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[Shoku]

Naw, later plants maybe but these are vulnerable to anything that could break them up. They're really only held together well enough to function as a unit.
Like a floating glob of moss I guess.

[Supermikhail]

So, is it reasonable if Rooted one uses its soft tail to snatch lily pads off the surface? It already has some light sensitivity, but it doesn't have much mobility. Which could be amended by increased stretchiness of the tail.

And Octobrachius could re-qualify. Say it looses most of its arms and only the small ones remain. I reckon the big arms would be pretty useless because the plants would be much smaller than Octobrachius' prey.

[Shoku]

Not really no. Unless you think stretch some hundreds of times its body length would be reasonable. Even if what we were working with was the size of modern sea life the bottom wouldn't usually be near enough the water surface. Well they sort of could be but these would have to kind of litter the ground with their young while only the ones that got in suitable shallows (or could crawl to them) survived. Becomes more of a problem as they become smaller because the shallowest spots have the water rising and sinking with those tides and even just from the actual waves.

Now, it could potentially grow some more complex body structures giving some sort of smaller line floating up to the surface that could be yanked down below when it snagged something tasty.

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I'm not really for "losing" things. Fuse the arms, shrink them, grow stretch and twist them but don't just lop them off altogether. If you shrink them down to nubs and change the shape a bit they could make nice steering ridges maybe.

But if you really must be rid of something there's enough leeway at this stage to go back to an earlier ancestor.

[Supermikhail]

Oh. Of course not losing completely.

Now. What would you say to a symbiosis between Octobrachius and Donutsaur? Say, Octobrachius attacks Donutsaur, grabs it, but doesn't digest, at least not entirely. But it keeps swimming. This is beneficial to the Donutsaur which, with influx of fresh food quickly regrows lost bits.

Also, say, the rooted fellow still tries to reach the surface and tasty lily pads. It grows and grows upwards, and reinforces the tail with minerals similar to those making up the root. So, it grows insanely long, by the Ark's standards, and it basically pierces the water surface at all times, like a spear. Of course, the top is always in a fight with the hostile environment, which would require some adaptation, like pores able to close when exposed to air.


I still need to set up water and air pumps, and place some furniture around it, and then we can dip our fellows in!

[Shoku]

I don't really like that connection. It kind of feels like trying to mix up a teeter totter and a cruise missile.

No, if it's that very thin and very rigid at a length like that it's just going to snap apart really really often.

[Supermikhail]

Oh, well. How about a colony? Trying to build a Babel tower to the light. Similar to a coral but different.

[Shoku]

If they don't have to anchor to the bottom why not just let them swim? Like that video I linked you don't really need a lot to swim around slowly and it's not like these plants will run away.
Think grazers instead of predators. Just fill up somewhere then no rush to get to the next bit of food, just so long as they don't starve first.

[Supermikhail]

My problem with making them swimmers is that they've got orientation and anatomical differentiation (if such a term exists) which I don't really know what to do with. Obviously, if they want to swim, they've got to drop the shell bit - they don't have any special swimming devices so it's going to be an extra weight. They're left, I imagine, with one end long and thin, with a (relatively) developed vessel system, and muscles good for undulating movement. The other end is thick, has a bunch of muscle, previously used to stick to the shell; and secreting ability, previously used to restore damage to the shell.

[Shoku]

So what? The only swimming device anything has right now is a jet and having the shell at the bottom like that gives them a nice weight to keep them vertical. Take something that's there and use it for something else.

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Unfortunately my thoughts on octobrachius kind of staled out and I've forgotten to keep thinking about them. I'm going to try and get back to that...

[Shoku]

Though the hiding behind a shell thing could just be a portion of their lifecycle. Leaving it behind after they got big enough to not likely have to worry about being swallowed whole could make a lot of  sense.

[Supermikhail]

Yeah, after I left my computer running to render that thing, I, too, came upon this life-cycle idea. And I'd say it's the first one in these seas... Although. Are there two different species now - one with a free-floating form, one without?


You know, just showing off.

[Shoku]

The lighting or maybe how textures work with it definitely looks nicer like that.

I'd say just go with there being the one species. It doesn't sit right with me to have one species and then just give it a new life stage to make some other species.

[Supermikhail]

I feel like I'm done with computer graphics for a couple of days. Just looking again at this image, I'm starting to get an urge to fiddle with lighting again. And the current render time doesn't do any good to my nerves. Anyway. Edit: by the way, have you got any experience/creative ideas to the way a lab doing research on marine lifeforms from an environment differing from ours/from a different planet might be set up? I realized that keeping the critters in an open aquarium is not the brightest idea, and there's probably gotta be some testing equipment.

Let's look at this two-form idea from the evolution's point of view, that is, say, at first there really were two strands, one just sitting on the bottom, one with a free-swimming stage. Which one would be the most successful?

[Shoku]

Well the big trouble with studying aquatic life that developed away from us is bacteria. We really want to avoid slamming them with invasive species so we'd need to go in with completely sterile robots but even the ones we've been launching to Mars and such carry at least a few bacteria that seem to refuse to die. There wouldn't be much risk of contagious diseases or any of that though- the chemistry of those things makes them really species specific. All of the nastiest that gets us is either from a few sorts of animals that just happen to have diseases that are pretty close to compatible with our bodies or like carried through insect bites and that. But really what that takes is long term contact between humans and those species- nothing like what you'd see in the high end labs people would use for our first contact. As for any of their bacteria invading us back we're not really worried about wiping out species native to workbenches and test tubes but we would go to a fair effort to figure out what kinds of things were in their air and possibly seal against that.
So in a nutshell we'd be really reluctant to do it with anything but robots and we'd be pretty meticulous about those as well. Might have to like mine and refine the metal at the moon or something so it never had contact with our biosphere.

Well speaking in terms of the process it's assumed that if we were to just add on a free floating stage that it was useful enough to actually spread through the population in the first place. Being able to get up and swim about works better in the general sense but there are always a lot of things going on and I've already talked about some of the advantages and concerns of being rooted in place.
If we had more complex ecosystems going on I'd say there might be some areas where the stationary form did better but with what we have right now I'm not inclined to say there's much of that.

But I'm actually not to pleased with that so I'm going to give a little more breathing room to the species.
I'm sure you know the general difference between freshwater and saltwater. Well, land obviously creates some interesting variations to the water environments. So far we've just been dealing with continental shelf type areas but there are rivers that run off of the land and some shapes in the land result in other peculiarities. If you have a low ridge that separates a pool from the ocean at low tide the high tide will usually result in a big flow of water into these pools. A big difference about these that has matter to life on Earth is that these often have a lot of dirt kicked up and suspended in the water but seeing as vision isn't very present in what we've got that won't matter so much just yet. Still, some lakes and things should be available to these lifeforms. They would have hydration issues making big jumps between salinity levels so that sort of thing would be rare but might happen a few times down the road.

[Shoku]

I've realized something about Octobrachius- you've got those little syringes up front for sucking up food but even on a liquid diet there's probably waste involved. Do they have any way of dumping that out of themselves or do they just try to minimize it and pretty much die once there's enough of it to clog up their insides?