The various stages have names: facehugger, chestburster, warrior and queen, but this very odd species has never been referred to as anything but "aliens", a far too generic term. Be that as it may, let us pretend to be exo-zoologists observing this creature and deducing what we can from its behavior.

It's important to keep in mind while we do this that the alien is not the product of natural evolution. It is an artificial creation from someone's bio-lab who knows where or when. I say this because every planet will evolve its own unique biochemistry and the idea that a creature from one world would be able to handle the alien proteins of a creature from another world (in order to eat it, or use it as a host to parasitical offspring) makes no sense. The only explanation for a creature like the alien is that it was created artificially.

Which raises the obvious question: Why? What purpose was it made to serve? I'll come back to that later.

The first thing we learn in this movie is that the eggs can stay dormant but alive for a very long time. We're not told how long the crashed spaceship found on LV-426 has been there but it certainly looks like many years to me.

E.C. McMullen Jr.
Possibly a million or so years. Upon seeing the alien pilot in the original theatrical release, Captain Dallas makes the following comment:

"An alien lifeform. It's been dead a long time. Fossilized. Looks like its growing out of the chair."
- Captain Dallas

Kelly sez:
Possibly. Or maybe much less. A million years of the very active weather on this planet would probably bury the ship.

The unfortunate Kane leans in close and the egg comes to life and fires a facehugger at him (I've always wondered why the egg needs to be so big or if there's more than one facehugger per egg). The design and the actions of the facehugger imply that whoever created these creatures was working on the assumption that most aliens have a "head" with at least one orifice leading into the body.

The facehugger used just enough acid to get through Kane's spacesuit without injuring Kane himself. It then kept him alive in a deadly environment (LV-426 hadn't been terraformed yet and still had a methane atmosphere) while his companions brought him back to the ship. The creature stayed attached for what looked like the better part of a day and then fell off and died, its purpose fulfilled.

What took so long? Just implanting an embryo somewhere in Kane's gut (not his throat or else he couldn't breath) shouldn't have taken that long. My guess is the facehugger doesn't just implant the embryo. It also takes in a great deal of information about its host and its host's environment and adjusts the embryo accordingly. Evidence for this can be seen in ALIEN³ where the alien that gestates inside a dog looks "doglike" when it matures. The facehugger is also probably making metabolic and even genetic adjustments to the host's system to make it more compatible.

Kane seemed fine and felt okay when he first woke up, but he wasn't conscious for more than 20 or 30 minutes when the chestburster forced it's way out in one of horror / sci-fi movies' most memorable scenes. Let's consider the implications of the chestburster's eponymous method of exit. It would have been much easier to keep his victim unconscious and exit through a body orifice (I'll pause a moment to let you imagine the permutations). It also would have been easier to use its super-acid to burn its way out. Instead, it pushes through flesh and bone to create an explosion of gore. I would guess that most intelligent species are social creatures that can relate to the pain of their fellows and that connect the sight of their circulatory fluid with grievous injury. Clearly, this method of exit from the host serves a single purpose: to terrify.

Once it's out the alien is small. Its about a foot long and couldn't weigh more than a few pounds. It instinctively knows to run and hide and does so before the stunned crew of the Nostromo can react. But then, again in what looks like less than 24 hours, this tiny creature goes through a stupendous growth spurt, transforming into a full grown alien warrior that looks like its about 7 feet tall and must weigh 300 lbs or more. Now here we have a problem. What did it eat?

The alien is never shown eating any people (not in this movie, at least). It either kills them and leaves their bodies or captures them to be used as hosts by more facehuggers. But all that is irrelevant because it has this growth spurt before it touches anybody. Now don't get confused here between energy and raw materials. I'm willing to believe an alien genetic engineer could design a creature that could so massively speed up its metabolism that it could grow to adulthood in a single day. That's not the problem. To see what I'm talking about, let's consider an analogy. Imagine you have two small buildings and you want to turn them both into skyscrapers. You assign a small work crew to one building and over the course of several years they gradually assemble the structure.

To the other building you assign a huge work crew and pay them to work day and night and, of course, the skyscraper is built very much faster. That's the difference between a slow metabolism and a fast one. But Both Crews Use The Same Amount Of Raw Materials! In other words the little chestburster would have to eat nonstop during those 24 hours. That 300 lb mass can't appear out of nowhere. Aliens gotta eat.

This is the single most difficult to explain aspect of the alien lifecycle.

E.C. McMullen Jr.
Not difficult really, consider: It is entirely probable that the alien has two things going on.
1. A cache of raw surplus stored within its body.
2. Extra food from its host.

After Kane wakes he says how hungry he is and at the dining table eats ravenously. The alien embryo inside of him could very well be using his own body against him, metabolically sucking the protein and nutrients right out of his muscles and organs in order to reach a stage where it can "hatch". Kane's ravenous hunger could stem from his body telling him that he is starving and needs to eat right now to replenish himself.

Yet even with that said, there is still the question of weight. For one thing, we don't need to assume that the alien is 300 pounds. Even though it can lift a full grown man off of the ground, that is not a matter of weight. An adult female chimpanzee can weigh up to 70 kg (about 154 pounds) ~ a little less than that of an average full grown chimpanzee male (90 kg or 200 pounds). In a sitting position, that chimp can lift a platform holding a 300 pound man and his identical twin, over her head with one arm^. In 1924 at the Bronx Zoo, the one arm pulling strength of a 134 pound female chimp named Suzette was measured at 1,260 pounds!++

Raw muscle power is not an act of weight but tensile strength.

In addition to strength, our alien also has sharp claws, teeth, tongue, and tail to rapidly put down its prey. It would seem that these creatures were built for a quick fight, not a drawn out one. This would suggest that the creature is light-weight for its size and lacks the ability to engage in a protracted battle. The fact that, even full grown, it chooses to hide and perform stealthy rapid attacks is a method used by smaller predators on earth, like moray eels, spiders, rats, and badgers. All things considered, having a hungry Alien loose in your spaceship is not half as bad as having a hungry Grizzly in it.

So lets assume that, full grown, the creature weighs about 150 pounds (it's taller than the chimp, but when I first wrote this, I didn't take into account the difference in water to body ratios). Well for a fact the newborn alien creature wasn't 150 pounds. Where did the weight come from? Even assuming that the alien, with its alien make-up, could have weighed 150 pounds as a newborn, it still doesn't work.

This is why: Assuming that it had the ability, like some parasites, to inject a pain killer into Kane's bloodstream so he wouldn't feel the discomfort, there is just no way that a 150 pound object could have gone unnoticed to even the most casual observer. There is nothing within the ribcage of the human interior to support a 150 pound object. Even human parasites like tapeworms, which can get up to 30 feet long and weigh as much as 50 pounds, distribute their weight throughout the small intestine. Kane was a slight man, so he would have been carrying about his own weight, about twice the weight he is used to carrying. So no, the infant alien wasn't 150 pounds.

So back to the main question. Even if we assume that the full grown alien had all the raw ingredients in reserve to grow to full height, it still needed the raw material to actually weigh 150 pounds: where did the weight come from?

Consider the human body. We are, by weight, over two thirds or roughly 80 to 85 percent water*. Every time we see the alien, it is always wet, literally dripping from everywhere with liquid. The alien is quite possibly a water creature, and as such, could be as much as 90+ percent water by weight - like some sharks.

But what a creature is as an adult and what it is as an infant are two different things. If we assume, as Kelly does, that this creature was originally created in the lab, then the creature may have been born to be as little as 20% water, like some insects. This puts the weight of the creature around a possible 13.6 kg or 30 pounds. The creature's body is about a foot and a half and the tail may add another foot. Two and a half feet total and curled like a snake: Well within the limits that a man the size of Kane could carry without notice from others. If that same weight was in the lower torso, the bulge would have been obvious, but the creature burst from Kane's chest, not his abdomen.

150 pounds, dripping wet

So if the infant creature, after its chest birth, has a reserve of all the nutrients and raw materials to grow to an adult alien without further feeding, then all it needs to process or metabolize that reserve is water and lots of it.

We first see the full grown alien in the condensation towers of the spacecraft. The creature headed straight for the ship's water supply. It is so wet there that crewman Brett removes his hat to allow the cool water to shower his face. It is there that the alien found its water to hide and grow to a full 150 pounds.

The alien grabs Brett, immediately shoves its mouth/tongue into Brett's head, and while Brett is still alive and screaming, rises into the air to finish his Brett meal in peace. In the original theatrical release of ALIEN, we are led to believe that the creature apparently ate its human victims.

"But it's like a bug," you may say. "It could eat anything on the ship, even insulation."

Well it could if that insulation was packing protein or some other recognizable growth ingredient. And I won't go into the wide varieties of insulation materials available, including metal. As alien as its body is, it needs us for survival once it adapts itself to our genetic code. As for insects eating insulation+: cockroaches eat insulation and a number of other things. But if you feed a cockroach just non-organic insulation it is going to starve and die. Like humans, a cockroach can eat many things that do little or nothing for its health, but to grow and survive, it needs nutrition same as the rest of us. For the creator of an alien creature that can adapt to the widest possible range of varmints, the certainty of food on hand would be the prey itself, which the alien genetically adapts to so it can use that creature for breeding and eating.

Kelly sez:
Excellent! This is a good explanation. It fills up with water and mixes in a few choice proteins to turn the water into a gel or some such which then solidifies into body structures.

It's also worth noting that the fact that the "Company" has a regulation requiring their commercial freighter crews to investigate any "systematized transmission" and that the crew isn't overly surprised at the sight of the crashed spaceship on LV-426 means humans have already encountered other civilizations.

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