NESLife VI

Well now I have to go choose one of your suggestions then.

EDIT:
Organism: Crushing Feaster
Ancestor: Thick Feaster
Selective Pressure: Complete lack of competition over crystalline parts "Inedible" Sunfeeders as a food source.
Mutation: Two mandible-like structures on the sides of it's mouth made of calcium that ground the glass like sections of the Inedible Sunfeeder into harmless bits that can then be digested.

Im loving how quickly we are going through this!

Benefits of everyone being in a relatively close timezone I suppose.

Or maybe everyone is waking up early/staying up late because of this EPICNES.

Close timezones? Please forward my heartfelt apologies to Daftpanzer.

Haha, he lives in the UK doesn't he?

Indeed he does, hence why his contributions are doomed to come through in the wee hours of the morning.

Consider this to be the deadline. I'm finished the writeup (took roughly 3.5 hours), and I will finish the drawings and stats before posting the update.

Epoch II: The Towerian Epoch

The explosive diversification of life continues. More and more natural niches are occupied, and the sheer diversity of new life creates even more opportunities for complex biotic relationships to form. In this epoch, we see several milestones, such as the first dedicated herbivores, the development of the first visual organs, the first complex life histories, as well as the first multicellular parasites.

To fully understand the state of complex life in this epoch, one must first discuss the Towers. The great mineralized stalks created by these filter feeding organisms, who gave this epoch its name, left not only a very prominent fossil record- they also led to a radical transformation of the benthic environment. As increasingly inedible plants came to predominate on the ocean floor, Towers provided a refuge, one of the last places for the crawling bottom dwellers to gain a safe meal. As our survey of Towerian life begins, we shall first consider the Filters. Beyond the obvious prominence of Towers, Filters of this epoch are notable for the fact that multiple lineages independently developed pumping systems, for a variety of reasons ranging from feeding, to locomotion, to poison dispersal.



Poppers are morphologically very similar to their Spire ancestors, but reproduce by a unique new mechanism. Rather than undergoing fission from one adult form into two half-sized juvenile forms, Poppers release small, membrane-bound ‘spore bubbles’. These planktonic structures drift upwards to the oceanic surface, where they pop, releasing a tiny larval form which parasitizes various Floaters, Tonus, and other such lifeforms. After a significant period of feeding upon their hosts from the inside out, the mature larvae, by now having eaten the majority of their host’s biomass, emerge and descend down to the sea floor. Possessing a huge nutritional headstart over their competitors, Poppers are able to reproduce and disperse to a degree unmatched by their ancestors. The magnitude of this disparity sent the Spires into a steep decline, culminating in their extinction at the Epoch’s conclusion.

The Tower continues on the success of the Spire, actively pumping plankton-filled ammonia through a spongy maze of internal feeding chambers, before expelling the filtered fluid out of vents located on the central stalk. These vents serve as excellent shelters for other filter feeders or photosynthesizers, allowing Towers to build up large accumulations of living biomass in their lower reaches. The benefits of this cohabitation are debateable. On one hand, the living organisms on the lower stalk can serve to sate predators who might otherwise make an attempt at eating the Tower’s living tissue. On the other hand, these organisms can serve as bait, luring large predators who might otherwise have disregarded the Tower entirely. Regardless of this, the pumping mechanism alone renders these organisms highly successful, and many areas of Lambda’s seabeds have become littered with angular, mineralized networks of Towers, growing out of Towers, growing out of Towers, and so on. These branching structures, even when collapsed, provide valuable shelter for other organisms, and will ultimately become some of the most distinctive and frequently fossilized structures of the epoch.

Adapting the same type of pumping mechanism operated by the Towers, the Luasks make use of simple jet propulsion to make themselves the most mobile of the floating filter feeders. With a unique escape mechanism, greater access to food due to the aforementioned pumps, and a limited ability to move against currents, Luasks have found a comfortable and secure niche, although they are still dwarfed in population by the simpler Floaters.

Sinkers have adopted a different strategy for mobility, using the same mechanisms to different ends. By pumping ammonia and gases in and out of specialized sacs, Sinkers are able to modulate their depth. This behaviour allows them to filter feed over a broad range of environments, often following plankton as they cycle up and down the ammonia column. While not as effective at filtering the surface as their more passive ancestors, Sinkers enjoy a comfortable existence, dominating in the region of the oceans below the Floaters.

Svi have, in a striking example of parallel evolution, adopted a similar strategy, making use of waving cellular microstructures to generate current. This serves a dual purpose of both increasing the Svi’s feeding rate, and distributing diffuse toxins around the organism. These are not lethal, but are strong enough to serve as a deterrent to most predators and potential competitors for space. A closely-related group, known as the Belchers, made use of a similar mechanism, but with a focus on outright killing predators rather than generating currents. Unable to make effective use of the dead predators, and lacking the Svi’s increased nutrient uptake, the Belcher lineage was swiftly extinguished.



While the filters diversified, the Sunfeeders remained much more stable. However, the increasing prominence of Indigestible plant lineages would prove to be one of the defining selective pressures of the epoch.



Towerspores took advantage of the unique niches provided by the Filter-feeding Towers, specializing for an existence anchored into the tower vents, raised a safe distance above the benthic predators. Coupled with their tremendous rate of reproduction, Towerspores quickly came to dominate the Tower vent ecosystems.

The Molun (often conflated by paleontologists with the hypothetical To’lun family) was a close relative of the Tonu, which had developed a selection of rudder-like protrusions, possibly to aid in navigation. However, a free-floating organism with limited means of detecting its environment was ill-equipped to make proper use of such mobility, and the energetic cost of such movement put it at a significant disadvantage when put into competition with its Tonu counterparts. After a few million years struggling to get by in marginal environments, the Molun quietly descended into extinction.

The Indigestible Sunfeeders, thriving from a lack of predation, have been afforded the opportunity to diversify. The Broader Indigestible Sunfeeder (Broader, for short) has developed a degree of tissue specialization, extending long protrusions out from side to side. This has helped to turn the long-standing evolutionary battle between Sunshields and Indigestibles (and to a lesser extent, Sporers) ever more in the favour of the Broaders, who frequently shade out their neighbours to monopolize the available light. As Broaders come to make up more and more of Lambda’s total plant biomass, marginalizing the Sunshields and Sporers, the stress exerted on hungry herbivores has a cascading effect up the benthic food web, pushing the whole seafloor ecosystem towards collapse.



To better understand the nature of this collapse, we come at last to the Feasters and their descendants. Already by far the most diverse group, many Feasters are running into the limitations of their ancestor’s body plan. All members of this group exude a digestive enzyme onto the surface of prey, then absorb the digested slurry directly. For locomotion, they feature a simple longitudinal musculature, allowing them to thrash from side to side like a nematode. For now, the lack of complex musculature and hard structures places an upper limit on the development of many of these lifeforms, but several lineages are finding ways around these limits.



The Mawie has found a comfortable niche feeding upon the denizens of the Floater clouds. With hook-shaped fins and a whiplike stinging tail, the Mawie is capable of seizing and quickly disabling and eating other organisms seeking to take advantage of the cloud’s bounty. While it will also feed on Floaters and Tonus in a pinch, the supply of other Feasters is so great that such desperation foods are rarely necessary.

The Clapper, another descendant of the Jetter. Opting for a less ostentatious lifestyle than their free-living cousins, Clappers have atrophied bodies with large, hook-like appendages to grip onto Tonu and Floater colonies, and occasionally settling in the living portions of Spires. With the exception of occasional predation by several of their free-swimming relatives, Clappers enjoy comfortable, ectoparasitic existences.

Yet another descendant of the successful Jetter lineage is the Jetseer. Lacking the sheer offensive power of the Mawie, the Jetseer makes up for its physical limitations with its unique sensory apparatus. A cluster of light-sensitive cells at the front of the creature forms one of the first true eyes to appear on Lambda. With the ability to detect movement and detect simple images, the Jetseer has a profound advantage over its competitors. Jetseers are able to easily evade the deadly Mawie, while detecting and feeding upon Clappers with relative ease.

Rounding out the broad diversification of the Jetter lineage is the Grabber. Digestive specialization is the name of the game for the Grabbers, whose flattened bodies provide a large surface area for enzyme secretion and nutrient absorption. A jack of all trades-style generalist if there ever was one, Grabbers are opportunistic omnivores who have come to thrive particularly in marginal regions, where the higher-energy Mawie and Jetseer struggle to find enough food to survive. The ability to extract some limited nutrition from the otherwise untouchable Indigestible Sunfeeders provides a key competitive advantage wherever such Sunfeeders are to be found.

Grazers have adapted to an exclusively herbivorous existence, specializing in feeding upon Sunshields in particular with the use of powerful digestive enzymes. With an armoured carapace for defense against predators and near-exclusive access to a previously untapped food resource, Grazers are thriving. Additionally, their armoured plating provides useful anchor points the musculature of all Thick Feaster descendants, helping them to overcome many of the muscular limitations of their soft-bodied relatives.

Spinators have not achieved the same degree of success as their Grazer cousins, but with a set of ten dextrous spines for locomotion, they have managed to do fairly well for themselves. While the spines served well for locomotion and as simple sensory organs, the decline of the only predators capable of threatening Spinators rendered their defensive capabilities (already significant, thanks to their armoured cuticles) somewhat redundant. The monopolization of Sunshield food sources by Grazers, coupled with the decreasing food supply on the ocean floor due to the spread of Indigestible lineages, drove the Spinators to use their legs to climb into the undersea forests of Spires and Towers. Here, the Spinators thrive, generally avoiding predation and feasting upon the forest’s bounty.

The Biter, a descendant of the Crawler, found itself in a similar situation as the Spinator. Faced with the same resource shortages that plagued Lambda’s benthic ecosystems throughout the latter half of the epoch, the Biters too were forced up into the Towers. A several million year-long war for survival was waged, but in the end only the Spinators remained. With lesser mobility, simpler musculature, and greater vulnerability to predation due to their largely unarmoured nature, the Biters, already extirpated from the ocean bottom, were rendered extinct in their last refuge, high in the branching Towers.

The Spinelords have adopted a different, but similarly effective solution to the musculature problem, through the development of a stiff, but flexible central cord. Coupled with a set of stabilizing fins, this creature is the most efficient and effective swimmer to be found in Lambda, using its high mobility to feed on the abundance of prey that considers itself ‘safe’ once it is lifted above the ocean floor.

Sniffers also build upon the success of the Spinelo, making use of a strong olfactory sense to track and hunt respiring prey. Though they are inferior swimmers than the Spinelords, their sense of smell evens the playing field, allowing the two species to vie for dominance as open-ocean predators.

The Burners and Caustic Feasters were two closely-related scions of the Feaster specialized at taking down the stalks of Spires and their kin, as well as predating upon other well-defended organisms such as Sunshields and Indigestible Sunfeeders, through the application of acid. However, the amount of acid required to take down a spire rarely made the investment worthwhile, and these two lineages were fiercely outcompeted and ultimately driven to extinction by the Grazers. Against a species specialized to feed specifically upon Sunshields, the Burners and Caustic Feasters had almost no chance of long-term survival.

The Apicelo, a descendant of the fearsome Muscelo, made use of its significant size and a muscular feeding apparatus to predate upon Sunshields. However, the herbivorous lifestyle is less nutritionally-rewarding than one of carnivory. Thus, the Apicelo’s new feeding strategy still did little to overcome the energy limitations that plagued its precursors. Coupled with competition from the better-specialized Grazers, the Apicelo’s lineage dwindled along with that of the Muscelo, lingering on for several million years before at last being driven to extinction by the collapse of the benthic food web. The Digesto fared little better. Focusing on efficient digestion, it was able to make a brief resurgence, but it faced constant competition with smaller, faster, or better-defended predators, where it was unable to make effective use of its size and strength. The Digesto lingered in somewhat larger numbers and over a larger range than its relatives, but the same resource shortages that defeated its cousins would also spell its own doom.



By the halfway point of the epoch, the benthic food-web was stretched to its breaking point. The lack of food, as a result of the gradual replacement of edible Sporers and semi-edible Sunshields with thoroughly inedible Indigestible Sunfeeders, and their Broader kin, exerted tremendous stress on the herbivores, with a corresponding increase in stress for the predators who relied on the success of these herbivores. At some point, a threshold was crossed, triggering the stressed ecosystems into an outright collapse. The desperate competition for limited food resources hit apex predators the hardest, leading directly to the extinction of the already tenuous lineages of the Muscelo, Apicelo and Digesto. While the Grazers were able to live comfortably off of the remaining Sunshields, they were alone in this epoch- all other Feaster lineages were forced to struggle over the sparse leftovers, little more than a few rare clumps of Sporers. Falling dead biomass from the thriving surface ecosystems provided occasional reprieve, but with no specialized scavengers no single species was able to take a competitive advantage from this, other than perhaps the Grabber, who didn’t need the resources anyway due to their access to the rich food source of the Floater cloud. Ultimately, the survivors of the ocean bottoms either fled into the Tower forests, specialized, or fell into extinction. The ecosystem remained in this state for several million years, until the development of the Crushing Feaster (Crusher, for short). Closely related to the Grazers and Spinators, the Crushing Feasters were at long last a group specialized to grind up and destroy the glass spicules of the Inedible Sunfeeder lineage. With powerful, crushing trilateral jaws, these creatures thrived, on a diet of ‘Inedible’ Sunfeeders. The return of competitive equilibrium, and subsequent return of somewhat even biomass distribution amongst the Sunfeeders, marks the end of the Towerian Epoch.



Notes:

@bestrfcplayer- The Monjoga did not evolve, because the Filter went extinct during Epoch I. Extinct animals can’t evolve, because they are dead. The most recent stats are posted with the most recent update, not on the first page.

@Masada- Please stop making your names so long. Same goes for you Patchy, I’d appreciate one-word names if possible.

Also, a selective pressure is not an opportunity, like ‘lots of floating food available’. A selective pressure is supposed a problem for your organism, like ‘Intense Competition for Sporer Prey’. However, you could phrase it as, for example, ‘Intense Competition for Sporer Prey’ and then in the mutation section state that your organism has evolved to make use of floating food through [insert method here] in response to the selective pressure, which was difficulty in eating enough of its old food source.

Organism: Budder
Ancestor: Broader
Selective Pressure: Towerspores having a faster rate of reproduction, creating beds of towersporers to take up available sunlight spots before other photosynthesisers can get there.
Mutation: The protrusions on the sides of Broaders continue to expand throughout the organism's life, growing similar cellular arrangements to the core of the Broader. Eventually, these sub-Broaders grow large enough to break off, forming Broaders of their own. This quadruples their rate of reproduction.

Patchy said:

Benefits of everyone being in a relatively close timezone I suppose.

Click to expand...

Do you realise there are at least an Aussie and two people in Europe?

Well, if that's all then we're still over 80% North American.

No digesto?! :'(

Ah I saw. He died. Even with all his muscles. Oh well...

Iggy lumping himself with the uninsured masses to his South? Wonders will never cease.

Well, we're mostly in the same timezones.

Oh then were 2 Aussies, a Brit, a Catalan and an Israeli. At least. YOUR NUMBERS ARE RAPIDLY DECREASING!

Iggy's flip flopping more than Stephen Harper in flip-flops!

Great work, Iggy! Love the way this shaping up. I think you deserve a rest before the next update, as much as I want one NAO

Organism: Hobo
Ancestor: Sniffer
Selective Pressure: Food-related competition
Mutation: The duct leading from the acid-secreting glands becomes greatly enlarged, lined with protective mucus and powered by muscles, forming a primitive stomach-mouth, allowing the capture of food particles which can be internally digested on the move. BUT THERE'S MORE: some mutants also gained mucus-producing glands covering much of their skin, making them slippery targets and providing insulation against other creature's digestive juices. This, in turn, allows some species of Hobo to specialise in stealing from other creatures that are in the middle of feeding, by zooming in and hoovering up some of the semi-digested particles. To facilitate this lifestyle, these species of Hobo have become smaller, lither and their olfactory cells have become sensitive to the smell of digestive juices.

OOC: again, hope this is not too much at once!

Deleted.

Organism: Hitcher
Ancestor: Floater
Selective pressure: Reliance on ocean currents to provide food
Mutation: Commensal organ. Hitchers have developed an organ allowing them to attach to more mobile species so they are more reliably taken to rich feeding grounds than floating in ocean currents will allow.