Seeding The Planet

As well as exploiting its mineral resources, when the first plans for Loki were drawn up it was realised that money could be made in other different ways. The seas and the land were untouched and empty, meaning that it could be used as a vast factory farm. The green meadows could support billions of cattle, and the seas trillions of fish. But before the large vertebrates could be introduced the caretaking staff needed to first be established.

It is invertebrates that keep the terrestrial world moving, their activities forming the bedrock upon which the vertebrates can live. And so, many species were introduced to keep the planet’s new ecosystem happy. Worms, fungi, beetles, nematodes and their kin kept the soil aerated and recycled nutrients. In the ocean zooplankton, copepods, marine worms and their kin fulfilled a similar niche. Bivalve oysters also joined them, establishing colonies to later be harvested for their flesh and shells.

Now that the ecosystem was relatively stable, the first vertebrate species was introduced: Clupea harengus, the Atlantic herring. A fast breeding, hardy and delicious fish, this was to be the one fish species on the planet, the entire ocean used as one vast fish farm. The accountants ran the numbers and worked out that it would be possible to harvest millions of tonnes of herring at a time, with the population still being sustainable due to their sheer numbers and lack of predators. No freshwater fish were introduced, as there were no plans to farm the rivers and lakes yet; perhaps in the future they would be stocked for recreational fishing, but for now their purpose was to hydrate the cattle that would soon be arriving. As such, they were seeded with freshwater plants and invertebrates to keep the channels healthy and clean, but little beyond that.

With the herring breeding happily and the ecosystems functioning, now was the time to construct the human settlements and bring in livestock, the final step for turning Loki into a fully functioning (and profitable) agricultural world.

The final step never happened. Instead the future of Loki took a very different direction indeed.