritchAbomination Ultra Beast]], does not breed like regular Pokemon, but [[https://i.imgur.com/wMYYOh2.jpg Concept art]] shows that it breeds by spawning polyps that grow into larve and then adults. Basically it reproduces like a real jellyfish. Other Ultra Beasts may have other methods of propagating that are different from the standard "male-and-female produce and egg in a daycare", such as Celesteela sprouting from the ground in its home world.
* ''Trials in Tainted Space'' is an [[PornWithPlot erotic]] SpaceOpera which has the player boldly going to new planets to earn their fortune while BoldlyComing into every alien they meet. While almost every alien has average human genitals the Nyrea have some thing far different. The males lack penises, instead they have sperm sacs inside a cavity in their hips. The [[OneHeadTaller larger]] female uses her spiked ovipositor, a organ that looks like a horse penis with spines at the tip, to rend the sperm sacs and suck up the sperm to fertilize her eggs. If the female is an alpha of her group, she will make a lesser female gestate her eggs. Yeah.

* In "Body Shifters Universe", the aliens are human sized bacteria that shapeshift into whatever form a person finds most attractive, absorbs the DNA and divides into two more shifters who continue to mate with the nonshifter parent.

** [[http://scp-wiki.net/scp-150 SCP-150 ("The Prosthetic Parasite")]] burrows into a human body and changes the nearest limb (arm or leg) into SCP-150 tissue covered with a chitinous exoskeleton. The victim is mind controlled into removing the limb, which then hatches out more SCP-150 larvae.

** [[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-695 SCP-695 ("Eels")]]: Juvenile SCP-695 perform a OrificeInvasion on a male human, grow to adult size and lay eggs. They then force the host to rape a female human and infect her with the eggs. The eggs will grow into juveniles, which will leave the female's body through either an OrificeEvacuation or performing a ChestBurster out of her abdomen.

** Dr. Zoidberg's species lay eggs into the ocean and then die off en masse. He's only lived so long because no female seeking a mate will even look at him. This doesn't prevent Zoidberg having a JewishMother-equivalent relative, or introducing himself as "Norm and Sam and Sadie's boy." This is kind of FridgeBrilliance; since only the most disgusting and pathetic members of his race survive to raise the young, who do you think's going to be teaching them their standards?

* "Literature/DoesABeeCare" describes an alien whose life-cycle is going to a planet, infiltrating it and influencing the growth of science and technology, and hitching a ride from one of their starships to fertilize other planets. The kicker is that ''all this is done unconsciously on instinct.''
->[[spoiler:The ovum spilt him forth at length and he took the shape of a man and lived among men and protected himself against men. And his one purpose was to arrange to have men travel along a path that would end with a ship and within the ship a hole and within the hole, himself.]]