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Description
This world is known as Iktomi, named for a trickster spirit from Native American folklore (the name in this case coming from the Lakota interpretation) taking the form of a spider. It is so named for it's native inhabitants, the iktomites, which have a bauplan that many humans find reminiscent of a jumping spider. This description is somewhat inaccurate, as it is a very loose comparison and mainly only applies to the iktomite nymphs. Though an iktomite does have an exoskeleton when it is young as it ages it slowly develops a cartilaginous endoskeleton which can fully support them by the time they approach adulthood, and by the time they have reached sexual maturity they have molted their last exoskeleton and do not grow a new one as it will be unable to support a fully grown iktomite. In a way this process is similar to puberty in humans: the exoskeleton helps support the undeveloped childhood body and protects them from predators, but it will become a hindrance during the rapid burst of growth caused by the production of hormones that trigger the transformation from sexually immature nymph to sexually mature adult. The iktomites are sometimes called "spider-monkeys" by humans (sometimes derogatory, though most of the time it's just a colloquialism) because they have agile, flexible bodies with ten limbs specialized for arboreal travel. Two pairs of limbs are found near the front and back sides of the body while a smaller pair can be found in the middle, usually folded against the underside of the abdomen. These limbs are capable of feats of incredible contortion, as much of the surface of the planet's large temperate zones are thick with forests of rapidly growing bamboo-like flora, though their internal structure is far more similar to a palm than bamboo. These plants extend vine-like appendages out to grip the environment around them in order to steady themselves in the frequently windy weather as well as to pull competitors down and away from sources of light. The combination of stalks and vines creates a complex three dimensional habitat, which created the need for a large number of agile limbs to facilitate movement through said habitat. Each limb ends in a zygodactyl appendage, not unlike that of a chameleon's foot, with digits that can interlock so that they can safely sleep or rest without risk of falling. In addition to their limbs the iktomites have also developed eyes specialized for three dimensional living: a set of three facing slightly upwards and a set of three facing slightly downwards. Each eye can move independently but is always used in unison with another eye for maximum depth perception. Iktomites have an omnivorous diet, but their feeding mechanism is a bit unusual and makes them the subject of repulsion for many in the galactic community. A prehensile proboscis likes in a pouch on their abdomen near the base of their neck and ends in a radial series of radula, not unlike those of a snail or slug. These are used to scrape bits of food into the proboscis where it can be macerated by thousands of small teeth as it is swallowed. This limits them to eating softer foods, as they cannot tear or break down bigger chunks. Their diet, and consequently their cuisine, is therefore centered largely around decaying matter. Butchery is not an art that exists on Iktomi; instead, animals intended to be eaten are killed and left to decompose until they are in a softer state (and, consequently, more easily digested). Fibrous or otherwise tough plants are usually fermented or boiled to break them down into a state soft enough to eat, but their decidedly non-fresh diet is greatly supplemented with fresh, soft plant matter in the modern era. For the iktomites eating is typically a messy and time consuming (pun definitely intended) task, and in most of their cultures it is performed in private.

It's not just their scavenger lifestyle that has affected the development of their cultures, their hermaphroditic reproduction has also greatly affected their society. They exhibit pseudo-viviparity, meaning a whichever member of the mating pair becomes impregnated will carry a clutch of eggs within their body until the fetus within is almost fully developed, and the eggs will be laid within a day or two of their hatching. This is very costly biologically speaking, so pregnancy has been seen as highly undesirable in most iktomite cultures. In ancient times it was common for sex to be treated as combat or a competition in which two individuals wrestled in an attempt to impregnate the other, forcing them to bear the biological and financial cost of raising the child. Some cultures developed systems in which roles recognizable to humans as gender were created, though often they were far more complex than any mere human gender spectrum. In a select few cultures it was seen as a sign of prestige to become pregnant as only the wealthy could afford to do so. In most it was seen as something beneath those of power and pregnancy was relegated to slaves or lower class individuals. A few cultures even developed a kind of gender-caste with groups of individuals inheriting the duty of pregnancy and having to go to great lengths to move into a higher caste, with the pregnancy-caste typically being inherited by at least one of the surviving offspring of each egg clutch. In the modern era many cultures see pregnancy as something to be shared and often individuals will mate for life and impregnate each other. This has created a trend of twin births and often a sibling will be an individual's closest companion in life until they find a mate of their own. A small number of cultures even consider a sibling-pair to legally be a single individual and mating now occurs between sibling pairs rather than individual citizens, though this is usually found in religious minority communities and is met with distrust and suspicion, much like polygamy is in many human cultures.

The concept of a nation-state never truly developed among iktomite society as it has on most worlds. This is by no means a rare occurrence, but statistically species that develop a concept similar to a nation-state tend to be the ones that advance technologically to the point of joining the galactic community, while those that don't stagnate and remain roughly at the same technological level or develop exceptionally slowly. Iktomite civilization was, and to an extent still is, made up of a large number of smaller tribal and clan communities that competed and confederated with each other throughout their history (with the occasional short lived empire emerging to conquer vast territories only to fall to widespread rebellion at their zenith). This made their technological development much slower: whereas humans went from founding their first agricultural settlements to exploring space in only around 400 generations, it took iktomites almost 10,000 generations to accomplish the same thing. For some perspective, if humans advanced at the pace the iktomites did then there would have been 250,000 years between the first farms and the lunar landing. That's 245,000 years longer than it actually took us. That's so long that humans would have had to have started farming 50,000 years before they were even anatomically modern homo sapiens, so far back there there would still have been two or three other species of humans sharing the Earth with us (On a side note, that's kind of weird to think about, isn't it? Other species of humans?). The iktomites have such a long history that many things have simply been lost to time. Entire civilizations were founded, expanded, created great works and did great deeds, fell, and their cities fell to ruin for so long that they eroded away entirely until absolutely no evidence of their existence was left for modern archaeologists to find. Things began to change once industrialization began to take off. As populations began moving from rural areas to urban ones and population growth began to decline it became clear to several political and philosophical thinkers that the old ways of running their society could simply no longer work. A new political ideology developed and took root, one that--quite by accident--mimicked the organization of eusocial insects like bees and ants. A centralized government became the supreme authority in the land and would usurp many roles that had traditionally been filled by local leaders or social interactions. In addition to this the government would create and enforce a kind of fluid caste system on the populace, assigning functions (including reproduction) to individuals based on a variety of traits or circumstances. From the early industrial era of iktomite civilization rose the political ideology that would transform their society forever: hivism. The foundation of the hive-state (as opposed to nation-state) was heavily resisted at first, but its dominion over iktomite society was inevitable. Hive-states (which I will refer to simply as hives from this point on) spread rapidly across the planet until the myriad of small, interdependent tribal and clan territories were brought together for the first time into cohesive, over-arching cultural and social units. Hives became the dominant political entities on Iktomi, much like nations became the dominant type of polity on Earth. Differing viewpoints on how governments should be run created various types of hives, much like nations on Earth; although, on Iktomi there was never any real equivalent to democracy. Interestingly the iktomites never engaged in large-scale, organized, industrial warfare like humans did (wars did happen, just not on a global scale). Hives were instead more prone to engage in intense trade wars with each other, and would attempt to destroy the industrial capacity of other hives through economic rather than military means. This is likely because of the lack of private enterprise in iktomite society: the economic and industrial complexes being run exclusively by the state made conducting such conflict far easier than it would be for human nation-states.

Iktomi is divided into 98 hive-states and 12 tribal confederations. It has two continents: a large super-continent in the southern hemisphere that is home to 89% of the planet's eleven billion inhabitants, and a smaller, resource-poor continent that stretches down from the northern pole that is home to the planet's few remaining non-hive polities. It has a single, very interesting moon that is quite a bit larger than Earth's moon. It is believed to have formed in a manner similar to Earth's moon (via a collision with another proto-planetary body during the formation of the solar system), but it was formed with more material. It's larger size and greater density made Iktomi's moon capable of supporting widespread geological activity and even a thin atmosphere for a time, and some iktomite scientists speculate it may have briefly been habitable, though this is unlikely. In any case the geological activity has long since ended and the atmosphere lost to space, though the moon has a radically different appearance to Earth's own. The craters that resulted from the bombardment during the moon's early days were mostly eroded away while it still had geologic and atmospheric activity, and the interactions between the two forces gave it a very different landscape from what most people usually associate with moons. The surface of the moon is more like that of Mars, with rust-colored deserts, mountains, and canyons. After the development of manned space flight many of the more powerful hives established operations on the moon for research and resource extraction. As technology advanced and the exploration and exploitation of space expanded to their inner star system the planet's moon became the most important port for their civilization. It was much easier (and safer) to build a space elevator on it than it was to build one on the planet, and the rich resources of the moon made it cheap to develop the settlements there as fewer needed to be shipped from the planet itself. Eventually technology advanced even more and inner system became developed while the outer system became the new frontier, and by the time the iktomites had developed faster than light travel the glory days of the planet's moon were long gone as there was no longer a need to have a jumping point from the homeworld to the universe beyond. Currently the moon is divided into several territories leased to various alien polities, corporations, and interest groups as a place where they can conduct business with the iktomite hives while remaining on their own sovereign land. The moon gained notoriety after the assassination of Earth Federation President Nieves Linares by her Vice President and his subsequent, yet short lived coup. After being ousted from Earth by military loyalists mere weeks after his coup "First Citizen" German Ashworth fled to the small territory leased by a co-conspirator businessman on this moon and declared an "Empire of Earth government-in-exile." He continued to broadcast propaganda and attempt to build support for his cause for eight months before the iktomites forcibly expelled him and his associates from the territory. The whereabouts of the First Citizen are currently unknown, as he decided that he would rather get out of the shuttle the iktomites insisted give him a ride out of their territory and walk back to Earth. He was last seen exiting the airlock of Civilian Transport Vessel 11973-88. The iktomites have no extrasolar colonies and no ambitions to expand their territory beyond their native star system, and have instead opted to engage in widespread trade with the known galaxy as a neutral and independent power.

Description
This world is known as Iktomi, named for a trickster spirit from Native American folklore (the name in this case coming from the Lakota interpretation) taking the form of a spider. It is so named for it's native inhabitants, the iktomites, which have a bauplan that many humans find reminiscent of a jumping spider. This description is somewhat inaccurate, as it is a very loose comparison and mainly only applies to the iktomite nymphs. Though an iktomite does have an exoskeleton when it is young as it ages it slowly develops a cartilaginous endoskeleton which can fully support them by the time they approach adulthood, and by the time they have reached sexual maturity they have molted their last exoskeleton and do not grow a new one as it will be unable to support a fully grown iktomite. In a way this process is similar to puberty in humans: the exoskeleton helps support the undeveloped childhood body and protects them from predators, but it will become a hindrance during the rapid burst of growth caused by the production of hormones that trigger the transformation from sexually immature nymph to sexually mature adult. The iktomites are sometimes called "spider-monkeys" by humans (sometimes derogatory, though most of the time it's just a colloquialism) because they have agile, flexible bodies with ten limbs specialized for arboreal travel. Two pairs of limbs are found near the front and back sides of the body while a smaller pair can be found in the middle, usually folded against the underside of the abdomen. These limbs are capable of feats of incredible contortion, as much of the surface of the planet's large temperate zones are thick with forests of rapidly growing bamboo-like flora, though their internal structure is far more similar to a palm than bamboo. These plants extend vine-like appendages out to grip the environment around them in order to steady themselves in the frequently windy weather as well as to pull competitors down and away from sources of light. The combination of stalks and vines creates a complex three dimensional habitat, which created the need for a large number of agile limbs to facilitate movement through said habitat. Each limb ends in a zygodactyl appendage, not unlike that of a chameleon's foot, with digits that can interlock so that they can safely sleep or rest without risk of falling. In addition to their limbs the iktomites have also developed eyes specialized for three dimensional living: a set of three facing slightly upwards and a set of three facing slightly downwards. Each eye can move independently but is always used in unison with another eye for maximum depth perception. Iktomites have an omnivorous diet, but their feeding mechanism is a bit unusual and makes them the subject of repulsion for many in the galactic community. A prehensile proboscis likes in a pouch on their abdomen near the base of their neck and ends in a radial series of radula, not unlike those of a snail or slug. These are used to scrape bits of food into the proboscis where it can be macerated by thousands of small teeth as it is swallowed. This limits them to eating softer foods, as they cannot tear or break down bigger chunks. Their diet, and consequently their cuisine, is therefore centered largely around decaying matter. Butchery is not an art that exists on Iktomi; instead, animals intended to be eaten are killed and left to decompose until they are in a softer state (and, consequently, more easily digested). Fibrous or otherwise tough plants are usually fermented or boiled to break them down into a state soft enough to eat, but their decidedly non-fresh diet is greatly supplemented with fresh, soft plant matter in the modern era. For the iktomites eating is typically a messy and time consuming (pun definitely intended) task, and in most of their cultures it is performed in private.

It's not just their scavenger lifestyle that has affected the development of their cultures, their hermaphroditic reproduction has also greatly affected their society. They exhibit pseudo-viviparity, meaning a whichever member of the mating pair becomes impregnated will carry a clutch of eggs within their body until the fetus within is almost fully developed, and the eggs will be laid within a day or two of their hatching. This is very costly biologically speaking, so pregnancy has been seen as highly undesirable in most iktomite cultures. In ancient times it was common for sex to be treated as combat or a competition in which two individuals wrestled in an attempt to impregnate the other, forcing them to bear the biological and financial cost of raising the child. Some cultures developed systems in which roles recognizable to humans as gender were created, though often they were far more complex than any mere human gender spectrum. In a select few cultures it was seen as a sign of prestige to become pregnant as only the wealthy could afford to do so. In most it was seen as something beneath those of power and pregnancy was relegated to slaves or lower class individuals. A few cultures even developed a kind of gender-caste with groups of individuals inheriting the duty of pregnancy and having to go to great lengths to move into a higher caste, with the pregnancy-caste typically being inherited by at least one of the surviving offspring of each egg clutch. In the modern era many cultures see pregnancy as something to be shared and often individuals will mate for life and impregnate each other. This has created a trend of twin births and often a sibling will be an individual's closest companion in life until they find a mate of their own. A small number of cultures even consider a sibling-pair to legally be a single individual and mating now occurs between sibling pairs rather than individual citizens, though this is usually found in religious minority communities and is met with distrust and suspicion, much like polygamy is in many human cultures.

The concept of a nation-state never truly developed among iktomite society as it has on most worlds. This is by no means a rare occurrence, but statistically species that develop a concept similar to a nation-state tend to be the ones that advance technologically to the point of joining the galactic community, while those that don't stagnate and remain roughly at the same technological level or develop exceptionally slowly. Iktomite civilization was, and to an extent still is, made up of a large number of smaller tribal and clan communities that competed and confederated with each other throughout their history (with the occasional short lived empire emerging to conquer vast territories only to fall to widespread rebellion at their zenith). This made their technological development much slower: whereas humans went from founding their first agricultural settlements to exploring space in only around 400 generations, it took iktomites almost 10,000 generations to accomplish the same thing. For some perspective, if humans advanced at the pace the iktomites did then there would have been 250,000 years between the first farms and the lunar landing. That's 245,000 years longer than it actually took us. That's so long that humans would have had to have started farming 50,000 years before they were even anatomically modern homo sapiens, so far back there there would still have been two or three other species of humans sharing the Earth with us (On a side note, that's kind of weird to think about, isn't it? Other species of humans?). The iktomites have such a long history that many things have simply been lost to time. Entire civilizations were founded, expanded, created great works and did great deeds, fell, and their cities fell to ruin for so long that they eroded away entirely until absolutely no evidence of their existence was left for modern archaeologists to find. Things began to change once industrialization began to take off. As populations began moving from rural areas to urban ones and population growth began to decline it became clear to several political and philosophical thinkers that the old ways of running their society could simply no longer work. A new political ideology developed and took root, one that--quite by accident--mimicked the organization of eusocial insects like bees and ants. A centralized government became the supreme authority in the land and would usurp many roles that had traditionally been filled by local leaders or social interactions. In addition to this the government would create and enforce a kind of fluid caste system on the populace, assigning functions (including reproduction) to individuals based on a variety of traits or circumstances. From the early industrial era of iktomite civilization rose the political ideology that would transform their society forever: hivism. The foundation of the hive-state (as opposed to nation-state) was heavily resisted at first, but its dominion over iktomite society was inevitable. Hive-states (which I will refer to simply as hives from this point on) spread rapidly across the planet until the myriad of small, interdependent tribal and clan territories were brought together for the first time into cohesive, over-arching cultural and social units. Hives became the dominant political entities on Iktomi, much like nations became the dominant type of polity on Earth. Differing viewpoints on how governments should be run created various types of hives, much like nations on Earth; although, on Iktomi there was never any real equivalent to democracy. Interestingly the iktomites never engaged in large-scale, organized, industrial warfare like humans did (wars did happen, just not on a global scale). Hives were instead more prone to engage in intense trade wars with each other, and would attempt to destroy the industrial capacity of other hives through economic rather than military means. This is likely because of the lack of private enterprise in iktomite society: the economic and industrial complexes being run exclusively by the state made conducting such conflict far easier than it would be for human nation-states.

Iktomi is divided into 98 hive-states and 12 tribal confederations. It has two continents: a large super-continent in the southern hemisphere that is home to 89% of the planet's eleven billion inhabitants, and a smaller, resource-poor continent that stretches down from the northern pole that is home to the planet's few remaining non-hive polities. It has a single, very interesting moon that is quite a bit larger than Earth's moon. It is believed to have formed in a manner similar to Earth's moon (via a collision with another proto-planetary body during the formation of the solar system), but it was formed with more material. It's larger size and greater density made Iktomi's moon capable of supporting widespread geological activity and even a thin atmosphere for a time, and some iktomite scientists speculate it may have briefly been habitable, though this is unlikely. In any case the geological activity has long since ended and the atmosphere lost to space, though the moon has a radically different appearance to Earth's own. The craters that resulted from the bombardment during the moon's early days were mostly eroded away while it still had geologic and atmospheric activity, and the interactions between the two forces gave it a very different landscape from what most people usually associate with moons. The surface of the moon is more like that of Mars, with rust-colored deserts, mountains, and canyons. After the development of manned space flight many of the more powerful hives established operations on the moon for research and resource extraction. As technology advanced and the exploration and exploitation of space expanded to their inner star system the planet's moon became the most important port for their civilization. It was much easier (and safer) to build a space elevator on it than it was to build one on the planet, and the rich resources of the moon made it cheap to develop the settlements there as fewer needed to be shipped from the planet itself. Eventually technology advanced even more and inner system became developed while the outer system became the new frontier, and by the time the iktomites had developed faster than light travel the glory days of the planet's moon were long gone as there was no longer a need to have a jumping point from the homeworld to the universe beyond. Currently the moon is divided into several territories leased to various alien polities, corporations, and interest groups as a place where they can conduct business with the iktomite hives while remaining on their own sovereign land. The moon gained notoriety after the assassination of Earth Federation President Nieves Linares by her Vice President and his subsequent, yet short lived coup. After being ousted from Earth by military loyalists mere weeks after his coup "First Citizen" German Ashworth fled to the small territory leased by a co-conspirator businessman on this moon and declared an "Empire of Earth government-in-exile." He continued to broadcast propaganda and attempt to build support for his cause for eight months before the iktomites forcibly expelled him and his associates from the territory. The whereabouts of the First Citizen are currently unknown, as he decided that he would rather get out of the shuttle the iktomites insisted give him a ride out of their territory and walk back to Earth. He was last seen exiting the airlock of Civilian Transport Vessel 11973-88. The iktomites have no extrasolar colonies and no ambitions to expand their territory beyond their native star system, and have instead opted to engage in widespread trade with the known galaxy as a neutral and independent power.