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bensen-daniel β Biotic Zones of Router
Published: 2011-08-29 11:43:52 +0000 UTC; Views: 1542; Favourites: 15; Downloads: 23
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Description
EDIT: check out the new version: [link]This is a very preliminary sketch of the plant forms of some of the biotic zones that border the terran zone on Router ([link] ).
What do you think?
Do you have any other ideas for good plant forms?
After I get some feedback, I hope to make a full color map of the area of Router around the terran gateway, with example pictures of the major phyla of animals and plants for each biotic zone. (yee!)
~~~
For inspiration so far, thank you:
~AmnioticOef
*thomastapir
and
~Zippo4k
~~~
done while listening to: The Gathering Storm (meh), a Cold Dish (eh!)
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Comments: 47
You have some nice ideas on here. Not too many people in specbio do plants, probably because it's difficult to find a truly alien design. Looks like you've come up with a few! Nice.
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Thanks. You know, after spending all this time on plants, I actually had a tough time thinking of anything really new to do with animals([link] ). Animals are all stupid worms, with their mouth and sense organs in the front and some kind of way of movement. And radial aliens have been done.
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It's true, animal designs are tough. I think if you want to make an alien looking alien you have to start with an alien body plan. On Earth for example, the major forms of life we see are bisymmetrical and have some sort of visible or ancestral segmentation. So, if you don't want earth-looking aliens that look familiar, try designing something around a non-segmented ancestor. Also, you could try and see what kind of life would develop from a colonial organism with no real sense of symmetry. Examples of colonial organisms on Earth are colonial hydrozoans like Portuguese Man o' War, with their specialized polyps; and it can be argued that bee and ant colonies are forms of colonial superorganisms, with specialized individuals working together as a single organism, only over a distance (it would be interesting to see what kind of alien forms would develop from this kind of body plan--if it can be called a body plan).
I'm sure there are plenty of others. Delve into biology in the topics less explored and you'll find all sorts of interesting ideas. Then, just let your imagination run loose.
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Well, I've got animals without symmetry (the bush-like thing), but I haven't played much with non-segmentation. Thanks for the advice.
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No problem. Good luck.
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If it helps, I had to read the summary to realize they weren't...like...biology homework.
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Whoops, I thought I posted a long comment here. Must not have clicked "add" 
Speculative botany is something you can never get enough of, and I love all these ideas. Some of them are a little mysterious though 
What's going on in Zone 2? Are the plants excreting dead tissue in which chemical reactions occur, and then reabsorbing it?
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Bingo! Each piece of "tape" is actually a mineral that oxidizes in the air under with sunlight as a catalyst. The tree gets energy by breaking down the oxides. Hm...which means that something else in that ecosystem needs to make oxigen...I'll get back to you on that
Other non-chlorophyll photosynthetic systems? Something with piezoelectricity?
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Aw, see, that's so cool! Write a description like that for every zone! 
No, do whatever you want 
Non-chlorophyll? Hmm...I don't know if this is possible, but maybe the plant uses photons to power its ATP synthase-equivalent directly. That is, photons enter the protein on one side (maybe guided by tiny fiber optics?) spin the little mechanism, and leave the other end. This is the most efficient pathway I can imagine.
Maybe light is focused onto a watertight reservoir of fluid, which then heats up and expands. The fluid's outlet is a membrane imbedded with ATP-equivalent synthesizing proteins, which are powered by the outflow. At night the reservoir cools down and refills by diffusion.
And then of course there are dozens of alternative chemical pathways. Witness this gem from Wikipedia:
"Other processes substitute other compounds (such as arsenite) for water in the electron-supply role; the microbes use sunlight to oxidize arsenite to arsenate. The equation for this reaction is:
carbon dioxide + arsenite + light energy β arsenate + carbon monoxide (used to build other compounds in subsequent reactions)"
As for piezoelectricity, perhaps piezoelectric crystals feed into an electron transport chain that works the normal way. This opens up the possibility of kinetosynthesis, with plants exploiting the movement of wind and water to compress their crystal-laden energy converting organs.
Take all my ideas with a grain of salt, since I'm completely ignorant when it comes to chemistry
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You know it's funny. Some of these ideas come more easily to me now as words, and they're a bitch to draw. I'm trying to illustrate as much as possible, though, since this is, like, an art website.
I wonder about the arsenite/arsenate chain. There would have to be a lot of arsenite in the environment, and a chemical cycle to recycle the arsenate and carbon monoxide. What conditions would make such a cycle likely? In any case, it would be horribly toxic to earth-based life.
But! Maybe 100 million years ago when the aliens made the link to Arsenon(? could I think of a stupider name for a planet?) the principal form of photosynthesis was C02/02. After some sort of global cataclysm, however the arsenite/arsenate plantlife takes over. The Arsenon gateway on Router now spews toxic chemicals all over the surrounding countryside. And of course, the gate on Arsenon is surrounded by a dead zone created by all that deadly oxygen.
I like the idea of piezo-electro-synthesis. Another group of autotrophs (can't call them plants) makes sugars by harnessing the energy of movement (maybe a better word would be kinetosynthesis). Maybe from a planet with a dense, windy atmosphere.
Yeah, my biochemistry is pretty bad, too. Hopefully someone will read this and stop us before we GO TOO FAR!
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I can't answer those questions either, unfortunately, but the scenario you outline sounds good. Maybe the gate to Arsenon is the gate to the underworld in the mythology of the local humans, since strong winds could blow killing gasses from the gate over their settlements. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, since I don't actually know the status of humans on Router yet
Also, I wonder how that global cataclysm would look on Router. If it was a meteor strike, a fiery jet might shoot out the Arsenon gate, finishing the job of extinguishing the original plants.
THERE'S NO GOING BACK NOW.
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Human life on Router will have to wait until I decide where it is on Earth and how it's discovered. And that depends on the themes I want to explore and the story I want to tell. The working idea I have now is that the gateway is in present-day New Guinea, and it's inhabited by several successive waves of migrants (getting older and stranger the farther one goes from the gateway on the Router-side). Many of them are stone-age hunter-gatherers or subsistance farmers (maybe some of them re-invented the agrarian empire), but there's at least one outpost of western-educated drug-runners/revolutionaries near the gateway. And farther from the gateway, there are some advanced human groups who got technology from contact with Router's other inhabitants.
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New Guinea's good--better than clichΓ© old Antarctica
Man, this world is so rich that I can hardly see how you're going to pack all these themes into a single story. Are you going to write a full-length novel, do you think?
What kind of technology?
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Well, also, Antarctica doesn't have the possibilities for faunal interaction I'm going for.
As of now, I have no idea what I'm going to do with Router. So far, I haven't thought of a single, coherent series of events to tell about (i.e. no story). ~rubendevela thought an artbook like Barlowe's Expedition might work, and I did have an idea for something like that (which I can't use now because Spielberg stole my setting for Terra Nova!) that I might be able to past on top of Router. But that's not a project I want to do alone, and I think I'm going to have to become a famous author before I can get people behind me on that one. So we'll have to wait and see.
I have no idea what kind of technology
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Ah, the old problem of option-paralysis. Better than the opposite, at least.
An artbook does sound like it could encompass the world more easily, but I still think some kind of rudimentary narrative (of the Louis and Clarke type maybe) would be cool.
As alien as you can make it? The first thing I thought of was technology that makes extensive use of wormholes. For some reason the alien culture that made it discovered how to create wormholes early on (maybe they built an extra-large hadron collider, I don't know), and so never developed any kind of miniaturization or self-contained tech. A computer might consist of several multivac-like subunits spread out across a wide area, each of which is specialized to perform a specific task. The units are controlled and link to each other via a handheld "router", maybe an orrery looking thing with wormhole-gates in place of planets. The user can reach through the gates to manipulate the controls of the computer subunits, and the subunits communicate with lasers shined though the gates. Another idea is a gun linked up to a giant supply of ammo stashed away somewhere, or a weapon that briefly opens up a gate with a connection to space in order to suck some poor soul away
That's just the first thing I thought of, feel free to reject it completely
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Well, I am trying to focus on Gondwana right now (not...entirely successfully, as the last couple of days should demonstrate)
I like the idea of a Lewis and Clarke type story. In fact, that would fit very well. (hmmm) I wanted something that starts out more like a sketchbook (here are some plants I found today) and gradually evolves into a story (it's been three days since the drug-smugglers kidnapped us and Joaquim isn't getting better).
Clunky-wormhole-tech is awesome! The original builders of Router are long extinct, of course, but that doesn't mean some kick-ass ancient artifacts can't be uncovered!
No, those are great ideas! Thanks!
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Oh wow, in zone 5 the trees reflect light onto their clones! "clones"! I thought it was "cones"
It reminds me of those aphid colonies that produce a sterile soldier caste for protection.
[link]
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your Z-3 forms are very similar to the Tower of Babble Trees on my world of Varian III. at least in the regards to the heart like pump in the root system. for the Babble Trees they need it because of how massive they are. without the "Heart" they could never get water to the top most leaves with capillary action as do earth plants. Your designs are just very cool I like em alot!
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Thank you. You know I hadn't considered using the heart pump to make these things very tall, but that would be a good idea. It would give them an edge over the plants of other biotas.
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that's what has happened with the Babble Trees. the region they are found is mega volcanic, it's the collision point of two continents. that said it is also very tropical. The soil there is far more nutrient rich than just about all other tropical forests on Varian III. These trees grow to massive proportions the tallest almost 2000 ft tall. Their branches are supported via buttress and column roots. They over shadow just about everything even any sapling that might try to grow which is why they have a unique reproductive system where two trees have reproductive roots. These roots will wrap round each other and inside a young tree grows. both trees share the load of nourishing the sapling which until it's trunk or "spike" grows past the perpetual dark of the understory has no leaves.Once this does happen the parent trees break off their "Gyno-roots"and reabsorb them. the young tree has a fighting chance now.All other forms of plants in the Night Forest grow on the massive branches of the Babble trees, though a few have become parasites of the trees often of their roots. It's a very complex biota.
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Sounds interesting, and I like the reproduction method. Hey, can I use those trees in Router? It's okay if you say no.
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I don't mind, as long as ya sight me as the influence, that's all I ask.
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then I am honored to have my trees used in your world.
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Thank you! I hope I'll have pictures out in the next couple of days.
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I love your creativity in plant-forms, they often get "forgotten" when conceptualizing alein biospheres, even most of Darwin IV's "plants" were very familiar. Some other body-plans I could suggest are "parasol" or "satellite-dish" like morphologies, "terrestrial sponges" for environments with "aerial plankton", linear "row-plants" that originally evolved on a tidally locked world, and motile or semi-motile "lighter-than-air" hydrogen-producing photosynthesizers.
PS: you may also want to take a look at the plant morphologies form the National Geographic Spacial "Alien Worlds" (for the UK audiences) or "Extraterrestrial" (for the US audiences), as both Aurelia (the tidally locked planet) and Blue Moon (the earth-like moon) had unconventional plant biologies.
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parasol or satellite-dish is an interesting idea. Maybe for a plant that doesn't rely on capillary action to move water from the root to the shoot (and therefor doesn't have stomata, and therefore doesn't care if water pools on the surface of the leaves, and therefore doesn't need to make leaves leaf-shaped to get rid of water). Few. Maybe dish-shaped leaves would be a good fit for the antler tree (z-3)
What would "row-plants" look like? Walls?
Ooh, and I like the idea of hydrogen-trees. I need me some of those.
I remember that Nat Geo special! I'll go back and see what ideas I can steal from it
Dan
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Parasols might also work for plants with active circulatory systems, and therefore a bit more "animal-like". Alternately the "dish might somehow retract during rain, or in response to touch.
The idea I had is that the plant would grow underground in a row, looking superficially like say a row or corn, however on their tidally locked home-planet the "stalks" in the back would be taller (and older) than the "stalks" in the front, as the plant grew "toward" the direction of the stationary sun.
I think "hydrogen-trees" could fall into animal-like forms, perhaps capturing flying insects for nutrition with sticky "roots". More complex forms may even evolve ways to control their motion, and detect food, sunlight obstacles or dangers ultimately becoming more like a photosynthetic aerial jellyfish than a "floating plant".
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Parasols and flying jellyfish are both good ideas (although I think there is an adaptive peak at the plant-like sessile, low-energy, no-nervous-system form, plus I don't want to have ALL of the alien biotas have plant-animals.)
How do the hydrogen-tress manufacture the stuff?
row plants. How would different rows compete with each other?
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Hydrogen trees would probably use methane the same way "oxygen trees" use carbon dioxide. The other possibility is as a side reaction, possibly disassociating from water or some other compound, but this strikes as possibly too energy intensive.
On their home-planet different plants would compete by trying to block the sun, witch is always in the same relative location in the sky, from their competitors. However the higher temperatures and a permanent cyclonic storm make the "most sunward" part of the planet largely "un-populated" by plant-life.
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Hydrogen tress: so methane 6(CH4) and water 6(H20) go in, are catylized by sunlight, and we get... glucose 1(C6H1206) and 24(H). Does that chemistry work? And, just like Zone 2, there will need to be something in the ecosystem that makes oxygen, or else the original aliens wouldn't have linked that planet to Router.
I like the row-plant idea.
Can you refer me to some thoughts on tidally-locked planets? I only remember what I've read in sf books, which is that life exists in a band on the terminator, with glaciers on the dark side and a desert on the light side. And storms in the middle.
I can think of some ways the actual situation would be more complicated, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel.
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The chemistry works, it's just reducing instead of oxidizing. I remember my biology professor pointing out that from a chemistry perspective they are both "just as good", but that our planet's low gravity prevents the retention of hydrogen, so even if such a system did evolve, others, such as sulfur and/or oxygen producing photosynthesis would ultimately "beat it out" for control of the atmospheric composition due to physics. The Hydrogen trees would only "work" because they retain the hydrogen in their body tissue, and the resulting mobility likely provides them with a competitive edge over "ground locked" vegetation.
So in one possible case while various species of oxygen trees may "dominate" the surface, any species of "hydrogen tree" could populate any place on the planet, because of their superior ability to spread across the surface. I picture a plane with a diversity of more "normal" oxygen producing organisms, but with fewer, but highly successful hydrogen-producing organisms, likely spread across entire climactic zones.
Alternately, the production of hydrogen could be tied to the "reproductive phase" of the plant-life in question. So while they would "normally" produce oxygen, during their reproductive phase they would "switch into reverse" and produce hydrogen for some kind of gas bladder, or gas bladders, and the "float away" to spread their seeds, or spores or however they reproduce. In some cases only the "fruit" might have the "hydrogenic" metabolism, while the rest of the plant remained behind.
I haven't seen much detailed on tidally-locked planets. However I can tell you that idea is considered obsolete. For one it would actually result in a very "Mars-like" environment due to atmospheric "freezing out" on the night-side of the planet, and atmospheric loss from solar wind on the day-side. Any habitable-terminator would only be temporary.
Deep oceans and significant enough greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere would result in more "Earth-normal" conditions across the surface of permanently habitable locked planets, and could ultimately prevent the formation of an ice cap on the night-side, or even if present, such a polar cap would still have oceans beneath it and never be frozen all the way through. The day-side would have a permanent cyclonic storm over the sunward "pole", the size ow witch would depend on the amount of ocean surface on the day-side of the planet. Strong winds would carry water vapor from the sunward pole and cold air from the anitsunward pole of the plant across the terminatior. Likewise beneath the surface of the ocean strong currents would cycle warm water and phytoplankton and cool water and zooplankton between the day and night sides respectively. So while there might be hot deserts on the day side and cold deserts on the night side, the terminator or "twilight zone" would be wet and lush for the most part. So while the terminator would likely be the biologically "richest" portion of the planet, the entire surface would be capable of supporting complex life, to some degree or another. However I had the paper on my old computer, witch is no longer with me, and the forum where I was first linked to the paper is no longer up.
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Hydrogen trees: why not have both systems? The ancestral plant uses both forms of photosynthesis, but there are some neotonous forms that breathe methane all the time. You get something like land-kelp, which doesn't require stiff tissues to grow high (quickly overshading other plants). Or, oh, what about symbiotic insects that build nests in the root system, allowing these things to continue to get nutrients even if the roots are torn free of the ground? You'd get floating rafts of hydrogen trees and symbiotic and commensal biota nesting on them.
The only problem I see here is where do they get the methane? Methane's a tiny fraction of the gas in the earth's atmosphere (much less than C02), so there must be some part of the chemical cycle that pumps out methane. And it has to be something they can export, if the hydrogen trees are going to make it on Router.
Sounds like for a tidally locked planet, a large, wet world with a thick atmosphere would be the best bet for habitability.
How might life mediate this place? I can imagine pale-colored plants or algae increasing the albedo of the sunward side (as in Lovelock). Then of course there are the plants of "zone 5" that use silica scales to alter the refraction index of their photosynthetic surfaces. They might be able to redirect light from the sunward side to the dark side, greatly expanding the habitable areas.
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Well their home-planet might have a higher methane concentration than Earth, probably closer to our current concentrations of carbon-dioxide. Also if they have symbiotic organisms they could be methanogenic (methane producing), or have have especially high concentrations of methanogenic microbial symbiotes.
Actually probably the opposite of what you are expecting, as locked planets are likely to be found around stars with not only lower luminosity than the sun but a lower proportional visual and UV index as well. Any photosynthetic vegetation is likely to be dark, and probably purple, if not black, to absorb what little visible light they get.
Conversely their "photosynthesis" might operate more or entirely in the infra-red portion of the spectrum. So their pigmentation might be far less related to what visible wavelengths they absorb, and more about what "color" they are in infra-red wavelengths. As the night side is pretty much half of the planet, any vegetation is probably going to be saprotrphoric or chemosynthetic, if autotrophic. So think lush deep purple jungles on the day-side and forests of giant mushrooms on the night-side, with lots of mixing in the "twilight zone".
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Methanogensis would have to be part of the chemical cycles on this planet. One of the ways that its biomes don't quite match the others on Router.
I would guess that air gyres (warm air from the light side flows to the dark side, cools, and gets swept back to the warm side) might deposit organic detritus on the dark side (like the marine snow that drives benthic ecosystems). What do you think about plants that reflect light away from the night side towards the dark?
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I thought part of the point was that all the biomes didn't "quite" match up, thus causing all kinds of environmental variability and strong competition.
I think that reflecting plants would lose too much light for their own use to be viable form a purely metabolic perspective. Remember we are talking an M-type red dwarf star here, much less overall output than our own sun. The plants will want to absorb as much light as that possibly can, any they reflect is solar energy they can't put toward their metabolism.
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Yes, exactly. It will make things very interesting.
Damn, I suppose you're right. In fact, lighthouses are classic examples of public goods (goods that can only be created by governments because selfish actors would NEVER make them for personal use).
How about this scenario?
On a normal world (not tidally locked), plants never evolve rigid structures. Instead, the live as low-growing moss, but extrude silicate extrusions that gather and direct sunlight (microscopic imperfections or impurities built into the extrusions refract light). Patches of moss compete with each other by growing extrusions to block light from (or focus light and burn) each other.
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It's why I can't be a libertarian, the free market is great for providing with what you want, but it's the last thing you want providing you with what you need.
It would be a good choice for an F-type sun. They produce far more light than our own sun, so plant may actually need reflective surfaces to protect themselves from the intensity of the radiation.
Ooo! Death ray-moss!
Imagine that they may have evolved from something like silicaceous sponges.
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A very good way of putting it.
I like all those ideas about death-ray moss. And I'll call it death-ray moss.
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That sounds awesome!
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pysche! I went and edited the new page. Now it's deathray moss
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I just love me some zoophyta. Mobile plants ftw!
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hooray! The idea is that in the chaotic mashup of alien biotas on Router, mobile plants will have an advantage.
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