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.

Back on Track...

The site is now back online in its new home with Google Sites, and there were many things I realized as I went through the process of rebuilding it.

One was a refamiliarization with material.  With 100 species on the site, and a long hiatus due to academic duties, my memories about some species was... fuzzy...  The review was refreshing and even worked kind of like a rediscovery.  It was as though I was seeing some of the nereids for the first time, and that will help when I get underway with creating new species again.

Another thing is that Google Sites has a much better sidebar navigation system than the host for the old site.  The links on the side can be extended so that all the sites are clickable or collapsed so that only a few are shown.  For the sake of saving space, I decided to leave the species off the list, but now it seems that if a species page is viewed that it collapses the whole sidebar, which can be disorienting.  I think if I include them in the sidebar it will solve that problem.  What do you think?

Another I noticed was a matter of consistency.  Just little things here and there, such as formatting from page to page and contradictions in the content of different species.  The formatting is a rather easy fix, and for the most part I've already done it, but making sure that all the material agrees with itself will take time.  Much of what I noticed was so subtle that it may take some interesting rewriting to iron out.

Finally, I noticed that the website as it is so far only takes up about a third of the storage space available, which means that, even with the full 200 species, there's room for more.  I don't think that will get filled with even more species, but I think I could use some of it to include more diagrams and illustrations explaining evolutionary lineages and interesting physiological points.  Or I might just save all that for Nereus 2.0... ;)

Any way, so the page is up and running again.  Many thanks to all those who gave feedback and input during the process, and keep an eye out for updates in the future!

Rebuilding the Anthill

So there's this comedian I enjoy who has this little gag about what ants must be saying when we callous, lumbering humans step on their anthills:

"You would think that they would take at least a second to look at what happened and go 'OH MAN!  I DON'T BELIEVE IT!  I ain't doin' that again...'"

There's of course no scientific backing for the scenario, but I still think it's hilarious and that it's a good analogy for how I felt when I found out that my website, which I had been working on (with material both relevant to Nereus and not) for several years.  I just didn't even want to deal with it.

But, after more than a month of not really doing anything to get my website put back together, I've finally got a new site going.  Here's the link:

sites.google.com/site/projectnereus

It's with Google Sites, so hopefully things will remain reliable enough.

At this point, all I have on the website is some information about Nereus itself, but take a look and let me know if there's anything I can improve, whether format-wise or in terms of content, while I'm still at this early stage of rebuilding my little anthill...

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.