The Beta Comae Berenices system is a recent find. The system itself had been known since ancient times but the planets were not discovered till a chance accident left a planet surveyor team and its craft the Renaissance stranded in the system. Repairs would take some time, and having discovered a habitable planet the team decided to touch down and do their job of studying the new location while collecting any material that might help patch up the ship. Only a few species could be studied by such a small team and much effort was directed towards identifying factors that would impact human habitability, but it was enough to identify some basic divisions in the local wildlife, and the report sent convinced their home government to begin efforts to colonize the planet.
Consider these those first files pertaining to the local biology. At the end of my last blog entry I posted a picture of a girl feeding a variety of Zainterian animals. These animals are all representatives of Zainter’s terrestrial land phyla – the rigidia (the reptilian eating out of her hand), hard worms (the flier), morningstars (the creature wrapped around her arm) and twoflowers (the one crawling towards her). Twoflowers have only had limited success out of the water and most land forms live in river or coastal areas where they are subject to the tide, so there isn’t much to be said about them, but I can go into great depth about the other three phyla.
The rigidia constitute the most advanced phylum on the planet. They are Zainter’s main terrestrial inhabitants and the creatures you will be hearing the most of. Except for a few largely obscure subphyla they look quite a bit like vertebrates, but the defining characteristic of all rigidia is not a spinal cord but a ribcage of a black silicon-based material called amaldine. This also happens to be the material used by the bone trees for their plating, and by this definition they would also count as rigidia (indeed, the rigidia are their ancestors), however their plant-like nature drove scientists to devise a separate phylum, botanimalia, so as to avoid confusing the public.
The subphyla and multiple clades are so diverse as to make a generalized anatomy difficult to determine, but some things can be assumed universal. The rigidia are sexual creatures with separated genders, but their gonads are located in their throats and so exchanging gametes involves either swallowing their planktonic form or mouth-to-mouth contact (which is to say, to the uninitiated, one amazingly intimate kiss). A few breathe through their skin, but most use a two-way respiratory system with outlets on the side of the ribcage (they are under the armpits and on the side of the chest for the two shown here), and similarly their digestive system is two-way. The greater part have jaws and use six tongues, but these jaws are lateral in exo-regicon and the tongues lined with spikes, while most true regicons have teeth on vertical jaws for this purpose.
All the rigidia you have seen thus far are regicons. They and their close relatives the exo-regicons make up most of the phylum and are the only groups to have made it to land. In both subphyla the amaldine ribcage has developed into a complex skeleton to support the creature, but while the structure is internal in regicons it forms an exoskeleton amongst exo-regicons. In the water this has allowed the latter to surpass true regicons, where buoyancy counters their bulk and they can retain mobility while maximizing durability, but on land this has caused them some problems. While their plating ensures they are well-protected against similar-sized predators, it loses its effectiveness as they grow and begins to weigh them down, so they have been forced to segment it into plates to keep a single blow from shattering the whole encasing. The most successful terrestrial exo-regicons are about the size of arthropods and all the larger ones are slow moving grazers no bigger than an ox, though this hasn’t stopped them from assuming larger more frightening amphibious forms. This has opened the door for the regicons, and they have since diversified into clades reminiscent of tetrapods on Earth and grown to sizes comparable to our largest animals. The exo-regicons might have them beaten for defense, but they have a secret weapon that puts the ball back in their court; specialized lung cells that deliver ATP right into the bloodstream immediately ready for use and extensive ATP reserves that can supply energy for long periods of time, allowing regicons to act at full speed and strength without the need for breath. This gives them endurance unequaled by any other creatures, and predators have long since learned not to try to wear out or suffocate a regicon. Of these Zainter’s cool climate has given dominance to the warm-blooded endotherms, but in equatorial areas the reptilians may yet rise to give them a run for their money.
The next major phylum is the hard worms. For the most part they are about the size of arthropods, but with their more efficient internal supports they could grow larger if not for their unwieldy respiratory system which draws oxygen through their skin. It is these supports that give them their name: all hard worms are lined with a series of keratin rings unattached except for lines of muscles that give some additional shape. The resulting structure is surprisingly lightweight and extremely durable while allowing for worm-like flexibility, as the muscles can pull the rings together or apart to bend or stretch the creature. Hard worms are extremely proliferative and several subphyla exist, but on land the only important one is the dodecapods, also known as the flexites.
All the hard worms shown up to this point have been flexites. Most hard worms are lined with keratin spikes derived from their skeletal rings, but flexites have adapted these into jaws, posterior antennae and a series of twelve legs with exposed keratin nails that can pierce into any substance they so desire. In fact their ancestral defense instinct is to roll around a target with their spikes pointing down to pierce it in what is known as the “death curl”, and several use this technique to hunt their food. Having twelve legs gives them an extremely stable gait while making sure there are plenty to spare, and almost every group has adapted at least a pair for uses other than locomotion, giving rise to structures such as wings, knives, pincers and oars. In fact, the major clades of flexites are differentiated mostly by their leg configuration. Even if they lose all their legs they can still move by rhythmic undulation of their bodies, and by pressing their body segments together or apart they can create enough pressure to even scale trees by this method.
Populations are just as hardy. Flexites are hermaphrodites, so any individual can impregnate any other. Their gonads are connected to their mouths and so while mating they lip-lock, taking turns spitting and swallowing each others’ gametes before they part and lay eggs. In times of population crisis flexites can even impregnate themselves, meaning even one individual can restore their population, making them extremely difficult to exterminate.
Morningstars are the next phylum on our list. Compared to the rigidia and hard worms there are relatively few species in this phylum, and they hardly deviate at all from their general body plan, but even within these limitations they have managed to fill a variety of niches. At a glance they look like sea stars but this is misleading – sea stars are radially symmetric and possess sets of five arms; morningstars are bilaterally symmetric and possess twelve arms, six small ones around the mouth for feeding and six larger locomotor arms with a particularly long thirteenth arm serving as a tail. In terrestrial variants the tail also sports eyes, transforming it into a makeshift neck and head – although the nervous centers, mouth and all other sensory organs are all in the body.
Unlike the other phyla described here, morningstars hardly have any skeleton. All they have is one or two rings of an amaldine precursor giving their body some shape and fangs in their mouthparts, but that’s it, and this precursor is flexible enough that even this fortification bends easily. Their strength is not in their supports, but their lack of them. Being constituted largely of muscle, morningstars are extremely strong relative to their size and can easily break open shells and even amaldine encasements covering their prey. This might sound difficult considering their muscles can only pull not push and have no hard body to act against, but what little skeleton they do have provides some leverage and by pulling tentacle muscles against one another they can fake a push. Unfortunately these muscles aren’t rigid enough to stand upon making walking a chore for the morningstars, forcing them to scoot rather than crawl, but it is well-suited for climbing trees where they can pull each other from branch to branch. With such flexible limbs morningstars can easily make their way through the canopies, and up in the trees they have proven extremely successful, culminating in a new form of locomotion; swinging from branch to branch by tentacles – cernuation (with all regards to Gert van Dijk for inventing the term)!
Such complex locomotion has a whole slew of consequences. Tentacles include a great number of muscles requiring quite a lot of nerves to exact even simple movements, and so even primitive morningstars have complex nervous systems, providing a basis for greater intelligence as in the advanced cernuators. Such a system in combination with their constant movement and intensive hunting techniques is extremely energy demanding, and all morningstars are at least partially carnivorous to sate this voracious appetite. Like the rigidia they have separate genders and gonads located near the mouth, forcing them to make oral contact to spread gametes or disperse them planktonically.
Last of these phyla are the twoflowers. For the most part they remained tied to the water and stick to areas where they can be exposed to it for at least part of the day, such as riverbanks and tidal zones. They are timid creatures and tend to seal themselves in their shells with their two armored fins, but if they are submerged and can’t spot trouble with their four all-around eyes they will open up to let water fill the cavities where these are stored. These connect to a small stomach that can pick up plankton, algae and small swimmers delivered with the flow, which is enough to satisfy their easygoing lifestyle. Some will even host algae on their fins, providing them with further sustenance and some handy camouflage. Such twoflowers are more keen on keeping their shells open and holding out their flaps to ensure their photosynthetic partners get plenty of sunlight, and it is the floral appearance of these unclosed red-tinted critters that earned them the name twoflower.
These gaps are also central to their respiratory and reproductive systems. It is through their membranes that gas exchange takes place and through it that bodily wastes are disposed of. Primitive gametes can grow here as well, and males can dislodge these for dispersal in nearby waters to be received by females, who similarly disperse their newly formed eggs back into the sea. While the stomach does not count as part of the gap it is connected directly to the hollow and acts like a small pump forcing water in and out through its contraction, preventing the contents from becoming stagnant.
Nevertheless, twoflowers are breaking ground in adapting to their new lifestyle. They can use their fins to drag themselves around, like sea turtles, and because their bodies are biradially symmetric they can continue moving even if flipped over. A modern clade has split the plates on the end of the fins to form primitive legs, and the new-found mobility and ability to manipulate objects around them has allowed has been improvement enough to finally make them diversify. Recently twoflowers have begun burrowing into wet mud to derive moisture and secreting nutritious juices to sustain their gametes rather than environmental water, allowing these creatures to slowly but surely distance themselves from their pools, and eventually break off of them altogether.
Thus ends the report filed by the first surveyor team. This is just a brief outline of each of the phyla without exploring their many species, but looking into that subject in depth could take days and that is what the website is for. Any future teams will need a priority to fully explore the subject in question, and mission objectives from higher command are still in pending. Have any of these groups interested you enough to ask for more about them in a future post? Just leave me a comment if you have any suggestions, or perhaps would rather the archivists explored the planetary database for more knowledge on the planet, its history and its inhabitants.
