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So I'm reading Sunken Empires, I'm thinking about my homebrew, and I'm dwelling on certain details, and I get to wondering:
What do merfolk, sea elves, and all the other civilized aquatic races do about their waste?
Seriously.
Air as a medium is one thing. Sure we drive by an open sewer sometimes and we gag and a minute later the inside of our car is minty fresh again.
Water, NOT SO MUCH.
And where do you go to, well, go? Has anyone really approached this issue before?
Because nothing ruins the exotic wonder of an underwater locale and culture quite like realizing that the water around you has suddenly gotten warmer and that the friendly mermaid next to you suspiciously seems more relaxed. >:(
My big concern about the "hometown" of my homebrew was that the half that was above water and populated by land dwellers would have to come up with a solution to their waste problem that didn't involve dumping it into the ocean, which isn't an option because (A: it's a fishing village and that's just bad news overall, and B: they'd be dumping it right on top of roughly a third of the town's population, the sea dwellers). But then the question inevitably came up concerning what the heck the sea dwellers do about their waste.
If you're talking about sewerage within a underwater town, the currents and tides would carry it off to be broken down by enzymes and bacteria.
The matter of a surface village dumping their collected waste into the water in which a third of the occupants live, then that's a bigger problem. I'd say it would take a while for it to break down and would more than likely force the underwater villagers to make Fort saves vs disease, IMHO.
So I'm reading Sunken Empires, I'm thinking about my homebrew, and I'm dwelling on certain details, and I get to wondering:
What do merfolk, sea elves, and all the other civilized aquatic races do about their waste?
Seriously.
Air as a medium is one thing. Sure we drive by an open sewer sometimes and we gag and a minute later the inside of our car is minty fresh again.
Water, NOT SO MUCH.
And where do you go to, well, go? Has anyone really approached this issue before?
My big concern about the "hometown" of my homebrew was that the half that was above water and populated by land dwellers would have to come up with a solution to their waste problem that didn't involve dumping it into the ocean, which isn't an option because (A: it's a fishing village and that's just bad news overall, and B: they'd be dumping it right on top of roughly a third of the town's population, the sea dwellers). But then the question inevitably came up concerning what the heck the sea dwellers do about their waste.
I've not thought about it before.
Perhaps merfolk have evolved so that their wastes are considerably heavier than water, so that they naturally sink to the ocean floor. There they might be buried under the sand, or recycled into fertilizer for undersea farms. Civilized merfolk would have restrooms like civilized humans do; these would usually be at the lowest levels of their buildings where.
Above ground, people have dumps, middens, and landfills. This is where they put their garbage. If they have any sense at all, they build these things down-wind of their homes, so the wind blows the smell away from where the people live and work and play.
Underwater there are winds too. We call them currents. There are also thermal climes, places where there is almost a physical wall with one "climate" on one side and another "climate" on the other side. A scuba diver can sit on one side of these thermal climes and be in comfortable water, and stick his hand out, across the boundary, into very cold water, almost freezing cold (or at least it seems like it). Currents don't drift across the boundaries between climes (and so neither do smells or other foulness).
So, any undersea race would take advantage of thermal climes like this (much like above ground races take advantage of cliffs and rivers to provide barriers). It would be natural for them, as natural as it is for an eagle to use updrafts to gain altitude the easy way.
Now, you also asked about surface dwellers dumping their garbage where they fish. Poppycock. Right here on earth are thousands of perfect examples where we have fishing communites who get nearly 100% of their daily subsistance from lakes, rivers, and oceans, and yet, the same communities dump their sewage right into those same bodies of water.
Fact is, most fish just don't care, unless the pollutants are so toxic that the fish (and other food sources) are dying from toxicity. Short of that, sewage actually attracts certain bacteria, and the microorganisms that feed on it, and the small critters that feed on those, and the bigger critters that eat the small critters, and then we humans catch and eat the bigger critters.
Ergo, sewage = more food, not less.
And finally, you asked about the nice friendly top-siders being courteous enough to their soggy neighbors not to dump garbage in their homes.
Again I say Poppycock. Ever go to your friendly neighborhood city council meetings, wherever you live here on Earth? City planners argue endlessly over whose constituency they can drop their garbage on, and eventually, it gets dropped in someone's figurative back yard. It's the nature of the beast.
Still, we live in crowded times. Not so much in D&D worlds. So maybe the top-siders really do care about it "polite pollution". You're the DM, so they care if you say they do. But that simply means they ask their fishy neighbors and do the same thing they do - dump on the other side of a thermal cilme, or down-current from the submerged communities, or both.
And if all that fails, they buy a few otyugh eggs at the Absalom market and raise their own little community of garbage disposals.
I think one difference between merfolk communities and city council meetings, is that if the merfolk are disatisfied with the decision, they might make their displeasure known in some interesting way.
Amphibious creatures like sahuagin might be especially martial about not getting sewage dumped on them. Merfolk might use magic curses and spells to get their point across
There is a good point about sewage being a source of nutrients for the ecosystem. I think the human race in the real world may be running into problems if they try to isolate their waste, because that could lead to shortages of vital elements like phosphorous. The atoms need to be circulated through the ecosystem.
On the other hand, parasites can easily get circulated along with the atoms. So you do not want to live where they are dumping human wastes into the same water that they are drinking and bathing in, unless you like cholera.
In a fantasy ecology, the merfolk will be resistant to must human diseases and vice versa, but some diseases and parasites would jump hosts as they do between species in the real world. I don't think this would happen as frequently as between land animals, but it would probably affect the merfolk moreso than the humans, who would be constantly introducing their aquatic neighbors to newly mutated parasites from distant lands or from other terrestrial species.
So I would expect the merfolk to avoid direct exposure to waste from human communities, if they can. Not just human waste, but waste from farm animals would also be unwelcome.
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explained why the native Americans were hurt so much more from European diseases than the Africans and Asians were, and why the Europeans were not much affected by diseases from America.
The basic reason is that the Europeans had more exposure to germs from across Eurasia, from a wider variety of species. The Africans also had considerable contact with these these, and had their own tropical diseases to worry about. The Americans had fewer animal species with which they had close contact, and the combination of sparser population and geographic isolation (it's hard to get across Arizona without modern transportation) meant fewer opportunities to share germs.
I think in a fantasy world, there would be a similar situation between the land folk and the aquatic folk. The land folk would probably have more contacts from distant lands, more opportunities to exchange germs with distant lands, and more species of animals in intimate contact with their lives where germs could mutate.
In this scenario, the merfolk would probably get exposed to enough pathogens so that they wouldn't be decimated like the Native Americans were. In fact, they would probably not get decimated by plague as often as the land dwellers. But they would quickly learn to avoid areas where land dwellers concentrate, they way most people in the real world like the idea of avoiding areas where tropical diseases are common.
They could be like Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger force and simply have a 100% efficient metabolism. ;)
"It's like Thunderdome in here only two men enter, no men leave."
Also, they might have restrooms like on the space shuttle. If they go in or near something with a vacuum effect, it would sleep up any excrement along with the surrounding water and wisk it away. In this case, their plumbing would need to be much the opposite of our own. i.e. negative pressure in the pipes to create suction.
Instead of flushing when they are finished, they turn their toilets on before they start and then shut it off after everything is cleared away. At the tail end of their sewer system is the pumping station that evacuates waste downstream.
Also, they might have restrooms like on the space shuttle. If they go in or near something with a vacuum effect, it would sleep up any excrement along with the surrounding water and wisk it away. In this case, their plumbing would need to be much the opposite of our own. i.e. negative pressure in the pipes to create suction.
Oooh, I like this. How about they have a little maelstrom just down-current from their homes? Heck, it could be small enough that the surface folk don't even know it's there...
Another possibility is that since we're not talking about real creatures, and I can't really see how mermaids could evolve from hominids in the first place, perhaps they don't even have the basic chordate structure of mouth, digestive tract, anus. They could excrete waste materials through respiration or perspiration in a manner that is no more noticeable than the mammalian tendency to produce 'greenhouse gases'. Or they could regurgitate wastes, although this presents the same set of problems that the original poster pointed out.
There is even a species of lizard that disposes of excess salt by sneezing. An undersea race could do something similar, perhaps even disposing of nitrogen and carbon wastes that way. Perhaps, since most of these races are portrayed as someone amphibious, they dispose of their wastes above the water. That could explain why they evolved the ability to breathe air.
Or it could all go into the Ethereal Plane.
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Again I say Poppycock. Ever go to your friendly neighborhood city council meetings, wherever you live here on Earth? City planners argue endlessly over whose constituency they can drop their garbage on, and eventually, it gets dropped in someone's figurative back yard. It's the nature of the beast.
Not an option for this village. The lifesblood of the town goes through the merfolk, and due to the town history anyone suggesting dumping on their aquatic neighbors would likely be in for an in-town hall beating from the local land dwellers(and considering the high population of pugilistic sea dogs AND orcs/half-orcs and how many of those converge on a Venn diagram, this could be bad news for said waste disposal maerick).
But yeah, this brainstorming is as much about making the underwater realm palatable for visiting surface dwellers as much as for the native people.
Another possibility is that since we're not talking about real creatures, and I can't really see how mermaids could evolve from hominids in the first place, perhaps they don't even have the basic chordate structure of mouth, digestive tract, anus. They could excrete waste materials through respiration or perspiration in a manner that is no more noticeable than the mammalian tendency to produce 'greenhouse gases'.
I'm starting to lean towards this for certain types of aquatic humanoids(merfolk, my octopus people, my crab people) though I'm probably going to wind up heading back to dealing with the original problem for others(sea elves, aventi).
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They could be like Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger force and simply have a 100% efficient metabolism. ;)
"It's like Thunderdome in here only two men enter, no men leave."
Also, they might have restrooms like on the space shuttle. If they go in or near something with a vacuum effect, it would sleep up any excrement along with the surrounding water and wisk it away. In this case, their plumbing would need to be much the opposite of our own. i.e. negative pressure in the pipes to create suction.
Instead of flushing when they are finished, they turn their toilets on before they start and then shut it off after everything is cleared away. At the tail end of their sewer system is the pumping station that evacuates waste downstream.
NICE.
Well collection of waste in packs made from sea plant leves and burying it to fertilize the sea plant farms looks like a standard agricultural practice.
The undesireable waste could go to nearest deep chasm to keep the Soggoth occupied with shinies ;)
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explained why the native Americans were hurt so much more from European diseases than the Africans and Asians were, and why the Europeans were not much affected by diseases from America.
The basic reason is that the Europeans had more exposure to germs from across Eurasia, from a wider variety of species. The Africans also had considerable contact with these these, and had their own tropical diseases to worry about. The Americans had fewer animal species with which they had close contact, and the combination of sparser population and geographic isolation (it's hard to get across Arizona without modern transportation) meant fewer opportunities to share germs.
I think in a fantasy world, there would be a similar situation between the land folk and the aquatic folk. The land folk would probably have more contacts from distant lands, more opportunities to exchange germs with distant lands, and more species of animals in intimate contact with their lives where germs could mutate.
In this scenario, the merfolk would probably get exposed to enough pathogens so that they wouldn't be decimated like the Native Americans were. In fact, they would probably not get decimated by plague as often as the land dwellers. But they would quickly learn to avoid areas where land dwellers concentrate, they way most people in the real world like the idea of avoiding areas where tropical diseases are common.
Oceans are big places - bigger then the land is ;)
If anything, the merfolk would be the heavily resistant ones infecting the land walkers ;)
It's a bit of a wash though, since most bacteria that would've infected the humans would either 1) not pass through the water, or 2) the merfolk would be immune due to lol merfolk.
So long as the merfolk live somewhere with currents, which is everywhere in the ocean, any waste would be carried away without much trouble.
I mean, consider the ocean already. Dolphins poop in it. So do sharks. So does every other creature in it. There's not a huge problem.
Go reef diving sometime. There are schools of tiny little fish that live to scavenge whatever is dropped in the water. A mermaid starts munching on a lobster, the little fish will come around like sparrows to someone at a sidewalk cafe. Decide you don't want the rest of your lobster? Toss it out and some smaller creatures will happily carry it away.
Okay, so you want the mermaids to be pretty and romantic and not crap in the middle of a conversation to then have the crap devoured by cleaner wrasse. So come up with an approximation of what humans do. Humans in the middle ages and even up to recently had privacy screens and chamber pots behind them. In merfolk cities, I'd expect some strategically placed fan corals and some rocks that are the home to little crabs and a few sea sponges to filter the urine.
Now if we're talking about other waste of a society. Okay, so what do mermaids do with their busted combs, broken tridents, and those hideously uncomfortable-looking clamshell bikinis that are out of fashion or too kinky to be seen with in front of one's parents? Fact is, if you toss most anything on the sea floor, pretty soon it's going to become part of a coral reef. So I expect that merfolk cities are built with a lot of discarded grot with coral to encrust it.
However, there are also likely a lot of nomadic merfolk encampments. The easiest way to deal with a certain amount of garbage is to leave when it gets too much and let scavengers tidy it up after you leave.
Just to point out something about the Jared Diamond reference above:
The human immune system is a complex beast. Having had contact with many sorts of microbes is not a prerequisite to mounting an effective defense when faced with something new. However, every person has its own immunological setup. Basically, we each have two bands of "immune elements", one from dad and one from mum. Depending on which elements we have, we are variously protected when faced with a specific infection. This has the effect that the diversity of immune setups in the population gives the level to which the population is resistant to a disease.
The native americans, on every part of the american continents, are believed to have all come from one single family that made the traverse across to where Canada is today. This is what's called a bottleneck, i.e. the entire population has more or less the same immune elements, and a very low diversity. Since they had a good level of resistance to the diseases they were faced with in America, they survived, but when the europeans came to visit they brought some diseases that nobody in the entire population had good resistance to. The classic example is measles.
However, it would be unfair to say the europeans came back unscathed. They brought syphilis to Europe, a disease that likely has shaped more of western civilization than most understand, and that was incurable until the advent of antibiotics.
What do merfolk, sea elves, and all the other civilized aquatic races do about their waste?
Easy, they dump it on all that useless land. Now you've got political problems, and adventuring can begin.
Perhaps this is merely my brain suffering terminal mountain dew poisoning, but can you imagine the horror of diarrhoea in an underwater environment?
So I'm reading Sunken Empires,
And where do you go to, well, go? Has anyone really approached this issue before?
Because nothing ruins the exotic wonder of an underwater locale and culture quite like realizing that the water around you has suddenly gotten warmer and that the friendly mermaid next to you suspiciously seems more relaxed. >:(
My big concern about the "hometown" of my homebrew was that the half that was above water and populated by land dwellers would have to come up with a solution to their waste problem that didn't involve dumping it into the ocean, which isn't an option because (A: it's a fishing village and that's just bad news overall, and B: they'd be dumping it right on top of roughly a third of the town's population, the sea dwellers). But then the question inevitably came up concerning what the heck the sea dwellers do about their waste.
Thanks, for all the lovely new images floating around my head. I'd never really thought about it before. (Really good subject, seriously.)
My opinion -- if it's a poor fishing village, they probably just dump their waste in the river or bay. They wouldn't have the resources for another solution. And fishing villages have done exactly that for a long time. The sea-folk would be used to it. And if the volume of waste is small compared to the stream/river/tidal flow it won't be a huge problem. Most coastal ecologies are set up to take advantage of any nutrients naturally flowing from the land.
A larger land community, with a larger volume of waste might need to find another way to dispose of it. Piping it farther off shore away from the sea-folk community as suggested above is a good solution. As is the ever popular otyugh --> fertilizer sewer system. If you really want to go crazy, set up some sort of Gate to someplace you don't like or care about.
A community of seafolk, as suggested above might not care about it, much like fish as suggested above. An aquatic cultures mores might be quite different from ours in this respect. That's a great angle to explore. If you want seafolk to be squeamish about it, they might just require you swim a minimum distance away or to specific locations where currents will carry the waste away.
About evolving immunity to diseases and parasites:
This is a complicated issue with many factors. It is not only the size of the area, but also how much contact there is across parts of it. The oceans are huge, but how much contact do merfolk have with distant merfolk and other creatures on the other side of the ocean. Probably not much, although creatures at the end of a current flow would probably have more resistances than creatures at the beginning of the flow.
It is also easier for a parasite to jump from one creature to another of the same species, which is why a lot of terrestrial species have evolved ways to keep away from their excrement by burying it or going somewhere else to deposit it. In humans, this led to development of latrines and then private bathrooms for sanitation purposes.
Merfolk might evolve similarily. Early on they might look for currents that flush the wastes away. Biologically, their wastes might evolve so as to sink or float away (I prefer the theory that they sink amid seaweed beds that can take advantage of the nutrients to provide benefits to the mermaid community). They'd probably have specialized fish hanging around to eat any parasitic larvae trying to get out of the latrine area.
When siting a community, they would not want to be downcurrent from an existing community. Their spellcasters might even use magic to shift the currents to their advantage.
Another option, if they have specialized breeds of seaweed to process waste products, would be to plant them as a screen to protect their communities from rivers and other sources of pollution.
Perhaps this is merely my brain suffering terminal mountain dew poisoning, but can you imagine the horror of diarrhoea in an underwater environment?
That is no horror... the real horror would be the dysentery, which offers all the niceties of diarrhoea with the addition of disease transmitted by contaminated water.
I've got it! it all goes to an orb of annihilation!
Well, it depends on how much you really want to be realistic. Land creatures evolved from water creatures in many ways.
One of these changes is that they separate waste into two forms... liquid and solid. They also developed a method of storage and only excrete a few times a day.
Fish, and many other forms of aquatic life, only have one "area" of excretion and no method to "hold it in" for the most part. So they are always bringing fluid in and at the same time sending fluid out. Solid waste is caught up in the flow and pops out once it is done being processed along with the liquid.
So you can come up with an elaborate method to deal with it... or just say they are used to small doses all the time and build up a resistance. The tides take care of the big problems over time.
Perhaps this is merely my brain suffering terminal mountain dew poisoning, but can you imagine the horror of diarrhoea in an underwater environment?That is no horror... the real horror would be the dysentery, which offers all the niceties of diarrhoea with the addition of disease transmitted by contaminated water.
It would effectively be a self-perpetuating cycle of pain, misery and suffering....
And since I haven't seen any aquatic races with disease resistance in their entries, it would be best to say that most Aquatic Races would probably have chambers in their homes or areas where such business takes place, areas able to be sealed off from the larger environment where the merfolk can come in, place the right openings against a chamberpot, do their business, slide the lid on and go back to what they were doing. For the sake of arguments, we'll assume the chamber pots are ceramic with lids attached by hinges of the same, fired and sealed to avoid breaking down under constant contact with water.
A short time later the people in charge of keeping the lavitory clean swim in, wearing fine cloth/seal-fur masks over their mouths and gills, scoop up the sealed chamber pots, carry them out deeper to sea and string the chamber pots up a series of ropes which allows them to drop the pots into a strong current that would take the fecal matter (an fyi, Fish release almost completely solid wastes, little liquid matter) far away from the community and thus hopefully also ensure that no giant scavengers hang around the community, preying upon it's citizens.
Reeling the chamber pots back in, the merfolk have not only removed the waste from the community but the items can now be cleaned out with a handful of sediment used as a scouring agent to ensure the chamber pots remain clean and can be taken back to be used again.
In regards to the Merfolk/Other Aquatic Races using their own fecal matter as fertilizer ... doubtful. They would know the dangers of keeping your own waste nearby in an environment where the medium (in this case, water) is extremely useful for viruses or parasites trying to spread to other hosts, and if they did actually go to the length of fertilizing their crops, it would be with dead material such as fish-bones, rotting plant material and other inedible 'waste', again kept a fair way away from the community at large.
Since these would invariably draw scavengers, I could see a Merfolk community encouraging diminutive and tiny predatory fish such as Oscars and the like to take up residence in their kelp-farms while the Merfolk who looked after the 'farms' would in turn drive out larger predators and even worse, larger herbivors and scavengers, much as farmers must drive away herbivors from their own crops on the surface.
What do merfolk, sea elves, and all the other civilized aquatic races do about their waste?
Easy, they dump it on all that useless land. Now you've got political problems, and adventuring can begin.
Ha I can see some PCs standing there as some merfolk heave themselves up out of the water onto the beach, take a big steaming dump, and then crawl back into the water. "What the heck!?!?"