Worldbuilding Ecology

That's fair enough. Your wyverns are pretty awesome, so I wouldn't begrudge you to brush over the aspects that are less important to the story itself - it makes it more likely you'll actually write the story without succumbing to Worldbuilders Disease. :P

Kniraffe
Unipecoran
Monossicone
Giraceros

Agreed. Every now and then, I come across something like ATLAS and think "blimey, scientists are really pathetic at making up names for things" - but no, it's not just scientists, as these animals names clearly show. The only explanation I can think of is that either or both of these species may first have been named based on nothing but accounts and drawings, which may either not have emphasized their strangeness properly, or if they did, may have been taken as exaggerations.

?

Too opaque.

This one flows better than any previous idea, but makes me think "rhinoceros" rather than "horn", and rhinos aren't necessarily one-horned and, even if they are, have their horns in all the wrong places. I'll definitely play with the pattern, though.

Interesting. And, now you mentioned that one, I'm realizing that simply "unicone" would work too, sort of. It puts the burden of establishing that this is a giraffe entirely on exposition, but that may not be such a bad thing or high price to pay.

—-

I read up on fern reproduction for the Agriculture thread yesterday, and I think that process, when combined with your parasitoid suggestion, may be just the ticket:

It could work like this: When the sperm and eggs combine in the womb of a Rutting female, what is produced are not embryos but a number of "pro-somethings" (what's the animal equivalent of a twig?), which are all separate organisms in that they are genetically distinct from the mother and from each other, but which wouldn't be able to survive outside the womb. When these have matured, they "give birth" to a fertilized egg each, and those grow into embryos. When these embryos have matured sufficiently, the prosomethings detach from the mother's womb lining, separate into smaller pieces, and "infest" the wombs of the daughters instead.

Thus, each non-Rutting female is born with a number of prosomethings already in its womb, each of which can produce a clonal copy of either that female herself or of one of its siblings. In other words, if the original mother gave birth to a dozen children, then the set of her living descendants will throughout the luster consist of varying numbers of copies of those twelve children. However, the in-womb infestation isn't perfect, so not all of the daughters will get the whole range of prosomethings, and because of that will be able to produce only smaller and less diverse litters as the lustre nears its end. They become thus in yet another sense less fertile as time goes on, which is exactly the imagery I want.

Any issues I overlooked?

ETA: Yes, I overlooked that these are supposed to lay batches of eggs, not produce viviparous litters. Curses. Ss there a way of merging those two? I don't really know enough about egg-laying to answer that, I fear. Once more unto the bresearch!

edited 9th Oct '12 2:25:31 PM by kassyopeia

I'm reasonably confident this system wouldn't work with eggs, because the embryos wouldn't have developed sufficiently before they would be laid. I suggest going back to parthenogenesis, but with a more direct analogy to ferns. In between Ruts, haploid rodent like things reproduce asexually, but the Rut triggers them to mate and produce a generation of diploid rodent like things, that then complete the cycle by producing haploid rodent like things.

I'm afraid the wyverns are a symptom of Worldbuilders Disease, they originally had nothing to do with the story I had in mind, but once I thought of them they were just too cool not to develop more. So now I have one partly finished story and two or three story beginnings set in this universe, none of them really related to each other at all.

This is something I do a lot, I have three or four universe concepts, with some glimmers of plot and characters but not much else. Most of them don't have that much interesting ecology. Maybe my attempt to come up with reasonable giant ants? The basic idea is that they have a symbiosis with a tree that produces magic potions that allowed them to evolve to large size, six feet long, in spite of the many, many obstacles. They have a form of endoskeleton, made up of essentially the regular exoskeleton of insects but inside the ant, and with weight reducing holes. Their exterior is covered by a thin layer of chitin that serves only for protection and water retention. In contrast with smaller insects they have lungs and oxygen binding hemocyanin in their hemolymph. Giant ant larva develop in individual burrows, and are fed on dismembered prey items and magic potions from the trees.

That would more closely parallel the aphid's lifecycle than the fern's, except for the haploid/diploid switch: Several generation of clonal parthenogenesis, followed by one generation of sexual reproduction. It's nice in that it's comparatively straightforward, but it doesn't quite have what I called the "delightfully alien and off-putting quality" of a scheme involving alternating generations in an animal, and infestation of the viable type by the reproductive type.

However, it just occurred to me that that scheme is perhaps a bit too much like that used by the Aliens (from the eponymous franchise), even though it doesn't rely on an extraspecific host and is a lot more benign.

ps: Anyway, the only thing I really need to figure out is what their lifecycle looks like from the outside. I'm telling the story as seen through the eyes of its largely pre-scientific protagonists, so they, and thus the readers, will never really know what's going on inside a rodent's womb. All the former will care about is to kill them, I expect, since all the rodents will seem to care about is stealing their hard-won winter food stores.

edited 10th Oct '12 1:47:10 AM by kassyopeia

Okay, I did more reading and have a revised version of the previous scheme which I think combines most of the appealing aspects while doing away with most of the objectionable ones. Forget about the eggs and the ferns. Instead, think of the robudents (will be explained in due course) as marsupials with a dash of jellyfish. The females have a pouch, the males do not. Reproduction works like so:

• During the Rut, a female and male copulate in a manner such that the fertilized eggs end up in the pouch. The most elegant way I've been able to think of so far is that the male first inserts his penis into the female's ovarial orifice, at which point a number of eggs cling to it, and then insert it into her pouch and deposit eggs and sperm there. As long as the result is the same, any other method will do just as well, though. The fertilized eggs, which have a moderate amount of yolk to fuel their initial growth, then grow into genetically distinct polyps (see the jellyfish article), one of which attaches itself to each of the female's nipples. From that point on, it gains all further nutrition parasitically from the female's milk.
• As soon as the polyps are mature, they bud (thus ro-bud-ent) larvae (which brings the total number of stages of this organism to three) and support their growths by passing on the milk nutrients. During this phase, the polyps effectively become umbilical cords. Sex selection is temperature-dependent to take advantage of the slightly varying in-pouch temperatures which reflect the more significantly varying environmental temperatures. During the first half of the lustre, all larvae develop into females, during the latter half, an increasing proportion develops into males.
• The larvae eventually grow to the point of being able to survive outside the pouch, at which point they detach from the polyps and become young. However, just as in kangaroos, there is an intermediate phase during which they leave the pouch for only short periods and then return again to suckle and sleep and so on. As it happens, they do not usually bother to return to the same nipple every time, however, but simply latch onto the first one they can find. During this phase, the polyps continually bud copies of themselves which, as soon as the presence of a suckling young is detected, detach and attempt to infest that young's pouch. As before, this process is not perfect, so the young won't usually get the full complement of genetically distinct polyps but only most of them. Several generations down the line, a typical litter will contain several copies of a few of the original set, rather than one of each.
• Once the female matures to the point at which her milk begins to flow, the polyps can resume their growth and once more begin to bud larvae.
• The final step has to be to somehow get rid of the old polyps to make way for the newly sexually created ones before or during the Rut. Maybe the male's ejaculatory fluid contains something that causes this?

This is the first version that seems entirely consistent to me, but I may of course have misunderstood or overlooked something. Comments would be appreciated!

I would think this should qualify as sufficiently alien. Perhaps you could have them mirror marsupials a little more, and have them develop in the womb as embryos for a short time and then crawl to the pouch before turning into polyps? This would explain how they get into the pouch and how their clones get into the pouches of the robudents.

For getting rid of the polyps couldn't you just have them fall off when the female stops producing milk? Is there a major difference between the mating forms and the nonmating forms in terms of appearance or niche?

That's what I thought at first as well, but I think the version above is more elegant in two respects. For one thing, it doesn't seem likely that robudents would have anything that could properly be called a womb, considering that it would only be used every sixth generations or so, and then only once, and then only for a few days. At that level of usage, it makes far more sense for their internal reproductive systems to be as primitive as I meant to indicate by using the term "ovarial orifice", because that is all they really need. The same consideration applies to the polyps - to be able to crawl around on the outside of the critter, they'd need limbs, whereas to be able to move around a bit inside the pouch, they just need to be able to wiggle. It doesn't seem economical to have that adaptation if it's only used once in the relatively long and complicated life history of the polyp over the course of the entire lustre.

You mean the non-Rutting females never stop producing milk until they are either too old to raise more young or simply die, at which point the polyps have served their purpose, but that a Rutting female would stop doing so for the duration of the Rut, yes?

That was one of the open questions until now, but under the new scheme, there would be no difference whatsoever. After all, all that really happens in the female during the Rut is that the ovaries, which are usually dormant, turn out one batch of eggs. Everything beyond that point has either nothing to do with her directly, or is what happens in every generation, mating or otherwise. That's what makes it rather elegant, compared to most of my earlier ideas.

How long is the Rut anyway?

Sorry, there are lots of bits and pieces of my worldbuilding strewn over a handful of threads, so I'm never quite sure which bits I should explain, in a given conversation, and which bits I've already covered.

In-universe, the Rut lasts 3 days and the lustre, the period between ruts, lasts 6 years with 36 days per year, i.e. 216 days total. More exactly, the Rut lasts 3 nights - the 2 days separating those nights are spent huddled in underground burrows while wildfires ravage much of the planet's surface.

By our reckoning of time, the Rut lasts a bit more than a week, and the lustre lasts 6 times 3 months, i.e. a year and a half. That last figure is what got all this robudent buisness started, because the lifespans of the shortest-lived (and, usually, smallest) terrestrial mammals, such as some opossums and voles, measure less than that. So, I wanted to know if there'd be some way for these to still participate in the Rut, or whether they'd either have to mate on a different schedule, like all my non-mammals do, or else could not exist at all on my planet, in which case their niches would have to be filled by actual non-mammalian species instead.

Woot, I named the giraffe: It's a giraam. Admittedly, that reference is even more obscure than the ones previously suggested, but it fits just so well, plus providing me with a bunch of associated mythology to steal from. Too good to miss!

Killer Robudents

I don't know if anyone noticed, but dogs et al were conspicuously absent from my earlier description. I deliberately threw those out in order for their domestic niche to be available for the badgers. However, that still eaves the wilderness niche to be filled, and I'm now awarding that one to the robudents, in order to make better use of all the effort people put into helping me come up with their reproductive scheme.

All of the predatory robudents derive from the very ordinary vole, to my great surprise. There are three principal species covering the size spectrum between a mouse and an ellefant.

The small version is called a "voling". These weigh about half a wort (1/72 of a fant, in this thread's usual unit) and measure a hand and a half in height. To an Altling, they are as big as rats are to a human. They eat pretty much everything except clover (read "grass") and trees: fruit, insects, dead animals (which, due to their relative abundance, makes them the primary scavengers of their ecosystem), and any reptiles or fellow robudents small enough for them to kill. Their lifespan is less than a lustre, so they must rely on the budding process for most procreation. Unfortunately, something in that process tends to go wrong during those irregularly occurring black years in this species. Resulting in a population explosion - and by explosion, I mean the nuclear variety. Resulting in what I'm going to describe as a hybrid of a lemming migration (the way urban legend describes those, that is), a column of army ants, a plague of locusts, and a piranha swarm (again, the popular version, not the realistic one). Find yourself in their way, and they'll certainly be the last thing you ever see. Outside of those times, these are more often heard than seen, due to their size and preferrence for remaining in ground cover rather than coming out into the open.

The medium version is called a "vox". Weighs about half a brick (1/12 of a fant) and measures half an ell at the shoulder. To an Altling, they are as big as foxes are to a human. Unlike volings which display no social structure to speak of outside the usual family bond between mothers and young, voxes live and hunt in groups known as "hordes". This allows them to kill prey above their own size, making them the primary predators of ground-dwelling game birds, rabbits, and the like. For insufficiently understood reasons, at they are neither the preferred prey nor the main competitors of each other, voxes and myrrhatels seem to be involved in an eternal feud. They will kill each other's young whenever the opportunity presents itself, groups of one species will always pursue and when possible kill a lone member of the other, and group-on-group encounters rarely pass without a scuffle and occasionally develop into what can only be described as battles. Of course, due to their larger size and general awesomeness, myrrhatels usually win. Voxes are the voles most frequently spotted in the wild.

The large version is called a "volf". Weighs about half a fant and measures somewhat more than an ell at the shoulder. To an Altling, they are as big as wolves are to a human. They live in relatively small family groupings known as "packs", often consisting of a breeding pair and two generations of offspring, one growing, the other fully grown. The latter comes about as the result of their, for robudents, uncommonly slow development process, which leaves them still sexually immature when they reach their first Rut. They generally leave their ancestral family grouping shortly before their second Rut and start one of their own. Volves are far more specialized than the two smaller varieties, and have evolved into respectable sprinters, as evidenced by their leggy build. A non-negligible portion of their diet is again vegetarian, but the remainder comes almost exclusively from a single source, the hare, which is too fleet-footed for any of the other predators to be able to catch, as a rule. Essentially, this is a situation much like that of cheetahs and Thomson's gazelles on Earth. Volves are relatively rare and shy.

As with all robudents, the teeth of the members of the vole taxon grow continually and thus have to be continually eroded to compensate. The predators above accomplish this by enthusiastically crushing bones and feasting on the marrow whenever the opportunity presents itself, leading to the Altling figure of speech "like a vox with a bone" when someone refuses to let go of something.

Killer robudent dentition!◊

(Really, that's the skull of a vampire bat, but except for the too-small lower incisors this looks just about right, doesn't it?)

Land Dragon are reptilian bielementals (creature capable of controlling two of the seven elements), the control both earth and metal. Land dragons dig holes with their elemental control, building this way great intricate tunnel systems that, when abandoned, are used by the vallar and the dwarves to make their homes. As with any other type of dragon, land dragons are often domesticated by sapient races to use as heavy machinery.

Forest Gliders are small creatures no more than 1m tall, these creatures are monoelementals of wood and their skin resembles tree bark. They have wings made of leaves and a tail made of vines. Forest gliders are carnivore creatures that ambush small prey using their natural camouflage.

Black Ceros are creatures similar to rhinos that are only found in the black desert, these creatures have a black skin as strong as adamantite and are very territorial, they cause most of the deaths in the black desert.

The forest gliders feel a bit dissonant to me. If they eat meat, they should be like carnivorous plants - that is to say, should have a bodypart which mimics, by sight or smell or both, something that their prey is attracted to, and then lie in wait and entrap them once they get to close. A pouncing strategy seems too un-plantlike. Of course, they really are animals, so maybe that was the point.

Well, they are often labelled as dragons for a reason, in groups they tend to be quite dangerous as they may do a coordinated attack, one of these attacks can be quite troublesome, even for creatures such as trolls.

Besides, the gliders are not really made of on the inside, only in the exterior.

My planned Na No Wri Mo novel has a jungle region which features the following dangerous animals:

• Giant snakes (both venomous and constrictors)
• Giant crocodiles
• Hippopotamuses
• Large pterosaurs
• Leopards
• Triceratops
• Stegosaurus
• Ankylosaurus
• Velociraptors
• Carnotaurus
• Spinosaurus
• Tyrannosaurus

This is far from a complete list of course, but I'm only listing potentially dangerous vertebrates here.

I'm puzzled by your choosing leopards rather than jaguars. The latter are both bigger and more jungle-y, aren't they?

x7

This is going to seem like a bit of a non sequitur, but... are you familiar with Dwarf Fortress at all? The first thing I think of from your description of the voling parade is a catsplosion... and shortly thereafter the volves remind me somewhat of naked mole dogs.

(This is almost certainly just me, though.)

Only by name. I can definitely see the catsplosion parallel - "exvolesion", perhaps? The mole rat one, not so much, but the article is a bit short on details, so I'll just have to trust you on that one.

edited 30th Nov '12 3:15:03 PM by kassyopeia

I think the volf similarity is simply due to being canine-like rodents (and that voles tend to be somewhat subterranean, I think), with the resemblance ending there. :P

I'm not sure exvolsion flows quite right, but I will certainly agree that the situation sounds volatile. :D

In my stories, I've thought of Atlantis being inhabited by dinosaurs, specifically those from the book versions of Jurassic Park and The Lost World, plus a few additions of my own. So I also wondered: what would happen if some modern-day creatures were brought there as well? In this case, cattle, dogs, donkeys, goats, horses, and pigs.

From my sci-fi setting:

Urukan Ziggurat Ant: Eusocial arthropoid lifeform. Urukan pseudoants are eight-limbed, with the front set converted to mantid-like claws. They come in all sizes from 3mm (a worker of the White Brush Ziggurat Ant) to 30cm (Great Gold Ziggurat Ant soldier). It's the latter species that the family takes their name from: Like terran termites, they construct impressive 'towers' above their nests. Unlike the formations built by termites, however, the Great Gold typically builds a terraced, often roughly rectangular structure. These 'ziggurats' were actually misinterpreted as signs of sapient life by the first survey probes. The ziggurat ant, regardless of size, tends to fill the same ecological niche as terran ants. Swarms of Great Golds can be rather dangerous to careless individuals, since while they lack the venomous stingers or acid spray of earth ants, their claws function similar to those of the mantis shrimp. The impact from the claw of a Great Gold can shatter an adult human's skull with ease, and a swarm will leave very little to identify the victim by... Fun Fact: The Great Gold Ziggurat ant is the symbol of the Uruk Confederacy System Defense Force.

Jellyblimps: Cnidarian-analogues native to the planet MacArthur. Their metabolic processes create hydrogen gas which fills a large bladder, allowing the animal to drift around on the wind like gelatinous balloons. As they fly, they extend sticky tentacles that trail through the air to catch the ubiquitous flying arthropoids of its home marshes. Jellyblimps are largely harmless (relying on 'glue traps' rather than venomous nematocysts), but becoming entangled in their tentacles can be nonetheless rather annoying. In addition, they are flammable, and jellyblimps drifting into air intakes have caused more than a few aircraft crashes.

Glowfrog: Small vertebrates from the planet Corona. Somewhat resembling terran tree frogs in general shape and behavior, these critters communicate not through croaks but via bioluminescence (something very common to Coronan flora and fauna). Glowfrogs are popular with the planet's human inhabitants since they are not only pleasant to look at but also hunt more annoying local lifeforms.

Scythian Arrowhead: A predatory, highly aggressive 'snake' (actually an invertebrate) native to the Scythian Plains of the planet Lares. Arrowheads can coil up spring-like to launch themselves at a target, latching on with powerful mandibles and injecting a paralyzing venom. Fortunately, said venom has very little effect on lifeforms imported from earth. Unfortunately, it is a nasty allergen, and visitors to Scythia are well-advised to wear protective clothing when outside of known safe zones.

Maybe this question is better-suited for another thread, but: if eusocial animals are a thing, are there dyssocial animals?

Eusociality.

And there are indeed quite a few animals that don't have any interaction with other members of their species that isn't a predator-prey relationship (most of them being marine invertebrates who don't need to be particularly close to each other to mate).

Interesting. Thanks!