Saturday, July 7, 2012

Consistency or Practicality?

As many of you may have noticed, while I've been preparing the next batch of nereophytes for publication, I've been adding a new feature to the website as a whole: size comparisons for different nereid clades.  Overall, I'm quite pleased with how they've turned out, but now that they're more or less complete, I've reached a point of decision.  The first is that I'm still not sure what to do with those pages that have only one featured nereid, such as the page for the taxonomic class Radixa and family Planidae.  It doesn't make sense to have an image comparing a quicksand clam or a treemount to, well, themselves.  They already have their own images, complete with a human or a hand for comparison, so another image of the sort would just be redundant.  So what do you think?  Should I include it for the sake of consistency, or leave it blank because the image just isn't practical?  Keep in mind that, at some future date, I may add other material in the area alongside the links to the individual species, such as illustrative information about the clade or clarifying diagrams.

Another fence I'm sitting on is what to do with the size comparison image for the Filtrapennae phylum; the two species in this clade just aren't easy to compare based on size.  I didn't have too much of a problem with other clades, but I may redo those if I find a better composition in the future.  But back to the Filtrappenae: if I show the water gauntlet in the full glory of its colonial size then the crown of thorns is hopelessly dwarfed, and won't who up as much more than a tiny little blob in the image; if I instead show an individual organism from the water gauntlet, then it in turn will be a tiny little blob in comparison to the crown of thorns.  Again, I wonder if the situation warrants a size comparison.  What are your thoughts?

Finally, I wonder about size comparisons for the nereophytes.  Granted, at the outset of the nereophyte page I point out that it will be following a different format than that of the nereozoa, so a similar size comparison may not be practical.  Also, the sizes of various nereophytes may present a similar comparison problem in the future, but I just don't know.  Once again, I'm interested in what you, the reader, thinks.

14 comments:

  1. hm... well for the quicksand clam and treemount, leave it blank, but for the water gauntlet and the crown of thorns, it will be opposite, and as for the nereophytes, just go with the flow of comparing the size of each one, just let them new nereophytes in

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  2. Well, the Water Gauntlet's "reef" already shows a human for scale, as does the Crown of Thorns...so perhaps the remaining size comparison would be "how much of the Crown of Thorns would you have in the photograph, if a lone Water Gauntlet landed on it?"

    perhaps include the scale for the Radixa, in case more is ever added to the online clade.

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    1. Then again, we could expect new members of the species of Radixa and Planidae

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  3. Unfortunately, with the last batch of nereids I have planned, there won't be any species added to either the Radixa clade or the Planidae.

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    1. well then, i consider both the treemount and quicksand clam to be...*puts on sunglasses*... lone wolves
      YYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

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    2. Actually, after looking at my list it turns out I was wrong; I will be adding one more Radixa species.

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  4. Maybe you can cut off part of the Gauntlet colony like you did in the strider comparison.

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  5. Great Googly-Moogly, that bankvine looks amazing, would give any young visitors the heebee-jeebees, still, an awesome addition to the Erepofursia family :3

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    1. Nicky, I'm going to have to ask you to keep your comments relevant to the post to which they're attached. Since this one is about size comparisons, I'd like to keep any discussion here around that topic. If you can't wait to talk about the up and coming Erepofursia until I write my blog about them, you can always discuss your thoughts in my subforum at Speculative Evolution.

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    2. oh, sorry, i got too excited, happens some of the times

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  6. Perhaps...perhaps under Nidovalvae, put a siloette of the Quicksand Clam next to a siloette of one representative of Cizoria and one of Mollipodia?

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  7. Kind of going with the where to place things theme, where would the cloud rocket go, biome wise?Would it fit into the coastal biome because that is where it hatches?

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    1. That's a very good question, Anonymous. When I originally created the cloudrocket I didn't put it in any specific biome; to be completely honest, at that early point in the project the chosen format had yet to fully gel and I didn't even have distinct biomes planned out yet.

      As a result, when I explain the early stages of cloudrocket existence I don't specify exactly where the eggs hatch and grow. It only says they fall to the ground and spend a brief life in water. Is that water marine or fresh? Does it prefer warm or cold? Is the nereobacteria the cloudrocket depends on later in life sensitive to one extreme or the other, limiting their habitat in these early stages? These are questions I've yet to answer. What are your thoughts?

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  8. Well I suppose that if the cloudrocket had a specific migration route it would be plausible to place exactly were the eggs hatch. But since it simply circles the globe daily, then maybe it drops its eggs off in any body f water it can find

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