6th Turn
Events
Strength Dice: 11
Temperament Dice: N/A
Nothing of importance from an outside cause occured in this time.
Team Chaos
Knightwing64: Controlling actions of the host: 1+1=2
Aeranthos: Supports Knightwing64
Puppeteering Turnip
Turnips now have the ability to control their hosts movement. They secrete a substance from their roots into their hosts, interfering and influencing were they go. But this system is crude and very much useless as of yet. Turnips, like their hosts, are blind and deaf. This would be a bit more effective if they actually could detect a place to move their hosts to. Their only sense is their ability to sense ambient vibrations. But that usually leads their host to nowhere.
And since this feature relies on substance secretion, its success is correlated with how much of it is secreted, and Turnips are very small. Their influence is no more than a nudge.
It coexists with Undulating Turnips and Flatlander Turnips, their previous two ancestral lineages; they do not compete with eachother due to the new abundance of hosts.
Status: NT
Description: A small proto-animal. It is a parasite, it attaches itself to faunal hosts and feeds off of them with a set of long, branching tendrils that grow when attached to suitable surfaces, also using them to weakly influence where its host is going. It's tissues have the ability to flex; undulate to generate heat, and move around. It has specialised cells all around its body that control its movement towards higher ambient vibrations. It reproduces asexually by occasionally budding.
Habitat: Both the Aegla Fields and Silty Flats, attached to other peas.
Team Divergent
Mercur: Phototaxis: 3-1=2
Sleeper Puffer
Puffers now follow the light using a series of black dots on their backs. They can now know if it is night or not, along with moving where there is more light. But this new ability hardly changes their lifestyle. It makes them move slower when it's overcast, and stop into a form of sleep every night. While this wastes precious feeding time, it also grants them a small longevity advantage, since unlike their ancestors which move constantly, they rest at this time and therefore last longer overral. Yet they outcompeted them.
That is due to the very same reason on why they may not last all that long as a species. The Aegla keeps spreading inward as they also adapt into different varieties that are more and less resistant to heat. They convert open silty lakebed into plant fields, destroying the main habitat of the Puffers, since they are ill-equipped in digesting plant matter. Plants also coat the lake floor, making it harder to feed by just randomly shovelling whatever. Range of the Puffer is shriking. Less resources are available, and therefore the slower and more energy conservative Puffers have lived on.
Status: EN
Description: A rotund proto-animal around 9-10 centimeters in diameter. It aimlessly crawls on the lake floor with 10 pairs of tentacles and digests any organic debris it can catch with its gaping maw, using six shovelling appendages that line it to shove the food into it. It passively respirates through its short coat of hair-like tendrils that cover its body. It back has a series of black dots that detect light intensity. On the space between its outer surface and stomach, an isolated internal sack shaped like a vase acts as one large blood vessel and heart, shaking the liquid inside so that the oxygen and nutrients move around. This sack also envelopes the stomach to get the nutrients inside. It reproduces sexually, by periodically releasing gamates into the water from a dark spot on its bum and leaving the rest at pure chance.
Habitat: The Silty Flats.
Team Sol
TricMagic: Seasonal seeds: 5
Hazelseed Lily
It all started with one seemingly defective individual which dropped off not edge pieces, but pieces from its main hardened body, soft parts being inside. This mutation turned out to be a very beneficial one, as the lilies now had a shell to wait out the worst.
With millenia, this new system was refined into perfection. Each lily, from their germination, immidiately starts producing a stalk of small, hazel colored, hard shelled seeds. These seeds grow in synch with both the plant, and with other lily seeds from other such plants, controlled by a biological timer that has been refined by countless, ever-slight tweaks by natural selection into signifying the perfect times to perform reproductive functions. They are capable of creating the swirling shapes their ancestors once did on the lakes surface, but just in summers and fall.
These seeds start off as small buds on a tendril under the still soft and juvenile lily at first, but get larger and their outsides harden as their parent also grows to do the same. They also take a round protruding shape. They keep growing from early spring to mid fall, when the cold starts seeping in. In this time, lilies start self-dismantling, fully digesting their connections with their seeds and letting them fall onto the lake floor. These seeds then start the entire thing anew when the ice thaws and springs comes back.
This new way of reproduction, along with the obvious cheating the winter and no more soft edges advantage, allows the seedling lilies to start life with their energy reserves more than full, kickstarting their growth. The way the seeds are fed is also a bonus. The plants has evolved small canals that start at the outer edges of the plant and converge in the middle, going down to the stalk where their contents are stuffed inside the seeds. This system of vasicules allows a faster and more efficent transfer of material, and grants the lilies a small size boost.
Lilies are now complex enough to be considered true plants.
Status: LC
Description: A violet plant that resembles a sterotypical lily pad 10 centimeters in diameter. It is very efficent at what in its way of life. Besides from its very edges, the entirety of the plant is reinforced by a network of hexagonal cell walls. From its center, three sets of thin, soft petals grow up like flower, their function being absorbing oxygen. All of the plants tissues are connected via an internal network of vascules that move nutrients and water around. It reproduces asexually by growing a stalk of hardshelled, hazel colored seeds from its underside and releasing them all enmasse in the late autumn. Seeds wait out the winter and germinate in the early spring.
Habitat: The waters of the mountain lake, particularly at the surface.
Team Tetramylsis
flazeo25: Transportative sap: 5+1= capped at 5
Cant read the sign: Supports flazeo25.
Forest Kiteflower
Floating colonies of Kiteflowers are larger than ever. The changes are not apparent to the naked eye, except the observation that the sizes of collectives have almost doubled on average.
Inside the plants, the substance that courses through their canals have changed in composition. It is now an oily, sugary liquid that is a more capable organic solvent than water is, making the canals able to carry more in the same space. Along with that, they also contain antifreeze proteins that prevent the young and outer plants from freezing and shattering; since they lack the option of skipping the winter, this is a lifesaver.
Vastly reduced fatalities from the cold, combined with more efficent transport, has allowed individual Kiteflowers to last longer, grow larger and quicker, and reproduce faster. The result is the new forests. The largest colonies can grow into 100-meter wide forests. That is the largest they can grow before their method of holding onto eachother can't fight against the compounding force of the currents.
Status: LC
Description: A purple plant shaped like geometrically shaped flower. It's five centimeters in diameter. It is flat for the most part, except for the storage vacuole on its center, which is usually filled with nutrient rich water or waste gasses. This vacuole is connected to the outside by a short tube that itself branches into rigid, porous protrusions that line the plants outer edges. It is capable of secreting a sticky substance from a ring of vacuoles that is carried over onto their protrusions by the smaller tubes. It's inner and outer surfaces are almost entirely covered by a cellulose exoskeleton that gives it its rigid shape, save for the internal surfaces of the vacuoles. The mucus allows it to form mats on the water surface by sticking to eachother. From the center of the plant, on top of the central bump, eight twisting vines grow into the open sky, sprouting more sticky tendrils and small leaves and reaching 50 centimeters in lenght. Inside these tendrils and plants, a series of canals carry an oily plant sap that is also an antifreeze substance. It reproduces asexually by their unusual leaves. These leaves, being miniature kiteflowers, fall away when heavy enough, then grow into adult Kiteflowers independantly.
Habitat: The waters of the mountain lake. Particularly at the surface in the form of interconnected choruses and small forests.
Team Pizza
Leonardo8: Muscles: 5
Wormy Plateworm
Any part that the Corndogs didn't have specialised are now muscles arranged in series of rings, resembling that of a worm. These muscles have many purposes.
They allow faster and more efficent movement. They make is much easier to gulp food and water inside the stomach and internal gill system. It made them much larger. This has also increased reproductive speed by a ton. It is just better to have muscles.
But they are also in a tight situation along with the Puffers. Their range has shrunk, though less severely. Unlike Puffers, they have actual muscles and have a way of locating food. So they fare in very small numbers in the plant covered zones, while Puffers are practically non-existant there.
Status: VU
Description: A tubular proto-animal 10 centimeters in lenght and 4 centimeters in girth. It crawls along the lake floor using its ring muscles and eats any organic debris it can detect with its ability to detect specific chemicals in the water using its circular mouth and yellow lips, with digestion done in the tube shaped cavity that is lined with absorbant tissue. It lacks an anus, and instead has many small exits that mix the dirt a mucus that solidifies on the creatures sides and back to form a segmented dirt armor. Just under its mouth is an another cavity that opens into a network of thin canals all over the animals body. This second mouth sucks in water which then travels across these canals and supplies oxygen. It reproduces asexually by laying floating eggs, which hatch after a week of floating around.
Habitat: The Silty Flats.
Team Volcano
Magmacube_tr:
1) A one way, protrudable stomach with mouth facing down: 4
2) Muscles: 5
Enveloper Chickpea
Descending from a mid-sized, secondarily non-eusocial pea, Chickpea very much resembles a rather large, but an otherwise ordinary pea. But the differences begin showing once it moves to feed. Its stomach moves forward and its mouth opens as it stretches into an almost cylindrical form. Its stomach then envelopes whatever was on its path and digests it, dropping out any indigestible remains later.
Combined with its muscles that it uses to roll around, its fluid matrix providing structural support and its omnivory, this method of feeding is a one that is efficent enough, though it prefers meat and actively seeks it first. It uses its ancestral chemotaxis to find prey, usually preffering the swarms of smaller peas and vermiforms, and starts feeding when it detects enough indicative particles.
It's small size restricts it preying range to the eusocial peas and vermiform swarms, but it makes do for now.
They still use pheromones, signalling food availability to nearby others and making their kin know that they are not food. They don't form swarms, and are mostly solitary except in feeding frenzies when large amounts of them gather round in a cascading flood of food signals, usually indicating a ginormous swarm of prey.
Additionally, its internal fluid matrix has gained the ability to store nutrients in a time of yore, before Chickpeas were even a thing.
Description: A rotund proto-animal 3 centimeters in size. It rolls on the lake floor using its muscles, using an internal fluid matrix as internal support for that movement and a nutrient storage. It feeds akin to a starfish, it has a one way stomach that it uses as a net. It is capable of chemotaxis to find food and detect pheromones secreted by others of its kind that signals food availability and prevents them from eating eachother. It reproduces asexually by periodically budding.
Habitat: The Aegla Fields.
Environmental And Ecological Report
The Aegla fields are starting to encroach into the ancestral biome of the lake. The silty flats are not nearly as big as they used to be, and are getting smaller still.
The giant peas have evolved a much more pressurized internal bubble to keep a round shape, and by that, getting a little larger. Vermiforms and eusocial peas still go around, in huge numbers, taking advantage of the abundant flora to grow into truly huge numbers. A new speies of vermiforms is shaped like mats of flesh that slide along the violet and digest the plants, reproducing via budding from their backs.
Aegla themselves have changed also, becoming more rigid in shape and gaining short black stems. They resemble really soft and stout violet kelp now. They form a tightly knit barrier between the lake floor and the open water preventing the Puffers and Plateworms from reaching down to feed. This does not apply to the Corndogs, which, using its very small size, is capable of moving through most of the growth, feeding on the rich detrius normally locked under the plants. They are found in copious numbers.
Magma island just keeps growing taller and wider, cracking and shattering into a shape reminicent of a cakes crust as it does. Many smaller bumps have appeared around it as well.
Here's Magma!
More players are very much appreciated. Don't be shy.
Author
Topic: Competive Evolution: Season 2, Turn 8 (7/20) (Looking for players) (Read 9144 times)