Print

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

[Sorent]

Ok great. I went ahead and developed a creature last night.




Pockmarlotis-
1.    Hard heavy knobby structure on the bottom capable of cracking off into clones of the original. This is the primary method of reproduction.
2.   Photoreceptors on the top in thin hair like strands that drift in the currents. These are the primary source of energy for the creature.
3.   Expanding balloon like membrane that controls buoyancy of the creature In order to enable changes in water depth.  This is the primary means of mobility.
4.   Main mouth in the bottom of the creature is used to draw in minerals for consumption.
5.   Vents on the sides are used to draw in water for filling the bladder.

This creature will rise and fall within the water column dependent on sea conditions and its need for energy from sunlight. Also could possibly be able to control internal salinity levels as another method of buoyancy. In order to reproduce the creature smashes its bottom end against a hard surface to break off shards that contain genetic material capable of cloning the parent.
Alternative form of reproduction would involve the creature not breaking the hard seed pod until after it dies at which point it bloats and goes to the surface where it can be smashed against rocks in the surf. At which point the bottom seed pod breaks into small pieces that are clones of the parent.

Please pardon my art skills. They could use some work. This is your standard Microsoft Paint special.

[Supermikhail]

Welcome to the project, Sorent. I actually feel pretty newbie right now, and I'd like to make sure that you know who is the guru here. Also, that's a nice one.

In today's news, I've just gotten to Metazoa, and found out that fragmentation is considered a form of reproduction. "A-ha. Like rape by external circumstances," I thought.

I still need some time to get to jellyfish, but I already know of many different ways of reproduction, where the distinction between colonies and multicellulars lies, and that cells are capable of secreting a great variety of substances and things, so if we want poison, we pretty much can have it. But no artistic contribution yet.

[Shoku]

Photoreceptors are actually the bit in your eye that are sensitive to light. I'm not really interested in dreaming up fictional cell structures, at least not until we've made it a good way through a tree of life once, so you can go ahead and say the hairs are full of chloroplasts. are they hairs just to get a lot of light or do the currents physically do something especially useful?

Does the mouth go through the reproduction knob or is it like behind it?

-

Yeah, poisons are kind of terribly difficult to simplify without just taking away all of the rules and just letting them be like magic. I can't make my mind up about how I'd want to address them for this.

[Sorent]

Oh sorry im pretty novice. I guess what I meant was chloroplasts. Similar to a plant. They are used in the same way a plant uses them. The currents dont do anything useful I more just added that part to help with a mental image of what this thing would look like. Also I think it would most likely be black or dark brown/green in color in order to absorb the most light while deep in the water.


After thinking about it a bit I dont think "mouth" is really the appropriate word to use here. It is more of a tube running up the stem section that attaches the Bottom structure to the water bladder. I dont have too much knowlage on the way plants function but I was kind of thinking that it would serve the same purpose as root structures do for terrestrial plants. So basicly the tube just gathers nutrients from the water or more directly while sitting on the ocean floor and then ingests them in whatever way plants ingest things. Pockmarlotis actually derives its name from the distinct markings it leaves on the ocean floor after a collection of these rest upon it.

I would appreciate any suggestions you have for making this creature work in a primative setting. Also if it does not seem feasable just let me know. I still have many more ideas.

I forgot to mention that the tube does run through the center of the bottom knob.

[Shoku]

Well you're willing/able to take words apart and judge what they mean so you're still at least a little bit ahead of the crowd. I spent too many years studying the stuff for a fancy degree so if I didn't want to fill people in on detail I wouldn't even try something like this.

Different wavelengths of light penetrate to different depths. If these are rising and falling through them they can just sort of pick a color and go with it. There are actually some really depth specific sorts of bacteria and- well what I meant to get at is that if it's trying to be black just to get any light then it's gonna die. I'm not too concerned about choosing the best color- if anyone REALLY wants to know I could go find some charts about light piercing water but even I think that would be tl;dr

Plats mostly just suck in some of the metal ions and such along with the water they're absorbing. Potassium and Nitrogen are basically the two things they ever have trouble with, mainly due to pH imbalances and nitrogen just being all around a bit hard to come by- for whatever reason plants never took up the chemical process of converting some compounds with nitrogen in them into the forms it can actually use, but there are plenty of bacteria happy to do that for them. Perhaps later we'll apply some similar stresses to this and try to think up ways to handle it.

The one thing about the design that I think I should point out though, is that tissue with a lot of chloroplasts is the most expensive stuff for plants to grow (aside from some fruits but they are pretty big and secure by the time they try that,) so if there were some other creature that came along and just gave these a haircut to feed itself they would be in very bad shape. Now obviously herbivores somehow manage to not eat all of the plants everywhere and for a lot of reasons but on an individual scale these things are going to be under a lot of pressure to develop some defense mechanisms for that.

[Sorent]

Alright sounds good. So it is a workable creature then? I just want to make sure im doing it right, if so I will go ahead and try to develop other creatures.

The one thing about the design that I think I should point out though, is that tissue with a lot of chloroplasts is the most expensive stuff for plants to grow (aside from some fruits but they are pretty big and secure by the time they try that,) so if there were some other creature that came along and just gave these a haircut to feed itself they would be in very bad shape. Now obviously herbivores somehow manage to not eat all of the plants everywhere and for a lot of reasons but on an individual scale these things are going to be under a lot of pressure to develop some defense mechanisms for that.

It was my impression that this was exactly what we want. Meaning I have a stable creature that will now be subjected to the stress of some green hair eating monster of the deep and be forced into some form of adaptation to cope with it. Am I right?

[Shoku]

Yeah, it should work well for this. I'm less into things that get their food from the sun because their only reason to kill anything else is defense and we end up with some boring relationships if that's all that's around.

The thing I should probably counter that with though is that the first animal that eats things would probably just chow down on much smaller stuff floating in the water. Bacteria are plenty abundant and there would be a lot of slightly larger things like amoebas and that. Plus the offspring of most of the early large things would be rather tiny and numerous as well.

[Sorent]

Ok Ill focus on non plants for now. I just figured we would need some plant like things eventually right?

[Supermikhail]

Yeah, it should work well for this. I'm less into things that get their food from the sun because their only reason to kill anything else is defense and we end up with some boring relationships if that's all that's around.

I'd like to say that among protists with which I'm familiar now, none seem to rely entirely on photosynthesis so, at least partially, everyone is a predator.

I found that there are 2 common interesting things among unicellulars:

• toxins for offense or defense (that's why I thought poisons are easy)
• and parasitism

[Shoku]

Easy in what sense?

[Supermikhail]

Easy in what sense?

Easy to produce when there's survival need.

[Shoku]

That phrase doesn't really mean anything you know~

[Sorent]

The poison use among single cells makes sense to me. With only a single membrane separating the poison making organelle from the exterior of the cell where the prey or predators are located. I think what Supermikhail means by easy is that the organism is not going to need a very complicated delivery system for its toxins while still a single cell.

[Supermikhail]

Well. Protists, jellyfish, eels, snakes... Nature seems to be applying poison in pretty arbitrary places... Or maybe almost everywhere.

Edit: No, I didn't think about the anatomy specifics at that point. Just that toxin use seems to be universal.

[Sorent]

Sorry I think I misunderstood what you were trying to say myself.