jewishcomeradebot:

lj-writes:

The flying fire hazards! On the flip side, periodically burning underbrush and strategically setting contained fires to deprive the main conflagration of fuel are valid firefighting tools, too. These could be interesting ways for dragons to fight fire with fire, or to use forest fires as proxy wars with grounded populations caught in the middle.

I just had a stray though. How would dragons and dragon fire – including the hazard of wildfire – affect the local ecology? Like even in our own world there are plants that can only procreate if there’s wildfires, the shells of their seeds are too thick and hard to crack naturally and need to be exposed to the intense heat from a wildfire to crack open and plant themselves. Plus the ashes from a wildfire is actually an excellent fertilizer.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, I’ve just never really seen touched upon how dragons or any other kind of magical beasty might have an impact on their environment and how plants and animals might have evolved along side them due to these effect. Like, do dragons have birds who do their scale and skin maintenance for them like some large mammals on earth?

Omg that’s awesome! Plants that only sprout after dragonfire, called dragonflowers. Heat resistant birds eating bugs and detritus off the dragons’ scales and teeth, with the dragon’s mouth wide open for the latter procedure and the birds flitting in and out without fear. A hedge witch diagnosing an area’s ecology and determining that what they need is a resident dragon–too much underbrush that needs clearing, too few birds that depend on dragons to clean and are also adept pest eaters and pollinators. They haven’t had a dragon since that blundering hero (the mayor’s great-grandmother, who afterward settled down with a local girl) killed the local dragon. It falls to the mayor’s daughter to go find one for the town.