There is no biological reproduction. And it was confirmed, like years ago, that if the rahi had run out the Makuta simply would have made more. No need to search for a complex explanation, just try to understand and accept what was confirmed years ago.
So I only found that old quote, and from mobile, it’s madness to find the other one.
If somebody doesn’t understand: Makuta are still making Rahi, but after the Great Cataclysm they started to make more mutated Rahi for their army, than normal Rahi. But they were making Rahi every since they were born up to thier deaths.
Mate, one of the options that he gave, that I showed you, even, allowed for the answer to simply be that the Makuta were just pumping out new Rahi fast enough that their populations remained stable. This is something that nobody had answered, you included up until now. Your high and mighty attitude is unnecessary and frankly insulting, especially when you first came in here swinging you were using an answer that only tangentially related to his question. The only part of it that relates to his question at all is this:
The first part is a piece of information that the original poster is clearly already aware of, and the second rules out one of the solutions to this problem he suggested unless it was said differently in the story somewhere, which numerous people have pointed out that there is evidence for in the early days, such as “baby” Rahi and mentions of nests and mothers. It’s likely that these were simply oversights, but they’re not insignificant. You can’t behave like you were coming in here with a fully-formed explanation and that we’re the ones not understanding it. Believe it or not, there’s a difference between “Makuta make Rahi” - a fact, and “Makuta make enough fish Rahi that the Matoran don’t overfish them and kill them all” - an inference.
Baby rahi in the nest was confirmed to be a Taku in a Kewa nest, similarly how they coexist in the Tales of the Tohunga/Quest for the Toa game, your ignorance is pathetic to the actual facts. Makuta makes the Rahi this is canon, ever since the Makuta’s Guide to the Universe came out, and as the quote and the quide says, the Makuta made new Rahi with viruses as always. And Rahi behavior was based upon the creatures of spherus magna, that was the pattern the Great Beings used for the first Rahi, then the Makuta did the same job. Every Rahi behaves like how a creature of Spherus Magna do, that’s why they live in herd, make nests etc. When you have a freaking artificial universe, you’re gonna base everything on what you know. That’s why the mutant or simple experimence Rahi doesn’t behave like the normal ones, because they’re new things and not related anything on Spherus Magna. The Matorab says Lava Eels are similar to Venom Eels, because both of them are eels, while the lava eel is an artificial rahi, the venom eel is a real creature from the Aqua Magna. Why? Because the Makuta was given knowledge about how the animals should behave and they made the lava eels similar to the real eels. And it was never said how fast the Makuta are capable of reproducing Rahi, you can’t say it is impossible in a reality, where the fire burns in the ocean and where earth physics doesn’t make any sense. Maybe they have a machine running which pumps enough virus to the tank, which makes the rahi to fill the lost numbers, you can’t say it is impossible, as you don’t know what tech the Makuta use, and knowing the fact that the Makuta had a freaking teleporter which enabled their own island to disappear and reappear somewhere else, it’s pretty straightforward that they had a method to stable the rahi populations without enabling them to reproduce on their own.
Sometimes pure logic without overcomplicating that whole thing works. You may want a fancy solution, maybe because if the rahi can reproduce, the matoran why not? And we will be again on the irritating point of why the love is non-canon in a fully artificial universe, which was answered so many times before.
