<div align="center"><strong><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 2em;"><strong>Dragons Pern - Colors</strong></span><br/><br/>===================================================<br/><br/>Barring rare mutations, female dragons and fire-lizards are always either green or gold in color, while males are blue, brown or bronze.<br/><br/>    * Gold dragons, also called queens, are the largest dragons and the only fertile females. They are dominant over all other colors; any non-gold dragon will invariably obey a queen's orders, even against the wishes of its own rider. Queens do not produce flame due to the sterilizing affects of firestone; however, they do fight Thread - they fly in a special wing, with their riders armed with specially designed flamethrowers. Gold dragons Impress only to women. The queen egg from which a queen dragon hatches is tended specially by the gold from which it's Hatched, often rolled lovingly onto a lump of sand, and is the largest egg in the clutch, tinted gold.<br/>    * Bronze dragons are the largest males, although they are significantly smaller than the queens. They are almost always the ones to mate with queens, as the smaller colors generally lack the stamina to chase and catch the gold dragons. More rarely, they may mate with greens, but their size puts them at a disadvantage in chasing the agile greens. Bronzeriders are always men.<br/>    * Brown dragons are the next largest color. They may occasionally mate with queens, although this is rare, and becomes even more rare as the dragons increase in size; by Ramoth's time in the 9th Pass it is unheard-of. All brownriders in the Pern novels are men, but Anne McCaffrey stated in her guidelines for Pern-based online roleplaying that it is theoretically possible for browns to Impress to women.<br/>    * Blue dragons are the smallest males. They are nearly as agile as greens, but unlike the greens, they have the stamina to last through an entire Threadfall. They mate only with greens, as they are simply too small to keep up with a massive queen over a long mating flight. There are few prominent blue dragons or blueriders in the books. The blueriders who do appear are always male, although McCaffrey's guidelines allow for the possibility of female blueriders.<br/>    * Green dragons are the smallest normal color, about half the size of the queens. They are female, but unlike the queens, they are infertile due to firestone ingestion and can produce flame. They are extremely valuable in Threadfall because of their agility, but they lack the stamina to last an entire Fall. Originally, greens Impressed to women. However, after various natural disasters decimated Pern's population, women were needed to help repopulate the planet. Since going between during pregnancy<br/>      can induce abortion, it became impractical to present large numbers of women as candidates for Impression. Thus, green dragons began Impressing to men; by the time the earliest-written novels take place, female greenriders are entirely forgotten, although greens gradually begin Impressing to women again.<br/>    * There is only one white dragon mentioned anywhere in the Pern novels - Ruth, whose rider is Lord Jaxom of Ruatha Hold. He is not an albino, as his hide contains very faint patches of all the normal dragon colors. Ruth's egg would not have hatched if Jaxom had not forced it open; thus, it seems likely that white coloration in dragons is normally a lethal mutation. Although his parents are the largest queen and largest bronze in the history of Pern, Ruth is much smaller than even a normal green dragon in his time; he is only slightly larger than the largest dragons of the first generation. He is male, but sterile, with no urge to mate. He also has the unusual ability to intuitively orient himself in time.<br/><br/>The larger a color is, the less common it is. For instance, any given clutch of eggs contains no more than one queen, whereas there are as many greens as there are blues, browns and bronzes put together. Riding a larger color of dragon also confers higher social status in Pern's extremely hierarchical society. Perhaps as a result of this, it is commonly believed that the larger colors are more intelligent - but the recent novel The Skies of Pern implies that this may not be true.<br/><br/>The Pernese believe that chewing firestone makes female dragons sterile; they therefore refuse to allow queens to use it. Greens, on the other hand, are so common that if they produced offspring it would quickly lead to overpopulation, so they always chew firestone. However, Dragonsdawn suggests that Kitti Ping - possibly motivated by old-fashioned ideas about gender roles - deliberately engineered greens to be infertile and gold dragons to be unable to produce flame.<br/><br/>Found at http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Dragons_Pern_-_Colors/id/1338483 (http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Dragons_Pern_-_Colors/id/1338483)<br/></strong></div>