Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Shoku]

More like a flea. As far as I know diffusion was the big limiter on size early on but even so you things can't just go from a lump of bacteria up to the size of a mouse all in one continuous push. A big limit on size is what you're eating- if you've got to physically pick each morsel up then there's a very real maximum speed that you could possibly eat at even if the food was a thousand times more plentiful than that and even relatively within reach. On Earth things that suck in tons of small things tended to eat larger stuff and transition to things like filtering through those baleen teeth that family of whales use.

As for the critter- just sitting on the ground and eating things with a mouth like that would make enough sense that I don't think it needs any earlier steps shown, but also boring because we've already got that. Catching gas is whimsical and with things still being so small it's not like it really needs a lot of lift to float. The digestive tract branching lets it nourish a larger frame and probably spew out tons of eggs/sperm but I didn't go into that because the speed of reproduction doesn't really mean much without a lot of equations to show where things stand in relation to each other and all in all I'd say we can just ignore it all of the time except when we want to say it's an issue for a particular situation- and maybe solve the issue thereafter.

[Supermikhail]

I haven't born any new evolutionary ideas, but I've discovered in my Youtube subscriptions that Stanfort University are uploading a great set of lectures that strangely coincide with the recent revival of this thread, I think. The problem with them is that there are many of them and each one is one and a half hours. But I expect that if I found time, it would have been spent very usefully.

Edit: you're gonna like it At about 32 minutes.

[Shoku]

Biology in rap format almost always just feels awkward and at it's best it doesn't but also doesn't have any real draw for me either. I'm more the dry humor type and I don't think anyone would know how to do that in that format.

[Supermikhail]

Oh, come on! Do you often have sung (or recited, as it is) biology lectures?

Anyway, I propose that the next step in evolution should be determined through a competition - of all the species we've got in the ocean. I feel like there's enough demand for bacteria to make it a... (whatever's the scientific name, if any) resource. I fear that your... bulbous creature (that I'm not going to name anything coherent - authorship) is going to win, but it's worth a try. However, from my yesterday's trip into my Youtube subscriptions (namely BBC World... something), I've learned that size doesn't decide everything.

I had an idea to develop your creature to make it be able to change the size of its cavities arbitrarily, so as to be able to release some gas, or suck in some water with tasty bacteria... and whoever else might stray in. I'm hinting that it might make it the first real predator.

Beyond that I'm having hard time thinking of any more developments for the current creatures. Hm, trisgea xwigus could use some finetuning. Is the fact that its feeding apparatus spread over the large area between its wings an advantage or a disadvantage?

[Shoku]

That depends on size mechanics but it would at some point become inefficient. I won't be too stringent so you can decide if that's now or not.

The sucking in water thing sounds a lot like how submarines control diving and rising but at this point I think it would have a hard time digesting any of those bacteria when there was so much water to dilute the enzymes and things.

My balloon one is pretty reliant on just always having stuff in front of it's mouth though so if bacteria levels drop it's going to need some sort of movement to make it.

[Supermikhail]

It doesn't really need to change depth. I imagine that it can keep the same volume of its basic floating cavity, while fiddling with the size of others, but not changing the volume of gas while doing so. I just thought it could be turned into a predator - it sucks in a creature and then squirts out water through smaller holes, leaving the creature inside. And so it could create a pressing evolutionary factor - how fast you can waddle away when something starts sucking at your tail.

[Shoku]

It seems like inhaling a lot of water multiple times to get a prey item would take a lot of energy. If they are close enough to stationary then they might as well be picked up manually and if they move- well, you had better be able to overpower them from the get go. Obviously at the start a cavity that can be filled or emptied is probably not going to have a lot of suction.

The filtering things through smaller holes holds some promise but the free floating bacteria that could be sucked in right from the start are tiny so actually sending the water back out through some kind of pinhole setup would be too troublesome. Instead I think they could suffer losing some portion of what they suck in and having some structures on the walls of the cavity that were like a net or otherwise sticky to the prey, and then little arm structures on the cells could grab and engulf them.

Since the free floaters became less numerous circulating the water to get at them may or may not make sense in terms of how much effort it takes.
The problem though is working this into the gut it already has. Lining all of the gut cavity like this seems like kind of a waste because a whole lot of water will need to come in to put basically any out-pressure near any particular exit, or in other words you'd run the risk of getting a pile up of indigestible crap some place in the middle when there's still enough in current from the mouth but no longer enough out current to whichever exit.

There's an obvious solution in having just one tube that exits out the top but evolution needs gradual change and it would take something dumb like having them all migrate to the top until they merged but somehow not interrupting the gas sack and it would lose the whole benefit of always having nutrients freshly absorbed near every part of the body.

And finally on a technical note it is already a predator. It's been eating tons of the free floating ones and tearing off chunks of the others if it could get close enough and bite/tear them off. With some up/down control and a way of sensing any of the bottom crawlers around it it could easily float down with Jaws music playing before really ruining the day of it's prey. If they can be quickly exhausted by using those jets of theirs (and given the form they should) it could just latch onto some part without severing it and freak them out until they could no longer move away.

[Supermikhail]

No time for a proper reply, but

Yay, we've got a winner.

Let's name it bulbousaur

I feel like I've run out of inventional steam. There's gotta be a more reliant system to evolve them, beyond accidental inspirations.

[Shoku]

Nature doesn't use anything else.

Though to be honest I'm just giving this much push and pull because nobody else is around and you've seemed receptive to it.

You could totally give one of them a hook and just have it latch onto ole wingus for free transportation, unless maybe if it gets too many of them and can't carry the weight anymore.

We could give burger some bigger arms and have it release some sacrificial (or even already-worn out) cells to draw in the grazing types.

Feel free to think smaller though. One could just make little spikes that sit between the cells. Would really discourage the bulb types from trying to eat them.

[Supermikhail]

Your reply has sparked some inspiration!

On that note, I've just discovered that I'm a horrible analytical person. When I was a kid and we played something role-based, and I was a sort of GM, I decided that the story would be based around ghosts. And designed them. The most interesting ones are distinct in my memory to this day, even though it's been over ten years since I designed them. My current realization is that they weren't based around any inspirations or dreams. To take one ghost. I wanted to make scary monsters and with a twist. So I thought that one of the "features" that horrify people is asymmetrical disfigurement of familiar things. So I gave it five eyes. Then I took a regular ghost feature - a white blanket. I thought that when there's nothing under the blanket, it's scary but also cliché, so I decided to put something there. So I had the monster have a snaky tail. Then I also gave it crayfish claws, although I don't remember why.

I'm a horrible calculating person.

With this confession done, I've thought of two, possibly three evolutions. One is, say a relative of trisgea burger by accident swims into the bulbosaur, and doesn't die in the process. What does it find inside? A suspension of tasty-tasty undigested parts of creatures caught by bulbosaur. So, it decides to stay and feed on them. Of course, it can steal all the food from the bulbosaur, and then the bulbosaur starves to death. But it decides against it, and eats only what the bulbosaur hasn't digested, can't digest or doesn't want at all. Bulbosaur doesn't mind in the least. Well, in some places it may mind, but in others its inhabitant (?) makes itself to use by disposing of waste, because its a proficient squirter and squirts waste out of the mouth of the bulbosaur when it doesn't feed.

With time, the bulbosaur and the inhabitant grow closer. The inhabitant makes its one end stationary near the bulbosaur's mouth, to do its job better. It's even joined by its relatives, and they occupy one corner of the bulbosaur's mouth each, and divide their jobs - one squirts out waste, other two draw in fresh water.

That's one.

Trisgea xwingus floats to the bottom and finds a lot of useful stuff in the silt. And incidentally, it has got good "appendages" to get the stuff out of the silt - its lower fins or wings. It waves them at the silt and stuff floats up, right onto the feeding parts. With time xwingus' appendages grow better at their jobs. The lower wings separate into thin strips and start looking like combs. Moving combs, that constantly sift through the mud on the bottom. The upper wings grow in size and adapt to the sine wave movement. The feeding parts condense and form a soft porous tissue between the lower and upper wings.

Number three is my pet. I think we need a gray ooze for company. It's a layer of slime moving along the bottom and feeding on bacteria. It's soft and munchy, but on the upper side it's got stingers like that of a jellyfish.

Now, some of my descriptions may be confusing, and need an illustration to clarify the concept, but I've suddenly decided against drawing it. I've started to feel that flat pen drawings aren't enough to express the things that are in motion here. So, I want to try to refresh my Blender skills and brew up something more illustrative. I'm not sure how it's going to work out or how much time it's going to take, I haven't launched Blender since winter, I think, and before that I was only a beginner. But what we work with here doesn't seem too hard to model, so I'm going to give it a try. Cross your fingers.

[Shoku]

Goodness, I didn't expect 3d done by hand.

Well anyway I think the only part I don't have a good image of is the stinger bit. Do you mean it has tentacles sprouting out of the top of it or just that the top surface stings things that touch it?

A good question though is how do the bulbosaur replicate the new mouth bits? Do they survive well enough outside of a host that a young one just happens to get one in it's mouth? What happens if one takes in more of them than it has room for?

[Supermikhail]

Well, my idea for the bulbosaur's friends is that, yes, at some point in time on geological scale they start out independent. Of course, I can't predict what happens after that.
To the last question I'd say that the boys can sort it out. I mean, it's competition inside, get out or become another bit of food. Or doom the whole enterprise. Well, anyway an extra one can't take a full share because there are only three corners in the bulbosaur's mouth.
This can be a beginning of another "function" of bulbosaur's friends - they can protect it from parasites.

Addendum. That ooze is like a green soft furry carpet, only when you step on it, you immediately lose balance and fall back because your foot hurts like hell. So I don't really know how these things work. Maybe very small tentacles.

[Shoku]

Establishing any issues with how it works right now and what happens is handy for working out things that would make sense happening next.

Well with jellyfish the stingers are kind of like a small pit where this long hose is coiled up. When this gets touched by anything remotely like a fish and not much like the jellyfish itself the hose really quickly turns itself inside out and in doing so punctures the animal deep enough to get at the blood stream and then toxic things pour out the tip and into the blood. Admittedly I don't know much about how this setup would have evolved but I could probably dig around to find some journals about it if I felt motivated.

At this point seeing as nothing has blood that exact thing isn't going to make much sense but at the same time they're small enough that just sprinkling some poison on their surface would get it awfully far through their body, what with nutrients from food also being able to diffuse that far easily enough.

[Shoku]

My sister found this video that conveys the basic struggle I've had trying to set this project up.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6218337687149482044#
It takes like 30 minutes to get to the subject of progress but there we have the reason every other project to make alien life does it so far off the mark.

[Supermikhail]

Oh, yeah, I'm at the beginning of the video and I have to say, even though I had theory of evolution introduced to me like... ten, or more years ago, it's only about half-a-year ago, through some reading and mental speculation I think I got it, and then I thought "Wow, eureka! I'm a genius! This is the greatest thing in the world!" Basically, I had to unconvince myself that I'm the pinnacle of the world, the matter and all the living things. I guess this my belief was rooted in my interest in artificial intelligence - because artificial intelligence, at least sci-fi and... philosophical, wants to emulate the greatest intelligence in existence - human.

By the way, it had for a long time been baffling for me how sci-fi writers could think of any greater intelligence when they wrote about E.T.'s. But recently and suddenly I saw that, first, humans are very hormone-based beings and hormones will often overrule any purely intelligent movements. Then, after a short excursion into quantum physics, I discovered that there are a lot of concepts that our brain just organically cannot grasp, has to employ approximation and illustrations, or leave them in the shape of mathematical equations. And I saw that not only there can be better intelligence (I believe, the adjective "better" can be applied to intelligence, because it's a pretty artificial construct, although I can be wrong), but also an intelligence vastly different from ours.

Yup. So, I see what you did there. Of course, we could play around with primitive organisms for an unlimited amount of time, but it's much more interesting to play with more and more complex organisms - we need to have an assumption of progress, evolution. And maybe, one day, there'll be a third one!