Most normal bug species ever.
No but seriously how do seadwellers work? Why do the lifespans get longer the higher up the hemospectrum you go? What's up with the different teeth? Do they have different diets? Is blood color determined by like, primary habitat????
Something interesting and kind of infuriating is that all the trolls in homestuck proper are mutants of some kind/clones of each other so we really never get a baseline for "normal troll" behavior or physiology. Aradia, Tavros, and Sollux all have psychic powers of their blood color, but we don't know how much they compare to the other members of the species and how common they actually are. Hiveswap/Friendsim implies that they are all abnormally powerful for psychics iirc. Sollux is explicitly kind of overpowered, and so are all the other goldbloods in the comic (all two of them!) because they are all genetic copies of sollux. what.
The trolls that aren't overtly mutants seem pretty isolated from the rest of society, such as nepeta living in a cave, terezi living in a forest, gamzee spending all of his time on drugs (how do troll drugs work???), and eridan and feferi seem kind of normal i guess but we also know virtually nothing about what would be normal for seadwellers since they are supposed to be very rare.
The other mutants:
Karkat- bright red blood
Kanaya- even before becoming a rainbow-drinker she is the only one that can go outside during the day without dying/being burned, and regularly does this
Vriska- vision eightfold, mind-control, and the ability to shoot webs i guess
Equius- why does he sweat so much. actually, how is it possible for trolls to sweat if they aren't mammals? also abnormally strong from birth
Anyways i impart upon you the wisdom that troll horns are similar to antenna and that trolls do in fact have paws. google image search "spider paws" theyre real (for best results look up "tarantula paws"). General rule is that the bigger the bug the bigger the paws and since trolls is bugs.... :3
please feel free to share your troll biology headcanons and speculations!!!! I love bugs!!!!
the hiveswap rust and golds 8eing like that is most likely just due to poor characteriz8ion 8ecause i really dont 8elieve rust and golds are specifically powerful in psychic , aradia and sollux are just two little freaks with freaky powers /positive . i do think our horns are antennae though ! i never saw our species having ears cause we used our antennae to hear , another thing i like to headcanon is that our colors get a lot darker the further we grow , like the yellow-orange-red on our horns 8ecome darker more satur8ed colors , or our carapace darkens and grows tougher , i also always saw 8ones , nails , and eyes to 8e a red or orange color 8ased off the horns . like the colors for the nails and such is canonical 8ut i imagine them also darkening as we age .
I like to imagine that the reason why the warmer colors live shorter is because the healthcare they are given is so shitty that they die earlier compared to the cooler colors, who have better access to healthcare (due to being richer and more respected and whatnot).
Also drones are SO ignored in the comic. it's never explained where they came from before the Condense replaced them with robots after the Vast Glub -- which I imagine killed them too if she had to replace them. So I headcanon that if two trolls try to reproduce without the help of a mother grub, they get a haploid drone baby. and with the mother grub you get your standard troll. I think that would explain the similar sexual dimorphism traits trolls have like to humans, because why would Trolls look like that? unless if sexual dimorphism of troll is more of a vestigial trait. that would also be kind of interesting. That was my headcanon until i started wondering where tf drones came from rip. and that was my solution
Oh another headcanon is that Seatrolls have bad eyesight because their eyes evolved to see better underwater than in the surface, which is why they need glasses. My basis for this is only that Eridan and Meenah wear glasses, and Feferi never takes her goggles off once she's in the surface, so i think those are her glasses too lol. I headcanon Cronus doesnt wear glasses cus he thinks they are lame lol
weirdmageddons on tumblr has a really good post about how troll slurry is just blood mixed together + so I headcanon rainbow drinkers as being like that because mother grubs need to drink blood too
these are really interesting points of discussion! i always just accepted that the caste system was biological in nature and the population of a particular caste was relative to their lifespan. that is, shorter lifespan = more common blood caste and vice versa. i suppose it’s similar to how insect colonies work (with one insect being queen and the others being workers or something?) but with more levels to it instead.
i also believe i remember something about psychic powers being more prevalent in warmer castes, so based off of that i sorta just assumed that cooler castes tend to be physically stronger the higher you go. but iirc i don’t think that’s ever stated?
another random thing: i really wish the brooding caverns and trials were expanded more in homestuck proper. whenever they mention trials i‘m literally not sure what to even imagine other than wrigglers going through the depths of hell lmfao
i love hearing takes on this tbh, troll biology is really fun to discuss.