Lack of Digestion or lack of Nutrition?

[Starrchild]

I often see posts and comments referring to the adult Wraith not having an active digestive system. In “The Queen” Dr Keller states: “Your bodies already contain all the organs necessary to digest food.” While this suggests they aren’t used she does not say those organs no longer function. And both Shawn and Todd state the same line of : “...it may give me a moment's pleasure, but it will not sustain me.”
This to me suggests only that the Wraith do not receive any nutritional value from food sources after a certain age. Not that their bodies can not longer process the material. A human could try to live off of water or tea or some other very basic food element and it would not sustain them either. Their bodies would still process the elements of what they consumed, they just wouldn’t have any effect on their biological needs.
If in fact their digestive tract had shut down, Shawn would not be able to enjoy the “finer things” as the food he eats would simply remain in his non-functioning gut and rot. That doesn’t sound any more pleasant for a Wraith as it would for a human.
Then again, do hive ships have bathrooms? lol

[Davey]

In Condemned we have the Wraith enjoying some wine and a bite of food but saying that the food of the previous chef was not as tasty as the chef himself! But it (I don't like saying he about a wraith) said that the pleasure is only momentary but provides no sustenance. I suppose the Wraith is highly constipated!

[Starrchild]

I did state all that in the above post. And since the Wraith in that episode was a male, “he” is the correct pronoun. “It” refers to a thing. Genderless, inanimate, etc. The Wraith are a race of people. They are alive and have gender. Therefore Shawn is most decidedly a “he”.

[AleksisMi]

i used to think about this, i have a theory, the wraithe have normal human life spans, after a century of life they are basically at hte dead point, and only absorbing whatever htey absorb sustains thier life, they basically are vampires who reach the end of a natural life span and begin consuming directly through the blood or the flesh some core element of the living people they consume, since they can presumably consume animals to a certain degree for some limited sustainence i would guess they might do ok consuming cows to a degree, but it would probably be painful or somehow leave a deep burning pain until they could consume human or something... sort of like the pain of having a blood transfer of the wrong type? just a guess... maybe not the wrong type, but a blood type that doesnt work as well for carrying oxygen and other chemical compenents through their bodies.... it is possible that thier real issue is a lack of healthy blood production..... that may sound odd, but maybe something in thier bodies as they age slowly does something that requires human sustainance to survive... say a form of..... oooh....

i would guess they are suffering a viral or dna reshuffling where the irratis bug dna fights for supremacy against the human dna or vice versa, although likely the irratis dna is trying to dominate the human portions perhaps as a evolutionary defense or a evolutionary attempt to return to its natural form or to evolve a new stage? so they consume whatever they can find to not only sustain thier health and prevent thier dna from tearing itself apart, but perhaps also innately searching for a dna that would be campatable with thier irratis dna's attempt to evolve a new form

[WraithRichard]

I did state all that in the above post. And since the Wraith in that episode was a male, “he” is the correct pronoun. “It” refers to a thing. Genderless, inanimate, etc. The Wraith are a race of people. They are alive and have gender. Therefore Shawn is most decidedly a “he”.

Thank you. Even symbiotes have biological sexes and those are just freaky fish things. The wraith display very obvious sexual dimorphism (spell check is unhelpful for that word, sorry), especially that resembling humans (secondary characteristics at least. I'm not that interested in primary ones).

But on topic, I thought the inability to be sustained through food after wraith puberty (or whatever) was similar to mammalian lactose intolerance. While it varies from individual to individual and species to species, overall, mammals tend to become lactose intolerant around adulthood and require other food to sustain themselves instead,

However the wraith work, it seems to be fine nutritionally. Otherwise they'd have pica, scurvy, rickets (how does a purely spacefaring species get their vitamin D?), suffering from basic malnutrition, etc