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Porgs in 'Star Wars' could cause an ecological collapse, according to actual scientists

[Photo by: Lucasfilm]

We all fell in love with porgs from the moment we first saw them in clips for Star Wars: The Last Jedi—the adorable little sea birds from planet Ahch-To are so small, fluffy and cute. But could porgs actually lead to the downfall of the Star Wars galaxy if they were introduced into a non-native environment? Some researchers seem to think so.

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As discussed at ComicBook.com, a porg infiltration could theoretically cause an ecological collapse if the ones that hitched a ride on the Millennium Falcon populate in high enough numbers in a new ecosystem. Whereas, on Earth, native species act in accordance with their environment and non-native species, introduced by an outside element, may cause changes in their surroundings, an invasive species could completely destroy the area they're introduced to. Are porgs an invasive species outside of their Ahch-To home?

It seems like that could be the case, according to professor Tim Blackburn, an invasive species researcher at the Center For Biodiversity And Environment Research at University College London. “The most likely candidates to become invasive species would be those found around space ports, as they are most likely to be picked up and transported somewhere new,” he tells NewsAged. “Porgs might decimate some native fish if there were no porg-like predators already present.” (We has the sadz if porgs are considered “invasive.”)

Of course, this is all hypothetical, since, like, porgs aren't real. Even with speculative hypotheses like Blackburn's, we don't really know how fast porgs reproduce or how much food they eat in the Star Wars universe. The fictional bottom line, however, is that porgs may very well upset the natural order of things on arriving to a new planet.

And what's pretty amazing about ruminating on porgs' probable invasiveness is that they only exist in the Star Wars world as stand-ins for puffins, which were apparently everywhere when The Last Jedi crew were filming on Skellig Michael island in Ireland. Literally, porgs were concocted to cover for the puffins' presence on the shoot.

“[We] had gone to shoot this sequence on… the real island location that stands in for Ahch-To, and that island is covered in puffins,” designer Jake Lunt Davies tells StarWars.com. “Everywhere you look there are hundreds of birds dotted around the landscape. You physically can't get rid of them, and digitally removing them is an issue and a lot of work… And so I think [director Rian Johnson] thought, 'Well, that's great, let's have our own indigenous species.'”

The more you know…

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