Alternate Artificial Selection

What you need my creative friend is tamed dolphins, sharks, and whales which people ride on! The foolish Ottomans will never see the invasion force now!:D
 
What would the ants, termites, grubs and/or worms provide us with? Bees give us honey, but I can't really see what termites or worms could give us. Unless eating them became massively popular. It's certainly a neat idea, though.

The advantage with bees is they concentrate their food into a central location, and their food supply can be removed without taking the insects with it. Most other insects are separate male-female pairings, so you may get lots of infants, but have to organize the edible infant stage into a single location yourself.

Bees provided a useful pollination method for plants, so even gathering their food the bees pulled double duty. They also try to remove their wastes from the hive, keeping themselves and the food supply clean.

Mealworms might work, where over generations the people would consume the smallest of the mealworm larvae, so only the largest and fattest ones survive. Killing the early pupae would encourage the mealworms to get larger before pupating to become adults. This provides a form of natural selection, so you get bigger and fatter mealworms surviving each generation (about half a year per generation). Unfortunately, they have to be fed (oats and some veggies/fruit), instead of gathering their own food, and don't deal with their own wastes. Still, since they don't fly, they don't use as many calories for movement, so all their food can go into making the mealworm larvae biger and fatter.

A better option would be the honey ants. Ants can be fed on almost anything, so they would double as house cleaning and food supply. If you can figure a way to keep the honey ants in a separate container so you can retrieve the ones that are fattened, without starving the colony, this should work nicely. Ant nests also try to remove their wastes, keeping their nest clean too.

The fun part is when the hive adapts by making smaller honey ants, or in the case of steady food supply, stops making honey ants at all. This will be a fun thing to engineer into the honey ants, since their queens likely live longer than half a year, and the lower potential genetic differentiation (only a few different gene samples from the queens, vs dozens from the various mealworm parents).
 

King James IX

The advantage with bees is they concentrate their food into a central location, and their food supply can be removed without taking the insects with it. Most other insects are separate male-female pairings, so you may get lots of infants, but have to organize the edible infant stage into a single location yourself.

Bees provided a useful pollination method for plants, so even gathering their food the bees pulled double duty. They also try to remove their wastes from the hive, keeping themselves and the food supply clean.

Mealworms might work, where over generations the people would consume the smallest of the mealworm larvae, so only the largest and fattest ones survive. Killing the early pupae would encourage the mealworms to get larger before pupating to become adults. This provides a form of natural selection, so you get bigger and fatter mealworms surviving each generation (about half a year per generation). Unfortunately, they have to be fed (oats and some veggies/fruit), instead of gathering their own food, and don't deal with their own wastes. Still, since they don't fly, they don't use as many calories for movement, so all their food can go into making the mealworm larvae biger and fatter.

A better option would be the honey ants. Ants can be fed on almost anything, so they would double as house cleaning and food supply. If you can figure a way to keep the honey ants in a separate container so you can retrieve the ones that are fattened, without starving the colony, this should work nicely. Ant nests also try to remove their wastes, keeping their nest clean too.

The fun part is when the hive adapts by making smaller honey ants, or in the case of steady food supply, stops making honey ants at all. This will be a fun thing to engineer into the honey ants, since their queens likely live longer than half a year, and the lower potential genetic differentiation (only a few different gene samples from the queens, vs dozens from the various mealworm parents).

Very nice ideas, there. That could definitely work (in a TL, I'm not endorsing people going at anthills with straws.:p)
 
Fast Emu cavalry outrunning horsemen !
Aren't two-legged critters inherently slower than four-legged ones?:confused::confused:

If not, I'd still say emus are a bit small. Ostriches, too. So what about the elephant bird being more commonplace? Or crossbred with ostriches?
More easily farmable fish?
I believe that's called tilapia. Or you could use the Chinese system: put them in manmade ponds, feed them with captive insects (Chinese use silkworms), & catch them with trained birds...
 
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Maybe someone notices that hyena milk is extremely rich and decides to try to breed them for it, which sounds expensive, except that they can eat half-spoiled meat and bones, which would reduce the cost.
 
Aren't two-legged critters inherently slower than four-legged ones?:confused::confused:

Only as a general rule, though.

A couple of examples:

Ostriches can run faster than perhaps 80% of mammals.
Kangaroos can hop faster than elephants can run, and can move at the same speeds as deer.

Added by Edit: And, elephant birds would certainly not be able to cross-breed with ostriches.
 
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I think it has something to do with the breathing, bipedal animals don't contort their bodies while running nearly as much as quadrupedal ones, and so can maintain relatively high respiratory efficiency.
 
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