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[Shoku]

No, still not quite right. It's not going to be that the organisms are that much more complex (though if you insist on viewing it that way it's easy to make this round peg fit that square hole,) but that they have more complex relationships with each other. Right now the simplicity is just the food but a ways down the road we'll have lots of variety there.

As for scientific concepts the real fun of science is using your imagination to picture what's going on. Magnetism is supposedly pretty tough to understand but when you get that it's the same kind of thing as gravity except there are two directions that just cancel each other out most of the time and- well, let's just say I've got better mental pictures of proteins interacting that anyone could ever render in a video. Of course I obsess a little bit about how those videos don't match it because anyone that doesn't know better is going to think these things move about like clockwork.

[Supermikhail]

I still stand by my despise of human brain. Just take our short-term memory, or the phenomenon whose name I don't remember where you need some essential information and can't remember it for the love of god, and only stupid associations come to mind.

And as long as it's a biological thread, another thing to back up Agent Smith's theory that humans are parasites (the Matrix). Today I thought that we may be symbionts, we coexist with other animals to common advantage. But then I realized - nothing of the sort. Even though our pets get a sort of reliable source of food, on the average, in the same package comes lack of exercise, social exchange with members of the same species, and environmental influence on the survival of individuals, translating in the long term to slow or no adaptation to changes in environment. While we still have our guards, sources of food, wool, what have you, and spiritual comfort.

Simply despicable.

In other news, I'm still working on 3D, but don't have anything to show for it, just setting up the environment. Do you, by any chance, know if the shallow waters where most of our creatures live, if looking from underwater, should show any horizontal movement? The way I've got it set up, waves appear to move steadily in one direction... Well, I guess it depends on currents... Or maybe it would look better if the movement was periodical - you know, ebb and flow, ebb and flow?

Addendum. I guess, I could share another recollection. Well, I feel like it and also I feel that it might be the place to do it.

My work in this thread sometimes causes pain to me, or you could say, it's some irony, as I've had may wonderful creatures die on my hands, from a clam to cats. I've recently started visiting different zoo-shops, going around aquariums and noting to myself what awesome features nature has bestowed on its many children. And at the same time aching inside while encountering relatives of creatures that met a premature and sometimes painful end at my care. I probably have to assure you that it has always been unintentional, it just happened and even without any connection with my experience in caring about them. The clam was a surprise from my mother who took it, quite alive but rapidly drying up, to make food out of it, but had no idea how, and little desire to after I revealed to her its condition. A parrot, while also unexpected, had been set-up quite nicely, I think, but was killed by my cat. I just wonder what I'm doing in this thread - I who neither feels a part of natural, evolving life, nor is able to be one... nor is much welcomed to be one, if you think about it.

[Shoku]

It's kind of a wonder how people convince themselves that society stops evolution. Even with the finest medical care there is still a great range of genetic conditions which immediately drop one's reproductive fitness to zero. Meanwhile by spaying and neutering our pets we actually more greatly impact the reproductive fitness of those who have their organs in tact. Clearly we can see how the pure breeds have changed much more dramatically than their wild counterparts have in the same period of time.

And as for lacking exercise and social contact and so forth: that's improper pet ownership. I'm pretty lazy myself but I can still bother to take my dog on a walk.

More interesting though is the opposite perspective. We like to think that we are the ones using them but it makes just as much sense to say that they are using us. Wheat is just another plant with a fairly narrow set of living conditions yet through corn's use of humans it has come to take up a greater portion of the biosphere by many magnitudes. Just by growing some appealing starchy bits it has harnessed us to open up enormous tracts of land to it. Plants evolved those flowers to take advantage of insects as pollinators so we already know they have a history of this kind of thing. Likewise look at all the other domesticated species who have used us to secure themselves wide reaching success.
Neither we nor they have had time to adapt quite enough to the new local environment caused by these new interactions but we are all well on our way.

-

Keeping pets can be rough but so long as you learn from your mistakes it's worth it to keep trying.

[Supermikhail]

Wow, that's a nice spin on it. However, I'd like to note that the examples of progressive companionship you've provided belong to the plant kingdom, which is immensely satisfying to me as a person attracted to vegetarianism. Although, that's probably a matter for another discussion entirely, and it's been said in this thread already that our brains need protein-rich food, I believe.

That my reminiscence wasn't about pets. Well, some of them were pets, and some of them weren't. The thing that drives me to pets is a sense of productive companionship that I hope to get from our co-existence. And the most fascinating aspect - becoming friends, that is taming. I haven't ever been successful in it. As I've said most of my attempts ended in tragedy. Of course, I've gained a lot of experience from them, so to say, the hard way. That it hasn't been mutual (due to their cessation of any experience) is what's been making me more and more resentful of any interspecies interaction.

Oh, about your previous post, namely, protein visualisation. Of course, exercising imagination on micro-level constructs is good, but it doesn't really answer what I said about our brain's inability to grasp certain concepts. Can you with certainty say that in your mental picture of proteins you have particle-wave duality correct? I, to be frank, simply can't imagine the electron simultaneously in both states - it's either a smudge around the nucleus, or a micro-moon revolving around a micro-planet. Also, I, actually, doubt very much that you've got size relationships correctly - the nucleus is some tens of thousand times smaller than the atom, and if it was me, I'd constantly keep zooming between them trying to imagine them at the same time... Well, I guess, I've got a lot of unhealthy exaggeration here. But nonetheless.

Also, another example, which is pure speculation on my part. It's a common fact, especially among artists, that brain always fiddles slightly with the brightness of the image it constructs from our eyes' signals - it makes some areas of shadow lighter, for example. I don't see any particular use to it, and in contemporary world, I believe, people find this quality rather detrimental, again especially if they are artists. I believe it is due to our brain's contrast range limitation, because, if it's capable of distinguishing the details in that shadow, why can't it show them without changing brightness? Because we, people, are stupid, that's my answer!

At that, I swear I'm going to have something to show for my promise by the weekend! Meanwhile, let's keep bumping the thread.

[Shoku]

Well cows have had a pretty huge boom thanks to humans as well. It's pretty clear that they'd be much much less numerous if not for their little bit of control over humans. Chickens I can't really bring myself to argue for- back when we made most of the arable land into farms and started harvesting the crops with machines we drove wild chickens nearly to extinction and now the predominant form of life for them is undeniably unhealthy for them. I like to think permaculture farming has a shot at overtaking the whole factory farming model but that would basically require humans choosing to be less effective and, well, we know how hard it is to get people to so much as consider a non-progressive world view.

*Permaculture should theoretically get more out of a given chunk of land. It just looks like it would be harder to automate.

Actually the protein visualization thing is rightly at a different scale than any of that. There are still good comparisons to be made though because just like with the trouble of painting an atom to proper scale there is a problem of having a large number of things. With picturing molecule interactions you have at simplest the physics model of billiard balls bouncing around on their table and off of each other and at the other end of the learning spectrum you're given all of these tinker toy models to visualize spinning freely along certain connections but remaining rigid about others. The best sense of this that artists and engineers have been able to put into pictures for others is basically an amateur animator's mistake: They've got the frames of the animation that really matter and to fill in the space between they just draw straight lines between all the parts.

They know better than to think it works like that but at the same time they have the problem of making a video that is watchable. People can only recognize so many frames a second so the options are to either do a full realistic representation of the movements of some molecule over thirty minutes in order to show a single step of the process, show such erratic movements that the process practically looks like it has been corrupted with static, or to just dumb it down and only show the basic concept that is important.

Now me? In my head? I'm not limited to purely visual concepts. This is good news because photons would not be very informative about the nature of an electron cloud- hell, even electrons don't give enough resolution for that. But in my head? I can turn perspective on and off, use wildly non-Euclidean space projections, or even dissect the whole visualization to the point that there's nothing visual about it. Or if I'm feeling lazy I can just imagine an orange sitting in a field, pan the camera up, up, and up into the sky, and then draw a circle something like 3 miles across. Even before things like Google Earth I could do a decent job of scaling down the park and imagining that grey mass that a city becomes when you're looking at it as if from a transcontinental flight. All of those 'science for the uninitiated' productions have been training me to for decades.

I know my eye doesn't have the resolution to catch the size of an atom and at the same time have the smallest angular bit I could make out not still dwarf a proton but what does that matter inside of my head? Pretending to still use my eyes is certainly something I know how to do in there but I can just as well pretend to use imaginary organs without those limitations.

Ok, so particle wave probability densities? Yeah, I know I'm not picturing those as they are in reality. Not like a particle unless you try to make it act like a wave and not a wave unless you try to make it act like a particle- dissipates it's energy all in one spot but the peaks and valleys of the wave form cancel each other out when there's only one unit. I simply don't know enough about it. People have told me that it makes particle patterns if you place a detector in one of the slots but they haven't told me much about how you detect a photon without altering it's course so I don't know if two very different air densities could cause the same behavior or any number of other little variations to the experiment, much less all those other experiments about the nature of light. Does this mean that nobody pictures it as well as I picture cell contents? Of course not- that isn't even related. Hell, I don't even picture all of the cell contents so much as have a decent physics engine for displaying the general categories of them I know about; no doubt somebody out there who knows so much about the specific proteins in a system uses a mental framework like mine but with the actual details filled in.

-

Actually the fiddling with brightness is a common technique used in photography to sharpen edges. The contrast to pick it out in our heads is obviously there or else we wouldn't know there was an edge to sharpen in the first place but by separating what we're seeing first into individual objects our sense of sight has already taken us a step away from consciously dealing with the exact stimulus from our eyes and instead moved us just slightly into the realm of perceiving the world around us in terms of objects.

Brains are a rather expensive organ for a body to develop and maintain (even though they compute so much on the energy input of a light bulb,) so dealing with the exact input of sensory organs is a wasted endeavor. A photographic memory is useful for situations like forensics  investigations but we didn't evolve in an episode of CSI so instead we use the energy saving shortcut of just cutting out whole chunks of what we're perceiving and basically just replacing them with a search engine link to our internal wikipedia. Instead of uncompressed video of a woman wearing whatever outfit climbing into a yellow car with checkered trim it's snip-snip Carol climbed into a Taxi.

Hell, I barely have any memories of events that I could say I actually had a video representation of in my head- if I was very young and my parents were yelling at me about something dangerous or I felt particularly humiliated there's most of an audio clip for it but I bet I cut parts out of that too and just plug them back in whenever I try to play back the memory. I can construct a truckload worth of video segments to go with the actual memories as quick as I can snap my fingers. Hell, I'm only aware that they're constructs because I know about how my brain does this.

-

Meh, it's not like the thread is going to fall off of the list. I'd say more good is done by letting it dip low for awhile and then hammering it with quality content because that way people don't get sick of seeing "that old thing" they've decided they aren't interested in and anybody new looking at it sees a much more appealing collection of, well, this.

This kind of bumping is probably on the better side of things though. I like having to go through thoughts and sometimes reorganize them like this though I do always worry just a bit about driving people off in doing so.

[Supermikhail]

I just want to say first and foremost, that I love you for bringing up permaculture. Future is so much brighter for me now - humanity may have a future!

Also, about visualisations - I don't feel entirely convinced, but I doubly love you for at least partially convincing me and also for talking about non-visual visualisation, because I feel completely sci-fi'ed now, and all fuzzy inside. I guess I'll congratulate you on your brain physiology. Also, I've already forgotten my point, so, we are limited, and well, we are.

I came here to say that I think the OP might need to be updated. It's been already, for which bringing up my affection again might feel extraneous. Although I've got some difference of opinions. Are they really just bacteria colonies between mineral plates? They... function as wholes, I think. Besides, it feels kind of derogatory. And bad for publicity. Can they be upgraded to primitive organisms? I guess they're too primitive to go into Invertebrates, but they've got some tissues.

About bumping. I actually thought that this stuff would bring in participants. You know, it's technically General Discussion. And in places even Personal Advice. These things should have attracted people, but I guess not...

They weren't just for promotion, mind you. Thoughts about the promotional aspect came only after, actually... Well, lurk then, everybody else, and one day we're going to have five-legged trunk-tailed insect ostriches, and where are you going to be?

[Shoku]

My mother and sister make a couple of seasonal trips a year out to this permaculture place in an adjacent state. They've both got extra freezers in their basements to hold all the chickens they buy up and they get a good portion of their eggs that way too.
Plus anything larger they decide to decide to try. I think my mother had like half of a pig six months back.

-

Ha. Impeccable timing I seem to have~

-

I'm talking in terms of lineage. They don't exactly have organs though except maybe the jets.

So here's a thing about tissues: just about all developing animals start from that egg cell and then start dividing the cell down the middle. You're probably just familiar enough with that to know that it's a hollow ball around the time it implants itself into the side of a womb. After that they keep dividing but the ball folds in on itself so that you have two layers of cells. The opening is typically where the mouth ends up and then you've got some cells that are all set up to turn into different tissue types. Even that virtually alien stuff like hydras starts out like this but what I really look for is just some patterned distinction for the cells. For all I know if you tore one of the burger apart the ones that were inside but were exposed to water would just change into the external type of cells. (Regeneration is fine but regeneration requires that the cell reorganize to get the body back to a particular shape- what I described would have the things grow in triangle shapes if they happened to have their shells broken in that pattern.)

Fun fact: your spinal cord actually comes from the outer layer of cells. A good ways after the first inside outside distinction a little section of "skin" layer along the backside folds in and pinches off. This takes a certain B vitamin and so we've found that we can get rid of spinal bifida (where part of the spine if sticking out of the body- admittedly mentioning it makes the fun fact less fun,) by making sure expecting mothers get that vitamin. (Riboflavin I think?) Because of their shared lineage in your early body skin and nerve cells have a lot of traits in common.

If you want to think about it in progressive complexity terms these are a lot like sponges. A protective outside portion, a line of feeding cells with exposure to water, and glob of structural cells in between. Certainly much more mobile but sponges create water flows over their feeding cells while these just deplete the nearby water of foody stuffs and move to a new spot, except that one swimmer.

If you'd like to give them greater distinctions from bacteria colonies we may want to explore a life cycle.
Basic parts of that are: being some sort of larva that mostly just tries to not get eaten; increasing in size; swapping genetic material; popping out a bunch of babies. There's not a strict order for this to happen in and you don't have to do one just the once before leaving it forever (most obvious example: you could grow a bit, swap DNA, grow some more, spit out babies.) A lot of wet-place life also alternates between sexual reproduction one generation and then asexual reproduction the next. You could have burger split between it's shell parts then grow some flowery mating bits and spit out spores until little remains but a dried up husk (well, not "dry-dry" but you know- depleted.)

*spores are technically the asexual sort of reproducers but I thought the popular idea of them made for better imagery. It would be gametes if they sprayed sperm and egg or just flat out babies if that step took place before sending them out away from the parent body.

[Supermikhail]

It's so exciting today, suddenly. And a little annoying. Anyway.

First about the last. I've thought for some time now that our critters have at least one specialised tissue - muscle. At least, some of them perform a lot of actions that could use it.

Second, permaculture is so great! My interest especially comes from my grandparents' country house. My parents live in a small town and all their children moved away into larger cities, one has a kind of stable business, and a kid who needs to go to school, and better one school, not moving from city to city. The other, my mother, works in yet another large city, where I live, too. The grandparents are old, and the time approaches when they'll be gone. There's a lot of uncertainty with what's going to happen to the house. Just recently I thought that if it were up to me, I'd demolish it all to hell, because to me it's a nest of animal and nature abuse - goats held in inhumane stalls, sleeping literally in their own shit, chickens running around always with some disease - well, yeah, the grandparents are old, and can't do it very well, but why don't they then just go and live in the town apartment that they own, too? Granddad is just too stubborn, he supposedly loves goats whatever the conditions they are kept in say. Well, anyway, the ground there is torn and scarred, a lot of garbage in garbage places or just where no one who matters goes, no sanitation. I'm somewhat fond of that place, as I spent all my childhood summers there, but I just hate the way it's run, and wasn't able to suggest anything different until recently. But maybe permaculture is going to change that! Although, for me to be able to keep the house I'll have to find a stable source of income, also distant. Also, a way to connect to the Internet. I have very hard time imagining that anyone else would be interested in permanent living there.

On that note, I suppose actually turning the place into permaculture would be a pretty long process? The vegetable garden is very old-fashioned, well, there are native apple trees and some bushes but everything else, including animals is "imported". Although from the lack of care the backyard garden's been overgrowing with wild vegetation for the last two years and it looked pretty lively to me.

Another thing I wanted to talk about is, I think this thread could use one more topic. How about pet health? And namely, have you got any opinion on what domestic cats should be fed? Just today I had another zoo-shop assistant ridicule my cat's diet that's been prescribed by a zoo-shop assistant from a different shop, who ridiculed my cat's diet when I came there, and before that it was dry commercial food. I think that's actually the second main reason why I don't want to deal with pets - what am I supposed to feed them? Everybody has their own opinion, and vets can't agree even remotely. Like, being a human I know that a lot of meet is bad, don't drink too much coffee, eat a lot of fruits and vegetables etc. For cats - the one before last shop-assistant and presumably an experienced vet said that mixing meat with oatmeal is great. This last shop-assistant said that oatmeal is death. I just want to yell, "Leave me the hell out of your commercial and self-righteous agendas!" And take my cat because I don't know what to feed it with. Oh, and my parents' answer to all my cat's needs is fish.

So, your ideas on these things would be very much welcome, especially since I don't have a reason to suspect that you might be involved in the major-pet-food-company conspiracy.

Addendum. I guess setting up permaculture isn't so easy. Do you know anything about what would be native domestic animals in the Central Russia, where winters are quite harsh, and isn't a lot of forestation? I tried to Google something but I failed.

Another addendum. Might be related to the thread, but I'm having some comprehension difficulty.

[Shoku]

:/

Well, cats in the wild are water-efficient enough that just eating insects and such gets them enough water. They should be alright on the dry stuff but be careful because a lot of pet food mysteriously contains chemicals used in euthanasia. Not in high enough concentrations to harm the pet much if at all but the only place I know of where those chemicals are used is euthanasia and most people would probably not be too keen on making their pets into cannibals.

When people with experience in a field give you conflicting recommendations it's usually a good indication that they don't actually base it on very much. If they're actually laughing at you or otherwise being rude might as well give conflicting information back. "Ha ha, yeah, it is pretty dumb. I was just testing you. I actually feed my cat ____" Seeing as you've gone through a few different things you should be able to send them in circles and only really be lying about when you did something.
First and foremost is simply if you have good reason to think your pet's diet isn't working out very well. Beyond that it becomes very difficult to tell if people are just scamming you or stupid themselves. The dry commercial stuff obviously works to some degree or we'd have a bunch of sickly cats dieing all over the place.

I don't know much about how having a whimsical diet of "here's some tuna because I felt like giving it to you" affects a cat but if it doesn't poop all over or otherwise show you some kind of distress it should be close enough to ok.

I haven't really been able to thing of a way to use pet diets to talk about biological systems much though so this general topic probably would have been better sent through the message system.

As for those links though, it's unfortunate because I can smell the stink of a reporter having no clue what the research was and what the person was telling them as background information. It's not news at all that there are many genes for various traits with complex inter-regulation relationships and any biology student should have at least been introduced to the statistical methods of measuring the impact of a gene. A few years back I read a paper where they were looking at the dark vs light colorations of some mice that lived on beaches or on recently hardened rock from volcanoes and such.

*Basically the color of something like hair is based on cells pumping the pigments into little capsules and then sending those capsules out into the new growth.

With the mice there were two mutations that lightened them slighty. The pathway was a bit too complicated to describe from memory but alone either mutation didn't lighten the mice very much but with the both of them together you got almost all of the lightening in fur color. This is very relevant in the case of those flies because we can see that people already know to look for past just the straight up single-gene sort of focus that page talked about.

Now as for those kinds of studies, they're getting to be pretty common these days. Lots of people just rounding up a lot of samples and then checking all the DNA to see what kinds of relations they can find (one study found enough genes to explain about 30% in the variation of height in humans,) but these don't tell us anything about why those genes have anything to do with height. That takes a more narrow focus when somebody goes in and really breaks open the chemistry of it, like someone must have done to work out mice pigmentations before the people I read about could work out why the mutations having a bigger impact together made sense (and the order was important but again- not going to describe the pigment system.)

The writer for the plant article was much better. I'm not entirely sure if they are saying that JUST reversing the order had a major impact there or if it was that the reversed section got mutations that would never make it over to the non-reversed groups of plants and vice versa. As far as I know there are not many genes beyond the HOX genes (super important development stuff) that care about their order quite like that.

But other than that my only gripe is that an inversion wouldn't necessarily entirely stop recombination. Very rarely even our X and Y chromosomes manage to swap some material as evidenced by certain fertility issues where someone who is visibly female has chromosomes that are strikingly X and Y (very, very rarely.) The Y chromosome only makes someone male with a particular first-step gene that sets off the whole system that's scattered around the rest of your genome and then has a few genes that are only useful to males, such as proteins that improve sperm production (and likely some genes that may have been somewhat of a hindrance to females.)
A suitably placed inversion would certainly drive the frequency of recombination way way down but DNA is surprisingly elastic and can do some impressive contortion to line up similar sections.

[Supermikhail]

I guess I'm going to feed my cat what I usually feed it because frankly she looks very healthy.

Well, those articles were only mildly thread-related so no harm done to our thinking processes, I hope.

In other news, I think I did something! Disclaimer: the images didn't really take a lot of time, at least by professional standards, but I sank so much brain power into wrestling with Blender, that I'm just proud to have them. As a proof. Because next time I open the program, it might randomly decide that it didn't really like the lighting. Also, I did my first texture. Anyway,

Spoiler: Otherworldly Arc 3D, in cinemas this fall (click to show/hide)

Also, just when I thought I would upload them as ugly as they are, I suddenly had a breakthrough in what I'm not really sure myself, but I'm going to press ambient occlusion every time now. That's how the final look of the burger's picture came about. I haven't figured out yet how to do passable water, and especially water bubbles (along with bulbosaur's teeth), but we're getting there.

[Shoku]

So the burger has it's jets straight out on the sides like that? I imagined them as openings in the shell for some reason (and this probably explains the difficulty you had picturing jets and those fan ridges together as I described before.)

For the "teeth" just think round-ish stones. They're more about just grabbing something and moving it in (like a big portion of how we use our lips and tongue) than that whole other thing teeth are for.

[Supermikhail]

Hm. Openings in the shell... Like, straight down, or diagonal? And I'm still having difficulty imagining your idea, now probably even more than before.

Also, now that we've gone onto colour territory, it occurred to me it would be a good time to talk about colours. Mine were pretty random, although I tried not to make them decidedly red or blue, as I've heard these colours come from different sorts of blood, especially in creatures of such sizes... Or I may be thinking in a completely wrong direction, and at such sizes but with much more complex anatomy colours are attained mainly through pigmentation?

So, I believe a more realistic depiction would be to make them, well, sort of transparent white skin coloured, but, to have something mildly interesting to look at I made them different-coloured. And textured, in the case of bulbosaur. Although it now occurs to me that instead of fancy patterns I could spend time on a more rough skin texture.

[Shoku]

Well for the square one I pictured the ripple fins on the sides and just one opening dead center on the bottom of it. This kind of jet doesn't really make much sense because you'd have to shed the shell for a larger one as it grew bigger. I had decided to not press that issue and just go with it.

As for colors basic flesh is pretty much just colorless, and oftentimes not even opaque. Blood does add some hue to skin because the metals tend to have particular colors (hemoglobin has an iron atom held in the middle of it and as we know rust is a reddish color.) Hemocyanin is the other well known oxygen carrier and in using copper instead it is blue. I think the use of these metal atoms serves this one particular purpose on the molecule: When hemoglobin has all of its slots for oxygen filled it grabs them much more tightly. The basic result of this is that once it lets go of one unit of oxygen it will very readily give up the others. With the way chemistry usually plays out it would instead only being willing to give off it's final oxygen if there was a super low concentration of oxygen, and there wouldn't be if it had just given off the other three. We also have crazy regulatory stuff going on like this one molecule that's very similar to a unit of glucose but binds to hemoglobin and makes it give up oxygen MUCH more easily. We shove that onto some fraction of our hemoglobin pretty quick when we're at high altitudes, which explains why you're out of breath so badly when you first go up into the mountains but get over it after several days, for the most part.

Seeing as none of these have any blood analog we can count that source of color out and seeing as none of them can see we can count out at least very nearly all other color. Now the shells are obviously something excreted so they can vary from light to dark, though I'm not certain if animals make their shells dark for camouflage or if it's just a consequence of materials available.

Realistically I'd say the width of these things should make them mainly transparent at this point but you don't really need to do that if it's bothersome.

[Supermikhail]

I don't really have a lot of time, but as long as I've procrastinated in another thread already, I figured I'd bump this one up.

That thing about transparency - I decided it's actually about my perception of transparency. When I rendered an xwingus, which was a failed first attempt, and which was transparent, it had it's back visible through as a distinct edge, and I though it shouldn't be like that. But then I remembered my physics, and as it's an edge of two materials of different optical properties, it should stand out, right?

Today I thought that we haven't had real evolutionary stuff here for some time, and came up with something. Remember trisgea rhombus? I think, in the process of perfecting the formula, it could grow its feeding "whiskers" bigger, so it would resemble the xwingus somewhat and, just as xwingus' evolution, would go closer to the floor to sift, or as it would be, fish in the silt with its new-formed "nets" (for some reason, silt appears very nutritious to me). And, what if its two squirters on the rear grew also, because with the "nets" it would need more propulsion. In my notebook I even wrote that "Its squirters become a real engine". And they work alternating, like the car engine's cylinders, but I don't know how it looks from a biological standpoint. The body becomes thin and elongated, to compensate for otherwise decreased hydrodynamics.

So, trisgea rhombus evolves into a moving underwater flower, I guess.

Oh. The lower whiskers become harder, as their purpose becomes to muddy up water with silt, for upper whiskers to snatch up food out of. A finer, but probably questionable, detail is that the upper whiskers have cillia on them, to move food to the body. I don't know how well it would work for hydrodynamics, though.

Illustration at the weekend, hopefully.

[Shoku]

I wouldn't really worry about making the images transparent. Unless we went into a lot of detail for how the guts looked it wouldn't really help convey anything to other people.

Stirring up silt would make a little more sense if it had something small that burrowed into it. To rip off nature a bit- how about another rhombus shrank the upper shell section so that that bottom mostly wrapped around and if had the appendages sticking up. It would then have them waving around out in the water currents and curl them in if it grabbed onto something edible, or obviously if a predator came and bit it some.

As for our friendly bulb I'm thinking it could fill the bubble in its interior with a fluid and still be fairly bouyant while also having nutrients diffuse through it. It could probably get away with just having one stretch of gut in close contact with the bubble while still reasonably nourishing all the flesh near the bubble. You also get better transfer of molecules by having more surface area so instead of a sphere it should have more of a squashed disk and maybe even have some nubby extensions coming off of it.