[quote=Sundered Echo] The way humans get Biotics (I believe its the same for all non-Asari species) is for a child to be exposed to Ezo while still in the womb and then be lucky enough to not die horrifically from Ezo poisoning. Quarian immune systems being what they are, I cant see anything less than a 100% death rate for in-utero children exposed to Ezo....I'd say there was probably a rare occurence of Quarian Biotics before the Geth happened, back when their immune systems still worked like they were supposed to, but now It hink they'd just die. [/quote] I did have a longer post talking about why I didn’t think the quarian immune system would have any effect on the mortality rates of quarian biotics… but my internet cut out when I tried to post it and so I lost the entire thing. I tried to write it up again and the same thing happened! Here’s a tl;dr version because I really can’t be bothered to type it up again. > It’s the same method for all species, although the krogan did develop an alternative technique to bestow biotics. This process could be done on people of ages, all the way up to adulthood. It had an incredibly high mortality rate though, even among krogan, meaning it fell into disuse after the genophage. Because the traditional method of producing adepts also has a high death rate it seems as if the krogan adept is a dying race. D: > I don’t think that the quarian immune system would have anything to do with survival rates in biotic individuals. The immune system works by acknowledging proteins on pathogens/tissue and using this to recognise whether or not the target is a foreign body. If it is then it is destroyed. Exposure to element zero produces mutations in the organism’s genome, producing the known birth defects. Unfortunately, these mutations are still part of the organism’s body, so in most cases will contain the same proteins as healthy tissue. Because of this the immune system would recognise it as normal and not react. Regardless of the effectiveness of the species’ immune system, from krogan to quarian, it would not matter as the immune system would not be actively working to destroy these mutations at all. > As far as I can tell, other than the usual complications that come with the production of biotic-sensitive individuals, there are three primary reasons why quarian adepts are almost non-existent. [b]Relative scarcity of Element Zero:[/b] With the Migrant Fleet’s tight policies on resource management, no ship admiral in their right mind would willingly waste element zero on producing biotic-sensitive children when it would be put to far better use maintaining the many ships that compose the fleet. This means that there would be no attempt to purposely create adept quarians, as opposed to other species where it was somewhat common (albeit almost always done in secret). [b]Shipsplosions!:[/b] Because there would be no purposeful exposure to element zero aboard the Migrant Fleet, we can assume the only chance of a quarian adept appearing is through chance. As mentioned, dust-form element zero would be released by a critically damaged mass drive. However, the mother of the soon-to-be biotic would have be pregnant, exposed to a significant amount of dust-form element zero, and survive the oncoming catastrophe of an exploding ship in order to actually birth the child. A combination of these would be incredibly rare. [b]Environmental suits:[/b] I also imagine that, with the efficiency of the quarian environmental suits at filtering contaminants from the air, it would have no problem removing dust-form element zero. This would mean exposure would be impossible without a suit rupture.