"radula-like spine covered" Spine-covered. Otherwise, one might confuse "spine" for "backbone".
"blood containing haemoglobin": Haemoglobin-containing blood, or, as an option that's not so good, "blood, containing haemoglobin". Strictly speaking, "haemoglobin-based blood" is a little more specific and natural-sounding.
"specialize each in their own" sounds redundant.
"growth, others" You surely meant to insert "while" or "and" before "others".
"startled" Startle.
It needs a scientific name. If you want to go with something basic, "Floraverm spp." or "Floravermus spp" will work, since its common name sounds pretty scientific anyway.

The paper background should be decreased in prominence: it's grainy and the lighting is uneven. I also recommend making the lineart look sharper with some quick image processing, although that isn't required.

Since it's a genus group, and a somewhat specialized one at that compared to most species, I recommend adding a little more detail. What's the species distribution like for various kinds of flora? Are there particular varieties of flora, such as less digestible kinds, they don't eat? Are the specific types of tissue listed the only ones they eat? (Say, not eating thorns, prickles, hard tubers, seeds, inner bark or outer bark) Are they deterred by particular kinds of compounds or flavors? Are they active at specific times? Are they, like their ancestors, rarely found in aquatic biomes? How much detritus do they eat compared to fresh growth? (In comparison, roly-polies prefer decaying matter to seedlings, while some snail species prefer decomposing matter to fresh plants)

QUOTE (colddigger @ Nov 9 2021, 01:01 AM)

How big are their eggs? 3 days to mature size is pretty quick for 1cm depending on initial size. I'm interested in finding a cell colony example that grows that fast... I like the addition of the coffee flavor and illness it afflicts. Wait, the maulwort said it had oxalic acid, which is sour and slightly citrus like from my experience eating oxalis. where does the coffee flavor come from? Regardless, I like that bit. Very monarch butterfly.

Well, not oxalic acid. It gained additional defensive compounds. I'll specify those.

I based the exact details on houseflies, but houseflies, at 6-7 mm, are 60%-70% its size. I have slightly adjusted lifespan and growth time accordingly.

EDIT: I somehow forgot they were hermaphrodites.

Well, with that now corrected...surely you have something more substantial to say?

I have added the art and slightly updated the description, clarifying it does not have teeth.
I've tried something...different for this art style. Let's see if anyone can tell whose art style I am imitating.

Ephemeral Sapworm (Ephemeralis darthus)
Creator: Coolsteph
Ancestor: Sapworms
Habitat: Fermi Temperate Beach, Fermi Desert
Size: 1 cm long
Support: Exoskeleton (Chitin)
Diet: Sapivore: Maulwarts (nectar, sap), Razorbarks (sap)
Respiration: Semi-Active (Unidirectional Tracheae)
Thermoregulation: Heterotherm (Basking, Heat from Muscle Activity)
Reproduction: Hermaphrodite, Sticky Eggs

Ephemeral Sapworms, which split from their ancestor, live only during wetter seasons. Like houseflies, their lives are short: it takes 4-6 days for an egg to grow to an adult, with a maximum lifespan of about 23 days, though most are eaten by predators or mangled by flying accidents before then.

Ephemeral Sapworms are most active at dawn and dusk, primarily in the morning hours. They become active after sunrise, generally hiding and resting after 10:00 AM. They may rest on the trunks of blackflora or within the blooms of Maulwarts, and occasionally the spore chambers or blooms of other blackflora of similar size. Ephemeral Sapworms exist in smaller swarms in Fermi Desert, due to the lower density of its hosts there.

Because they have co-evolved with Maulwarts to drink their sap-like nectar, the adults' diets have less sap. The tongues of adults are not as sharp as most Sapworms, for lack of need to puncture bark and suck sap. Where Maulwarts are scarcer, they may suck sap from Razorbark spore chambers. However, this puts them into competition with their better-adapted ancestors, and only their slightly keener senses for sniffing out Razorbark (and descendants') spore chambers and more specific feeding times with more vigorous activity makes this viable.

Ephemeral Sapworms mate in swarms around clusters of Maulwarts. Unusually for Sapworms, they have some reproductive differentiation: especially well-fed Ephemeral Sapworms have longer cloacal segments, helping them lay eggs deeper into the soil. Ephemeral Sapworms can detect longer cloacal segments while mating and choose to fertilize more of their eggs accordingly. After mating, they all lay eggs (for they are hermaphrodites).Ephemeral Sapworms then investigate Maulwart hosts, tapping at fissures in the host flora’s bark with their tongues and inspecting density of litter on the ground before laying eggs. Ephemeral Sapworms have a lifetime egg output of 180-220 eggs, and lay them in clusters. The eggs, each about 0.1 mm long, are laid underneath 5 mm to 1 cm of floral material, depending on local litter and soil conditions. Usually, the eggs are laid under Maulwart bark pieces, which are hard, bitter, and unappealing to most detritivores until heavily decayed, reducing likelihood of disturbance. Because the eggs are laid under floral material and the larvae remain just slightly underground, predators of their eggs and larvae are different from most sapworms.
Ephemeral Sapworm eggs can exist in a dormant state for months. Seasonal changes and rain prompt the eggs to hatch. Early on, the larvae feed on sap from the Maulwart's major surface-level roots, before quickly sucking out sap from the base of the stem. At this time, Maulwarts usually shed their bark, making it easier to suck sap from the bases of the flora. They only become largely crepescular as adults, feeding almost constantly unless it gets too hot.

Like Sapworms in general, Ephemeral Sapworms need little water. They get most of what they need from a diet of sap, but occasionally suck up dew that has accumulated in the fissures of its host's bark.

Ephemeral Sapworms taste conspicuously different from other sapworms, due to accumulating the taste of the coffee-flavored nectar that is most of their diet. Most predators find them less appealing to eat than their relatives, and the smaller ones more easily poisoned by them may leave them half-eaten or let them go. Some of the smaller Silkrugg species with better vision just let them go, without even a bite, once they’re close enough to distinguish them from their similar-looking relatives, Nectarworms. Ephemeral Sapworms are nonetheless commonly eaten, especially by large fauna that need to eat many Ephemeral Sapworms at once to suffer ill effect. Egg-specialist Minikruggs are a major threat to their eggs, and one species isn’t deterred at all by the coffee-like taste of the eggs.

Although they look superficially similar to Nectarworms, they're actually less related than lions and tigers are to each other, and utterly incapable of hybridizing. Its mostly unremarkable ancestor started on a path towards specializing in the spore chambers of the Razorbark, Maulwarts' ancestor, several million years before Nectarworms' appearance, and Nectarworms genetically diverged still further from blackflora-specialist sapworms. Their mouthparts, reproductive habits and physiology, diets, life histories, and even predators of their eggs and young vary significantly.

Maulwart (Darthus spinosus)
Ancestor: Razorbark
Habitat: Fermi Temperate Beach, Fermi Desert
Size: 70 cm tall
Support: Cellulose Walls, Wood
Diet: Photosynthesis
Respiration: Unknown
Thermoregulation: Unknown
Reproduction: Sexual, Isogamous Spores Carried by Small Fauna, Self-Fertilization, Wind-Borne Germinating Spores

Maulworts, which split from their ancestor, are a slow-growing species that live on the back dunes of Fermi Temperate Beach and into the outer edges of Fermi Desert. They are very tough, prickly, and bad-tasting due to multiple defensive chemicals, and slightly poisonous if eaten in excess.

---
==General Physiology==

Maulwarts have very thick stems, studded with small, sharp, prickly leaves. These leaves are somewhat similar to thorns on grapefruit trees, although harder and sharper. As in its ancestor, the leaves are high in oxalic acid, making them unpleasantly sour or even toxic to would-be herbivores, deterring even those herbivores that specialize in sharp leaves, like curazzopes. A mature Maulwart has a woody stem, but younger individuals are merely crunchy and carrot-like. Most of their tissues taste like ashes and salt, but the younger, tenderer specimens are especially bad-tasting, compensating for their otherwise appealing tissue.

The stem is covered in thick, deeply fissured bark. In wetter seasons, they shed flat chunks of bark intermittently, leaving puzzle-piece-like patterns on the stem. New chunks of thick bark quickly regrow, but for a few days, it is vulnerable to sapworms and other fauna that can pierce somewhat surface tissues. As fog or dew covers the flora, moisture accumulates in its fissures, condensing into trickles of water it can then absorb.

The terrible taste comes from a combination of chlorogenic acid (the same compound that makes coffee bitter), oxalic acid, tannins, and a few other chemicals. The lectins in various tissues, including its nectar, can cause stomach upset in some fauna if eaten to excess, but the biggest part of its toxicity comes from wisterin, a toxic glycoside. Wisterin exists in its tissues at much lower concentrations than lectin, and is concentrated in the flower.

==Reproduction, Flowering, and Pollination==

Remarkably among its kin of the time, it reproduces sexually. However, unlike many flora, it reproduces in an isogamous way, with just one mating type, rather than "male" or "female". Reproducing sexually and using pollinators capable of flight has allowed advantageous gene variants to spread rapidly through populations, even away from high Maulwart concentrations, and more importantly, for sets of variants adapted to multiple stressors. Maulwarts withstand not only low moisture levels, but also fairly high salt levels in the soil or water, and even hot days (though it’s a rare concern in its habitats’ latitude).

Rather than having specialized male and female cells of drastically different shapes and behaviors, it has a plus strain and a minus strain. Each individual Maulwart produces only one strain, making it impossible for its gametes to fuse with each other. The gametes produced meet, fuse, and undergo nuclear fusion, forming spores which are distributed on the wind, much like flowers drying up and making wind-borne seeds.

Due to the sheer volume of gametes it makes, though, occasionally a few gametes end up as the other strain of the rest. Each gamete has identifying proteins on its surface. During the initial meeting of the cells, if the cells do

In harsh conditions, which are fairly common in its dry habitat, it may produce only a single flower. In better conditions, it can produce 3 or 4 flowers. Though the flower is fleshy and somewhat high in moisture, would-be herbivores are usually deterred by its bitter, ashy, salty taste. Out of all its parts, it is the most loaded with feeding deterrents. In excess, the chemicals of the flower interfere with digestion and cause stomach upset.

Its moist, fleshy, weakly scented black flowers, flourlike, sticky yellow-orange spores, and bitter, coffee-flavored nectar fairly high in minerals gives it an unusual set of pollinators. Its ancestor’s biggest pest, a tiny, short-lived sapworm species that sucked the sap from its spore chambers, co-evolved with it, yielding a specialist pollinator, the Ephemeral Sporeworm. At time of evolution, 50% of its pollinators by number are Ephemeral Sporeworms, with another 15% being other sapworm species, 18% Xenowasps (an unusual percentage of which are at least partly blood-drinkers), 10% Minikruggs, 4% Nectarworms and just 3% Xenobees.

After its eggs cells are fertilized, the fleshy structure dries up, forming a new, vaguely mushroom-like structure that spreads fertilized spores to the wind.

==Other Details==

Compared to its ancestor, it has a stronger root system, with various thick, almost artery-like major roots growing out within a few centimeters of the soil line. Its primary pollinator species sucks sap from its upper roots and the base of its stem for a few days as larvae. Having a few major roots be fairly vulnerable to Ephemeral Sapworm larvae during the wet season ensures a reliable supply of high-fidelity pollinators. They specialize in areas that are generally poor for tree-sized flora. They rarely occur in bonespire-dominated oases, and are generally found in mixed-species thickets.

When I made that post, and when I checked it now, "Salt" was listed as a habitat flavor under the Sagan 4 Project Rules in the Alpha timeline, as shown in the screenshot above. Wetlands was listed separately from Salt, the latter of which included Salt Swamps.

I don't have any plans for making a descendant of this for the moment. If Fermi sinks beneath the sea or becomes a bunch of tiny islands the next Generation, it could interfere with any ideas for it anyway. It was simply something that came up while I was going over it one more time before resurfacing it for approval.

The yellow soil could be due to oxidized ferric oxides, not sulfide ore deposits, as you seem to suggest. It's not out of the question the soils could be high in sulfide (judging by my limited geological knowledge), but the soil being yellow wouldn't necessarily be a clue.

Specifying the occurrence of arsenic and how it uses it would help.

I suppose it could get uncomfortably hot if it fought off a predator on a particularly hot day, warranting that detail.

"temperature beach"
Temperate.

I briefly considered bringing up whether there were even enough bug-equivalents in a temperate beach or desert to sustain a 2-meter-long herbivore, but then I realized sloth bears (one of the biggest insectiores), grow to that size, and being an ectotherm would probably reduce its energy needs. It probably helps that much of Fermi Desert and Fermi Temperate Beach's large fauna diversity was before some of those genus groups showed up, so the resource might be relatively untapped. This could be a useful consideration if you intend to make a larger or warmer-blooded descendant, though.

" killpedes" You meant "krillpedes"....probably.
This exists in quite a lot more habitats than its ancestor, including salt swamps. Is that due to being extremely adaptable from its enormous genome size?

Type 1: Temperate Coast
Type 2: Tropical Coast
Type 3: Ocean (Sunlight Zone)

Flavors:
Sunlight Zone flavors: Ocean (Sunlight Zone), Shallows, Coasts
Salt flavors: Salt Marsh
This has 3 types, and 4 flavors, though it could be argued the "flavors" rules was meant for kinds of flavors and not individual ones.

Is this a wildcard?

I recommend not approving this organism yet. There's some oddities about how it uses arsenic, as well as various typos. I'm going through it now.

There's a typo: "Pioneer Roots" should be Pioneeroots.
"how much nutrients": "how many nutrients", or "how much energy".
"odd looking Wing": "wing".
"Flora and carrion" "flora", as well as that other instance.
"underbrush, it" The comma should be changed, perhaps for a colon.

"species," The comma should be a colon.
Arsenic-based poison seems unusual in lifeforms. The closest I can find from a quick check is Chinese bracken ferns hyper-accumulating arsenic and chickens tolerating arsenic-based medicines.
If it doesn't eat hyperaccumulators, such as specialized flora, how would it obtain so much arsenic from its environment? Is it locked to places with especially arsenic-rich soil?

"stability.." has a double period.
It seems very unlikely those tails would matter to get themselves back up when they're so small. It's smaller than a grain of sand, in fact. I'm not sure whether the legs would really help it consume more microbes at that scale.
"but consumes detritus also" sounds awkward. "but also consumes detritus" sounds more natural.

Taking advantage of the abundant aquatic prey around them
"go to" Go-to.
"waters edge" Water's edge.
"trick things in the water" Don't you mean: "prevent things in the water from noticing them"?
"lost, they" is surely meant as: "lost: they".
"Offspring[...]food" can be revised in various ways, but the closest alternative is: "ancestor: females hold young[...]and their mate brings them food."

How delightful. I myself was considering sprucing up some sketches of Gumjorn relatives from 2014.
Hahaha. Shrog Pumpkin. It's not what it was made for, but I was supposed that's what it has become.
Would the muted shade of brown really hide it if it still has a lot of conspicuous green lenses?

What adaptations does it have for withstanding saltwater? Or does it efficiently capture freshwater from the rain? Since it can absorb nutrients from the ocean to fuel its growth, that would suggest it has at least some tolerance to saltwater, so how much tolerance it has, and ideally some vague mention of its mechanism, would be good.
These aren't effectively part-fungus like some crystalflora, so is it really a detritivore any more than Earth plants usually are? Is it like certain kinds of plants that can adapt to the unique substrates of part-decayed compost or rotting but recognizable logs?

I like the detail about the shrog skeletons.

Ehh....I have a feeling something is off, but it would seem no one is well-versed enough in hydrostatics to say otherwise. The standard amount of time per Generations is a lot, and they did slightly elaborate on the valves as being derived from the fingers. I guess this can be a problem the staff eight years from now can have headaches over. Unless there's any more objections, which I doubt there will be, I suppose it can proceed.

How often do these get into Fermi Temperate Beach, and for how long do they stay? I would imagine the Dockshrog docks, Mangrovecrystals, and Bonegroves would make it hard to get close enough, given its size.

I presume the method is biologically plausible, and one kind of skink has a sort of similar method, as do dogfishdogfish, although the latter uses a uterus rather than oviduct. If the oviduct-secretion doesn't seem efficient, it's not out of the question Krotezurucks could improve on that design.

The description would be easy to fix.
Instead of,
"Located within the “salt pouches” near their hips, this substance provides the young a rich source of protein, iron, and especially sodium to aid in their development."
You could say,
"The bacon goo is secreted from the oviducts. It derives its mineral content, especially its sodium, from nearby mineral-storing organs called "salt pouches" (though they are organs, not pouches)."
If necessary to make it seem biologically plausible, you could say: "The use of specialized organs to store necessary minerals for reproduction is somewhat similar to medullary bone in birds."

Well, I made that sketch many years ago. I don't know what I'd do then relative to what I would do now.

Warning: Inaccurate toes from 2014.


I plan to use these sketches from years ago to create polar-adapted descendants for various small Fermi thornbacks or adapt them to live in the colder latitudes of Fermi Temperate Beach. However, I apparently made two of them...generic, or intended to split from ancestors which are now extinct. Now, I can't decide which species should be their ancestors.

Upper Left:
Possibly intended as a Billdeka/Whiskerback hybrid, but since they're in different genuses, it probably wouldn't work. I could make it a Billdeka descendant that evolved similar structures to Whiskerbacks, or erase the back-whiskers. I could also erase the cheek patches or just make them spots to make them Whiskerback descendants. The Zzuzzu (extinct Articulated Thornback descendant) had similar thin spines which looked like hairs in the art, possibly reinforcing the potential of this feature to emerge in the lineage.

Lower left:
Earlier today, I wrote it as a Cryorasher descendant, but, looking closer, making it a polar-adapted Shortfaced Thornback descendant might be more parsimonious. After all, they both have long tails retained into adulthood.

Right:
Perhaps a Shortfaced Thornback or Voracious Anklebiter Thornback? I intended it to climb large flora, hence it being perched on thick spines.

https://sagan4alpha.miraheze.org/wiki/Bubbl...ated_Anklebiter
The bodies of adult Bubble-Throated Anklebiter rot, producing heat like a compost heap. The pools they breed in are covered in ice, which would insulate them somewhat. (Unless "no more than five cm deep" would plausibly covered entirely by ice...) It's also mentioned that "While ectotherms, they warm up quickly due to their dark bodies and are well-insulated by a layer of fat." Is this only sufficient for cold-temperate, not mild-tundra?

One small clarification: in its ancestor, it's said "The bacon goo is grown from the walls of the enlarged oviduct,". The salt pouches were used as a storage area for the sodium specifically: "The sodium of the bacon goo is sequestered in small, triangular, reticulated organs near the hips, called "salt pouches" (though they are small organs, not pouches)."

Did it merge the systems of the oviducts and salt pouches, or is the production of bacon goo now in the salt pouches?

I'm still not sure if tongue-traps are physiologically possible with their physiology as it exists. Tongue fingers (like its ancestor's) rapidly, hydraulically snapping inward with the help of flamingo tongue-esque hydraulic tissue, and having multiple cellulose prickles on the palm or in a hollow in the palm that stabs, impale or crushes small prey seems it would be easier to evolve in one step, and a descendant could adapt the structure to be something like the structure proposed.
I'm not sure if a hydrostatic muscle can even work if hollowed out.
"their tongue" Its tongue.

QUOTE (TheBigDeepCheatsy @ Nov 3 2021, 12:18 AM)

Any updates for this one?

No, not yet, partly because I need to know what level of intelligence and tool use is appropriate, in case I need to adjust the tool-using aspects of its body accordingly.

It's probably too late to matter now, but I did see two errors:
" its' ancestor's ancestor," should be "its ancestor's ancestor"
For it to eat juvenile Minosparrows, it would have to get into Maineiac Salt Marsh: "The young, which cannot fly, live in large pools and shallow bodies of water inland in the marsh."