HOME | DD
GrandWanderer — 30 Days of Exobiology Day 30
Published: 2011-06-24 17:44:38 +0000 UTC; Views: 2935; Favourites: 44; Downloads: 21
Redirect to original
Description
The kuelleri doleme taer is the largest terrestrial animal on Fyaburu. The four sensory lobes of the creature’s head are spaced radially, allowing it to keep an eye on each of its feet as it moves. Taer spend most of their time in dense apex forests of fungal growth. The animal’s extreme hight allows it to graze on the fleshy tops of these fungi, while its impressive mass allows it to push over the though trunks. In this way taer play a vital role in reshaping and renewing their environment by making way for new growth in an otherwise stagnant ecosystem. Moving at only a few dozen kilometers a year, a taer’s age can be roughly estimated by following the track left in its wake and dating the oldest regrowth.Related content
Comments: 3
something of this weight would need legs directly under its body if it doesn't live on a low-gravity world, and again, the size to mass ratio is rather obscure, I'm tempted to argue this creature would have to be more massive, bt I see it's science fantasy and not speculative science, so this explains everything.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
How can there be dense apex forests of fungal growth on the planet it resides on? Do these fungi feed on radiation present in or on the planet, and thus fill tree-like niches? (But radiation-synthesis instead of photosynthesis.)
Or do vast quantities of organisms die off in the waters or in the soil, allowing extremely rich and dense substrate for the fungi to grow on?
Normally, one (assuming one is a human) has no need to keep every limb in sight as one moves. This is because the sense of proprioception (the sense of knowing the relative position of each body part) enables one to coordinate one's limbs in movement without needing to watch each one.
Does the taer lack a conventional proprioceptive brain area? Does it possess poor coordination? Or are there pits, snapping creatures or other obstacles in its path that it would not be able to detect without watching where it steps?
Judging by its limb segmentation, it looks like it has an exoskeleton. Does it possess an exoskeleton, or is this merely body armor, similar to that of the armadillo or pangolin?
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
hahaha, well aren't we inquisitive.
Alright, I'll admit to two things up front. First, as much as I might want to go out with a bang, on the last entry in the a 30 Days series I'm usually exhausted and it winds up being pretty slapdash. Second, Fyaburu is a lot more science-fantasy than science-fiction.
So on to explanations (read "covering my butt and making stuff up"):
Fyaburu (fi-ah-BOO-roo) was once a volatile, caustic, hostile world much like Venus. This began to change when a space-born life form colloquially known as a "space moth" deposited the seeds of a world flower on the planet's surface. The world flower thrives in hot, chemical-rich environments, becoming monumentally vast, the main "flower" itself may approach the size of something like Olympus Mons as it absorbs these energy rich compounds. As a side effect of this process, the harsh condition of the host planet are slowly modulated, becoming more conducive to the development of other life. This also eventually forces the World Flower to switches from a chemosynthetic metabolism to photosynthetic pathways, at which point it begins producing seeds and nectar, thus providing a fueling station for the space moth.
Any life that develops on such a planet does so under perpetual cloud cover with the world flower as the only autotroph in the ecosystem. On Fyaburu it is fungi that tap into the roots of the world flower and make its energy available to the rest of the food chain. Larger fungi with longer hyphae are able to access deeper roots, but where a section of root nears or even breaches the surface of the soil a terrific profusion of life appears, analogous perhaps to a coral reef.
The kuelleri doleme taer feeds on the largest of the fungi, which are also the toughest to access and digest, hence it's size; a tall body to reach the softer top sections of the fungi and a large body to carry a stomach big enough to digest enormous quantities of material over the course of days or even weeks. However, this size produces a maneuverability problem in a forest environment dominated by tightly spaced trunks and dense hypha mats. To avoid becoming entangled or even falling, a potentially fatal prospect for such a large animal, the taer has an eye carefully watching each step it takes. Despite it's deft maneuvering, the taer is inevitably forced to push down sections of the forest, a hazardous prospect since many species of Fyaburu's fungi have acidic fluids running through there stems. Fortunately for the taer its thick, rhinoceros-like folds of skin protect it from most such encounters.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0