There is "not hiding who you are" and "not putting yourself in danger for no good reason". If you think you are really unsafe around some people, don't provoke them just for the sake of being a martyr. I think self preservation comes first here.
Unless you're playing in some hardcore difficulty settings, you have two main choices. Either you destroy every nest before they reach the pollution cloud (which requires artillery and an easy to expand robot or train network). Or you build walls with turrets. I usually go for full solar panel energy and laser turrets as I'm scared to death to "waste" resources. But to be honest, any type of turret can do for most of the game, you just have to decide what resources you want to spend on combat.
In some species, females are generally larger than males (which is true for a lot of different animals). But I don't know a thing about hermaphrodite fishes.
Even at ~2800 in puzzles I'm sometime faced with mates in one or mates in two that are quite easy. I feel like that score doesn't mean anything and shouldn't be compared to real games ELO.
If they don't call back, it's only because they are too busy contacting random people on linkedin just to tell them in a call they don't have to qualifications for the job. Priorities.
The realest, weirdly enough.