Markets in the wild

There exist relations of "supply" and "demand" in a rain forest, or in a desert, without human presence much less currency as we recognize it. Let us take a look at how they exist and what that should mean to us.  

The creatures of a rainforest are not in need of water. It is all around them.  It is, so to speak, cheap. Indeed, they devote time and energy NOT to the task of finding it but to that of warding it off.  Of getting and staying dry!  Water has a negative market value in such a situation. 

The creatures of a desert are very much in need of water. They devote a good deal of time and energy to finding it and to storing it away.  Water has a positive market value and a high one. 

Once, while arguing with someone in an internet forum (I was in my 'fierce anarcho-capitalist warrior' mode), someone of a different persuasion told me, "markets aren't natural -- they are social constructs -- otherwise they would exist in the rain forest!" I cooked up the above riposte. 

Now I'm post-anarcho-cap and I'm not anyone's warrior.  But I am reminded of my analogy by climate related controversies.  So, as you see, I'm revisiting it.

The implicit 'currencies' of the natural world as I described it then are energy and time.  Could we state this as a single 'price' or would the further development of such thoughts require two distinct prices.  As if one could only buy water with one payment in yen and another payment in dollars?  That seems conceptually awkward. If I were trying to build on those thoughts in a systemic way I would probably use a portmanteau like "timergy" for what our creatures are expending, to get water or to get dry. 

But this raises the further question: why do humans need dollars and yen? If markets can work, in an ecological setting, with timenergy as currency, why can't we? 

In a sense we also do use timenergy as currency. 

So, let me run through some numbered propositions:

1) It should be possible to restate much of ethology, the branch of biology devoted to animal behavior, in terms drawn from classical microeconomics -- I strongly suspect somebody is working on it. 

2) That reworking, working from the proposition that healthy organisms act so as to maximize their timergy capital through the progenitive phase of life, should yield substantive hypotheses open to empirical testing.

3) In the meantime, it is for economists to work from the opposite side of this merger. What are the consequences for our understanding of the world's various policy currencies (the dollar, the yen, etc.) of our recognition of timenergy as a sort of protocurrency?