- "Harvester" redirects here. For other species with the same name see Harvester (Prey) and Harvester (Skyline)
The Harvesters are a race of sapient, spacefaring aliens which travel from planet to planet like a galactic swarm of locusts, devouring each world's natural resources before moving to the next one, bringing their entire civilization in massive ships.
Biology[]
Physically, they're no more durable than a Human being, but compensate this by being enclosed within a biomechanical suit that gives them numerous advantages. They have a slender, quasi-humanoid body with three-jointed limbs and only two digits on their hands and feet. The head is enlarged and flattened. They have large, metallic-like eyes and the suit armor includes a number of long, grasping tentacles protruding from their backs. With the suit on, they have the ability to perch onto bars (similar to avians). There is a popular theory that the bio-suits are actually what the harvesters used to look like
Lacking both ears and vocal chords, the aliens communicate using a sophisticated form of telepathy. They are also able to control other beings, at least partially, by attaching tentacles to their necks, and apparently do this in order to communicate with non-telepathic species. This species breathes oxygen and requires similar environmental conditions to Humans.
Their hive-like society is ruled by a massive Harvester Queen, who exerts complete control over all of her fleet's soldiers.
Culture and society[]
The Harvesters are little more than nomadic looters. They do possess far superior technology, including enormous fleets of ships; defense fields to prevent missiles from reaching their ships' hull; highly destructive weaponry and protective biomechanical suits.
When invading an inhabited planet, the aliens' military tactics consist of large-scale attacks, destroying the major cities around the globe simultaneously and then heading to the next largest, presumably going on until there is nothing left.
History[]
At an unknown point, the Harvesters left their home-world and became a nomadic civilization, they went across the galaxy, consuming the cores of worlds they came across, one such planet was the home of The Spheres, a civilization who the Harvesters wared with for ages until the Harvesters defeated them.
In 1947 AD, a Harvester space craft crashed on the planet Earth, two of it's crew where killed in the crash, and the third died a week afterwards, following this event, the Harvesters abducted Humans throughout the 20th Century until they decided to commence their invasion.
In 1996, the Harvester mothership was detected near Earth's moon by a SETI satellite array and they shortly after took control of the planet's artificial satellites and prepared a coordinated attack on major cities, following the attacks, the surviving humans joined together and destroyed the mothership and the invading fleet.
For the following 10 years, the remaining Harvesters had a ground war with a rouge African nation, during this war, a distress signal was sent to the Harvester Home-world and was received by a queen who would return many years later.
In 2016, Earth had integrated Harvester tech with their own, the Queen's ship arrived and completely covered the Atlantic Ocean, they nearly devoured the Earth's core but the Queen was destroyed and the ship and the fleet which came with it was retreated back to the depths of the galaxy.
Appearances[]
- Independence Day (1996)
- Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)
Gallery[]
Notes[]
- The aliens were designed by Patrick Tatopoulos, and the film was the brainchild of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, the same creators of the Stargate franchise. The creators stated that they wanted to showcase a different kind of alien invasion than those popular in sci-fi films from the 1950s to the 1980s. While in most of these films the invasion begins covertly, with aliens hiding in the countryside or secretly assimilating people with spores, the creatures in Independence Day are confident in their superiority. They launch a large-scale assault from the start, destroying all the world's major cities.
- Although called "Locusts," the aliens in Independence Day behave more like ants and bees. They exhibit complex social structures and highly organized, collective behavior, similar to insect colonies, rather than the swarming tendencies of actual locusts.
- In the movie, when Will Smith is dragging a dead harvester, he yells, "What the hell is that smell?" In reality, it was dead brine shrimp. This could mean that the harvesters give off the smell of crustaceans (specifically brine shrimp), further adding to the arthropod comparisons.