So, here’s an interesting little fun fact for y’all.
We all know Vulcan blood is green. It’s been like that since TOS, and the explanation we get is that their blood is copper based instead of iron based like humans, which is partly what gives us that red. Iron is what allows us to transport oxygen throughout our body.
When copper oxidizes, it becomes a green color. That’s my guess as to why they chose such a rich green color. Here’s the fun part, though. We do actually have life forms on Earth with copper based blood.
Quite a few deep sea creatures (squid, mollusks, octopi) and some kinds of land dwelling have copper based blood! Instead of hemoglobin, they have hemocyanin. Their blood is blue, and like, a pretty solid blue, to be honest. Some mollusks actually have been beneficial in medical research due to their blood, but that’s a whole other thing.
Here’s another fun fact, hemocyanin is actually less efficient than hemoglobin. It doesn’t transport oxygen as well, but, it’s more effective at working in cold climates. That’s why these deep sea creatures have it. It’s an evolutionary thing.
Granted, that doesn’t make sense for the arid desert dwelling species of the Vulcans, but I just thought this was fun. There’s a couple species on Earth (skinks in New Guinea) with green blood, but they do have hemoglobin. They just use biliverdin (the cause of green in bruising) differently and don’t process it out of them. Biliverdin in humans gets processed into bilirubin, and then taken out of the body as both are toxic in high concentrations. High bilirubin counts are the cause for jaundice. Right now we don’t actually know why the skinks are able to keep high concentrates of biliverdin in their body.
I just thought this was interesting, thinking about how Vulcan blood works. I think about alien anatomy a lot, what bases can cause different colors, the alternate ways internal organs could be laid out in a humanoid, what other organs we could have. It’s fascinating, truly.
areudirty
titsay
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
