Cataclysm!!!

Well, I was just gearing up for a new batch of nereophytes when, literally out of nowhere, I'm informed that the entity hosting my website no longer exists.  Just like that, and the website is gone.  I can't put into words how disheartening this is.

Thankfully, more than 90% of the material is backed up, so the information is not lost, it's just not public anymore.  I'll be spending the next little while figuring out how to move forward with the project.

Just Waiting For the Pictures to Develop...

The last post in here was in October, and the last post with immediate relevance to my work with Nereus was more than a month before that.  I’m glad to say that, after a semester that—if it wasn’t from Hell itself, certainly took a page from Hell’s playbook—is finally over, I’ve been able to devote some serious time to presenting new plants on the website.

Now, that long hiatus doesn’t mean that I haven’t been working on nereid plants at all, for I have taken pockets of time here and there to organize clades and compose capsules for eventual publication.  But finally I’ve had enough time to devote to illustrations, which I think are a key component of the success of Nereus, or any similar project.  “A picture paints a thousand words,” as it were, and in the context of xenobiology I’ve found that pictures convey a lot more information than might apparent.  A capsule on any given imaginary creature may tell me a great deal about the evolutionary history, noteworthy behavior, or any number of useful details to reinforce the creature’s plausibility, but an accompanying image can either reinforce that plausibility or negate it all in an instant.

So I take my images very seriously, and try to use what skills I can in order to communicate the spirit and flavor of the nereids I create.  Over the years I’ve found that the illustration process has provided me with great triumphs as well as frustrations, surprises, and the occasional need to change capsules in order to fit with things I like in the picture; such has been the case with my first steps into my presentation of the nereophytes.

Because Coleria is a phylum that functions at a largely microscopic scale, I had a hard time figuring out exactly how to present them visually.  I started with sea grain, and a relatively straightforward capsule, but when I started to put together an illustration for the entry I was just never happy with it.  This turned out to be the biggest stumbling block for my nereophytes so far, because I didn’t want to move on until I could get that picture done.  Well, eventually I just said the image that’s up for the sea grain is good enough.  Maybe one day I’ll redo it, but in the end I shouldn’t let a presentation of nereid plants be halted by one little genus of algae.

So far with my nereids, almost all illustrations were rendered based on 3D models built in SketchUp so that I could explore biometrics, proportions, and image composition.  It’s been a technique that’s served me well, but after the frustrations I faced with drawing the sea grain, I decided on a different tactic with the verebull: a completely hand drawn composition without any preliminary 3D work.  While I still think the image for the verebull could be improved, it came together rather easily.  No muss, no fuss, and on to the next one.

Rock paint falls into the category of one of the images that has surprised me.  I used the same non-SketchUp technique here, penciling some stony backgrounds and adding the plant life itself in Photoshop.  I’m pleased with how it all turned out, but what surprised me was how the rock paint actually looks on the rocks.  What I had originally imagined was something more akin to desert lichen in appearance, but what has come about is something that is more visually interesting, and may help to paint future landscape images in a more alien light.

And I’m not sure if that pun was intended or not…

But if the rock paint surprised me, the splashmoss really came out of nowhere.  The original image in my head was something akin to shelf fungus, but as I sat down with pencil and paper, something else came out, something that looked more like a rash of pustules than anything else.  At first I thought about restarting, but since I was on a roll with alien looking plants I decided to go with it.

At some future date I may come back and see if the drawings I made are truly plausible, but for the time being I’m pleased with how the pictures have turned out and I’m willing to follow my initial impression that what I’ve drawn fits with scientific laws as we know them.  I look forward to anyone’s feedback on these matters, both in terms of the relationship between the capsules and their illustrations, and of the plausibility of the genera themselves.

When is Enough Enough?

Time for a brief aside from my reports on nereid plants. A discussion on Sigmund Nastrazzurro's Furaha website has touched on the idea of exactly how many species is sufficient for a "complete" speculative world; it's a difficult number to pinpoint because it depends on so many different factors, not the least of which being the amount of work a speculator is willing to put into the project. I thought I'd put together a blog explaining some of the creative process I go through early in my speculations and how I decide how many species to put in an ecosystem. Some other factors I could think of include:

- Diversity of the planet: How many different biomes of the planet do you want to explore/detail? Generally speaking, a planet that supports life as we know it will have several biomes, but if you're only interested in one or two you can largely ignore the others.

- Size of the biome: How much area does the biome cover? Obviously a water world will have many more aquatic creatures than land-based, and a biome that occurs in only a small corner of the world will not have room for much diversity.

- Biodiversity of the biome: How varied is life in each biome? You typically find more species in a tropical biome than you will in a desert. I chose to reflect this difference in my Nereus project, and you may wish to do so as well.

- The complexity of the food web: Who eats whom? When you're doing an overview of the biome's ecosystem you want to reflect the different trophic levels: producers, eaten by herbivores, eaten by carnivores. Obviously the process isn't always that cut and dried (both carnivores and omnivores can occupy several levels within the food web), but those three levels make for a good starting point.

For my own project I chose a rather large number of species (200 in total) because, in addition to well rounded ecologies, I wanted to show cladistic diversity and evolutionary radiation. That's a lot species for a project, of course, but if you want to do a project that's "complete" you could go through the following steps:

- Each ecology should include one apex predator, which means that a pyramid of species would sit underneath it in the food web. With two "lesser" predators underneath, and at least one herbivore for each predator you have six species of animals (if desired, you could throw in three or four plant species for good measure.

-Say there are three biomes you want to highlight. In order to reflect differing biodiversity of the largest one you could double the amount of species present and divide them up into groups of, say, six herbivores, three predators that consist of both carnivores and omnivores, two predators that prey on those species and an apex predator that pretty much eats what it wants. Or you could divide the biome species into two distinct ecosystems of six (for north and south continents, perhaps) and build them independently. Either way you're reflecting the broader biodiversity of the planet.

- In total, with three biomes (one of them twice the size of the other two) you've got 24 species to think up, and nine to twelve more if you add some plant species. If 36 seems like too much for your purposes you can always adjust your numbers accordingly. Perhaps highlighting only one herbivore, two carnivores, and a major plant for each biome will be enough, totalling to twelve species for the entire project. Of course there are more species on the planet than this, but you're not trying to show it all.

Well that's what I have to say on the matter; in the end it turned out to be longer than I expected and I'm glad I didn't post such a huge thing in Furaha's guestbook. If you think there's anything to add or a creative approach that serves you better let me know!

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Splashmoss

Though my class and work schedule are keeping me pretty busy, I managed to get a little bit written for the plant section of the website. As always, the text is subject to change, especially this early in the process, but I hope it gives a bit of an overview of what's to come.

As I've been researching and preparing, I've noticed that some of my plant ideas may need some drastic redesigns to move them more into the plausible end of the spectrum. I've provided images and descriptions of some plants throughout the animal and biome pages, but some of that information may be contradicted by my upcoming work with the plants themselves. I'll try and correct these points where I can, but otherwise consider the plant entries to trump information found elsewhere.

I also included a paragraph about the idiosyncrasies of the fictional scientists for a bit of flavor. I've always found such things an enjoyable inclusion to speculative projects, helping to flesh out the connection between the imaginary creatures/biosphere and the human audience.

At some point in the near future I will have the page up for the first group, the Coleria.

A Parade of Plants

So now that the first batch of animals is done, I've been gearing up to present fifty plant species of Nereus. I'm still working to get all the plants into a satisfactory cladogram and taxonomic classification, but things are coming along nicely. I've decided that, rather than featuring individual species I'll focus on genera, that way I'll be able to speak in more, well, general terms (notice the pun? ;)). I noticed many times while working with animal species that I was occasionally limited in what possibilities I could explore within a given entry; hopefully writing about a genus at a time rather than a species will allow me a little more flexibility in coverage.

Another aspect I'm considering, and would love some reader feedback on, is the order of presentation. The animals were grouped by biome, but with the plants I could present them a clade at a time, producing them in groups based on genetic relationship rather than by shared environment. A couple benefits I see from this are:

- Continuity of concept and appearance. With the animal nereids I would often have to revisit clades in order to ensure that the features and attributes of my current species meshed with its 'predecessors.' This occasionally resulted in wildly different methods of, say, reproduction or similar details, and even some niggling little aesthetic differences. While I feel that ultimately the animal cladogram came out pretty well, there was quite a bit of adjustment I had to make in order for it to make sense (and still more work in some cases, but that's a topic for another post); working within clades will probably solve those problems.

- Linear evolutionary progression. By starting at the beginning and working my way through the clades, I could better show the progressive trends of evolutionary adaptation and complexity, further reinforcing my own scientific understanding of the project. This would also not lock me into the developmental quagmire I found when it became clear that I needed to add insulating hair to some of the animals.

I think this method of organizing the plant presentation could certainly work, but I also think that the benefits of ecological symbiosis and the diversity produced from spreading out the clades as I did with the animals could have merit too. I just don't know which one would be best, so I put the question to you, the reader. By clade or by biome?

Freshwater Ecology 4: The Finishing Touch

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!

Freshwater Ecology 3: 99, 100!

I've done it! My original goal of creating 100 species for a single xenobiology project is complete! It's taken a lot longer than I thought (serious work began a little more than two years ago) but I'm pleased with the exercise in imagination and scientific education that has resulted from Nereus up to this point. By no means am I done with the project; this could even be considered nothing more than the halfway point.

But more on that later. For this post I wanted to focus on the final two species of this "first batch" of nereid animals. So far my freshwater nereids have been colored to rely on camouflage, and while there's nothing wrong with that, I wanted to depart from that with these two just for the sake of variety.

Of course, being an ambush predator, the river skate would benefit greatly from the same coloration as I've been employing so far, and in the end I abandoned my goal of a conspicuously colored predator here. Since the species is so different from any other nereids I've made so far I decided it would be unique enough to stand on its own while being camouflaged like everything else.

What I abandoned in one I embraced in the other, the yellow crested anguil. With a species already representing the taxonomic family, I had some precedents to work with, namely the armlike jaws, the mildly armored body, and a general color scheme. Of course, color is one of the easiest things to vary between species (and even subspecies) but it was nice to at least have the starting point. From there it was a simple matter of stretching the phylogeny to fit a unique species profile and make sure it's evolutionarily fit.

As always, I'm interested to see what you think about these species, so let's hear it!