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It's interesting to see this having particular advantages in particular lifestyles relative to skysnappers or flying saucebacks. The sky's getting crowded.

It's nice to see plents with green tongues: it's not often seen.

I've added a bit about what happens to shed trichomes; they're bonus aeroplankton with nitrogenous compounds

"2 meters long", are you referring to its body or wingspan?

body

QUOTE (Coolsteph @ Oct 28 2021, 07:23 PM)

It's interesting to see this having particular advantages in particular lifestyles relative to skysnappers or flying saucebacks. The sky's getting crowded.

It's like they say, "the sky's the limit". And this species is definitely taking advantage of that, given how happy those chicks seem.

I've been informed that the yellowish color of urine is a vertebrate thing. Further biochemistry investigation needed, may require an art update depending on the verdict.

Don't change it. It helps establish body chemistry.

We will also need to specify what their oxygen carrier is, and what protein complex is used for capturing valuable metal from the degraded blood cells, we use ferritin for our iron for example. There's probably a magnesium equivalent, or any other metal equivalent ...

This post has been edited by colddigger: Nov 9 2021, 09:56 PM

Actually, the thing that makes the yellow vertebrate-specific cannot apply to plents specifically because of biochemistry. The particular pigment is highly dependent on having vertebrate-like blood, which plents canonically do not, as their blood cells are modified chloroplasts. @colddigger

Explain more?

I thought plents used a porphyrin ring derived from chlorophyll, which is extremely similar to heme, and probably forms the same waste products during degradation.

Or it could make phyllobilins I guess
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/artic...444639318000047

But that's not as easy to learn about.

honestly I don't understand a lot of it myself, but with plents, because of how much was done to them retroactively to make them as plant-like as possible, we have to assume plant-like traits unless proven otherwise, and then find a way to bend plant-like traits to fit.

Nearly all of Sagan 4's biochemistry is completely unelaborated. Until I pointed out how stupid it was, plents were stated to have sap filled with literal chlorophyll instead of blood.