While I know that I still have a lot planned for Nereus, I feel very accomplished. The material on the website is substantive, and I feel like the planet is well represented at this point.
Okay, enough patting myself on the back. I think it's kind of fitting that the freshwater biome is the last one I do; since it threads through the all other biomes, it was helpful for me to know exactly what all those biomes were so the images and concepts I wanted to convey were clear and consistent. When it comes down to it, though, the only differences between the ecology I present here and what is found on Earth are largely cosmetic. I've explored how nereid bauplans would fare in this environment and the outcome has been interesting, but there wasn't much work to make the plants and environment plausible.
Not much else to say at this point. If you have anything to add, or see holes in what I've presented so far, let me know. If not, stay tuned for more nereid fun!
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You deserve congratulations and back-patting. That's a lot of work you've done...not just creature-creation, but actually putting together this website!
ReplyDeleteMy thought about what the River ecosystem page says - with how the sog drains the rivers and ponds, I imagine sog basins are good places to hunt for (recent(ish)) fossils.
"Not much work"? Off the top of my head, the Sog Basins and the Ballerina Forests aren't like what Earth has. So I'd say it was plenty of novel enviroments - which, again, is reason to pat yourself on the back.
That's a really good question about fossils in sog basins. My initial thought is that because they're swampy they would readily catch carcasses and cover them in silt; on second thought I wonder if, because these tear ponds can be transient in nature, sedimentation doesn't really happen in sog basins. On third thought, though, the sudden nature of tear ponds could mean that particularly large flooding could catch nereids unaware, drowning them and increasing the frequency of fossils. As you can see, I'm having troubles coming to any conclusions and further research is necessary.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was saying the biome wasn't much work I was referring to this freshwater writeup. As you pointed out, there are many nereid ecologies that are quite novel in comparison to Earth, and those required quite a bit of research and creativity to develop. Because the freshwater biome only has cosmetic differences and otherwise mirrors terrestrial rivers and lakes, there wasn't much work this time around.
Thanks for the accolades. I'm glad that people still show interest in the project, even after so long. That's a rare thing in the speculative evolution "industry." ;)
One thing I'm wondering, though, is "which came first?" - the ray body type (flattish), or the electricity-generating.
ReplyDeleteThe ray body type, I'd imagine, because there are electricity-generating rays, but there are also rays that don't generate electricity.
ReplyDelete