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[Parsely]

No, but the sci-fi version of Horatio, Lt. Leary certainly loves its biological digressions.

Every time he randomly notices some fantastic bug in the most innocuous place I roll my eyes and take a shot. He even uses his knowledge of animals to kill people. When he does that I finish my drink. It's so goofy.

[Egan_BW]

'Course, you could just say that said self-feeding only-species-on-the-planet is powered by Magical Energy, rather than Chemical Energy, the former being a form that never experiences loss because Magic.

[Tack]

Yeah but magic is usually a handwave-too-far in Sci-Fi.

I'd personally just go with the idea that the microscopic versions of this specific species can gain energy geothermally or through (wonderful red, thank you Culise) photosynthesis, and that the larger organisms themselves are able to rapidly devolve in the event of... say... death. So any parts of a corpse which haven't been scavenged slowly turns into a cloud of floating red mist, which proceeds to cannibalize itself and eventually form an imp, which is promptly caught and eaten by another, larger imp.

If we were to say that all of the cells which normally are programmed to die for us, instead split off, dump its waste into the air and then begin life anew, it could be... if not biologically impeccable, sort of poetic.
Like a magical land of open yellow skies, and crimson flesh-eating fog.

[Dirst]

Or in other words, The Thing's homeworld

[Egan_BW]

So you have to quickly scrape off all your dead skin cells, before they start to eat you?

[Strife26]

No, but the sci-fi version of Horatio, Lt. Leary certainly loves its biological digressions.

Every time he randomly notices some fantastic bug in the most innocuous place I roll my eyes and take a shot. He even uses his knowledge of animals to kill people. When he does that I finish my drink. It's so goofy.

You seem to have misspelled awesome-sauce.

[Tack]

So you have to quickly scrape off all your dead skin cells, before they start to eat you?

If that was the case you'd be in real trouble if any liver cells ever die.

[TheDarkStar]

So you have to quickly scrape off all your dead skin cells, before they start to eat you?

If that was the case you'd be in real trouble if any liver cells ever die.

Step 1: Stab yourself in the liver to remove your liver.
Step 2: Die to all the other cells you've killed in the process.

[Rolepgeek]

Presumably your body can also eat them. Which it would do for any non-ablative cells, I suspect. Though really, the premise requires some stretching anyway.

[Tack]

... The common cold meets its match.

[Jimmy]

Photosynthetic energy is the basis of life on our own planet, with subsequent organisms progressively stealing energy from this source by increasingly wasteful means, but that's not to say there's no other forms of energy available. Geothermal energy is a good example, though I'm not aware of any specific biological organisms that utilise this source actively on earth. Extremophile micro-organisms exist around underwater geothermal vents but mostly survive from aqueous nutrients rather than geothermal energy directly. It's probably the easiest form of energy to imagine being converted into biomass however, with others such as kinetic energy or gravitational energy unable to provide a sustained source of power, and electrical energy being too esoteric to occur regularly in nature.

[Arx]

The organisms could chemosynthesise. I don't know how well that would work on a grand scale over a long period, though.

[Rolepgeek]

The means aren't actually particularly wasteful. It's just a question of the amount of energy stores in a given organism, and the amount of that energy that goes towards not getting eaten.

But it sounds like Thermosynthetic energy is one possibility. I disagree with electricity being too esoteric though; we find it in nervous systems all the time. All you really need is some sort of slow churning set of substrates that end up working as chemical batteries.

[Tack]

The photosynthesis, thermosynthesis amongst those life forms small enough to get away with lethargy is good, but that's an issue because the bug-mouse sized lifeforms generally survive by being damn quick, I.e. Burning a lot of energy.

- Which makes me wonder how long the mist needs to Stay as a mist in order to make up for the constant energy expenditure of the oroborous species as a whole, or how high up the chain does it need to get. Bugs? Dragon-cicadas with vestigial solar-panel wings?

Or does everything up the chain need to rely on the light-heat-water profile, so the largest organism is the Ydraasil of... land anenomes, happily soaking up rays and spearing nearby interlopers with barbed harpoon-tentacles.

Likewise thanks to the ideas Culise and Arx have brought forward it could be possible (albeit, as RPG has said, with stretching), to say the gases caused by the constant volcanic activity are an acceptable snowflake-substitute for the water our home plants require.

Makes me wonder whether things which rely on thermal energy would be more likely to be colored inky black.
Which, if it's a fog of microorganisms, doesn't bode well for visibility near open vents (wait, that's metal).

Actually, wouldn't a red sun be more helpful for "red photosynthesis"?


The youth of the planet now is making me think this is the first species which got here, unless it actually is a red sun which, I think (but am pretty astronomically ignorant) requires an old sun, which might be mutually exclusive with a young world...


Re: Jimmy, Re: Electrical energy-
How powerful would the magnetosphere of a planet need to be in order for a species to generate power from it?
And how much would a field that strong mess up everything else?

[Rolepgeek]

World might have gotten trapped in an orbit around the sun, and been outside the system previously.