More Thinking

Creatures...  Okay - so I still do work on my Flash-Gordon style solar system game/setting.  Here and there.  I work on all my things here and there, it's a busriding world and you get it done on the bus or you don't get it done.  Anyhow - I started thinking that I wanted to make a real, true ecology for one of my planets.  So I started to. 

The idea here is that there are no kingdoms to speak of, just the one - nucleic single-celled organisms.  Many types of those, to be sure, but only them.  Protozoans.  This is a... take on what our real-world ecology is like, where a creature, a macrofaunal creature like a person is made of several colonies of different types of cells, but our cells are very, very specialized and our organs, which are almost entire organisms themselves, are all dependent on each other to survive in a unified matrix. 

Here the idea is that there are taxons of these protozoans, just a few - I guess families of the things and they'll be decided based on their morphology and their mode of movement and feeding.  That's the base level of these guys.  Millions of species, only a few families - flagellants, cilians, corkscrew jobbers and the undulates and the undrawable amoeba types, the blobbies. 

Now there are ranks of these things having incorporated with one another - at the base level they're just cells with cell biology, nuclei and so on.  Next level they're clonal, like sponges.  They're a bunch of the like organisms bound up together into what amounts to a fixed organ.  A lot like a sponge actually - except that the different types of these guys all tend to perform a different chemistry - some turn light to sugar, some eat up dirt, some prey on the unbound protozoans and so on.  They'll tend to form into Shapes, as they exist in that form.  The flagellants are all balls of tails and heads, maybe even really almost spherical colonies rolling on the waters or the ground.  The paramecia are bound up in tubular shapes, the corkscrew guys have a cup or socket shaped clonal morphology - and the undulates all weave together, forming mats and skins. 

These 'organs' are a taxa then - a second tier of the living organisms.  So balls, cups, tubes, sheets -

Then you get to the visible animals.  I should point out that I figure this will be a higher-than-earth-pressure ecology - so that the higher air-pressure will keep bigger monocellular creatures together, they're not bound so much by size, and the gravity will be a little lower so they can get around a bit easier.  Call it 1.8x earth pressure, .8x earth gravity.  So they're kind of big-ish, for Protozoans, maybe coming close to a centimeter or two in max size.  The clonal organs are going to be measured in fractions of a meter too - but they're visible.  But now you move up to the modular tertiary types of these creatures.  What if the tube becomes attached to the socket?  Then it's an articulated tube, rolling in the socket- then it's like an anemone - creatures with different chemical roles in a symbiosis.  Then there's predation and other elements, what if the tube/cup gets wrapped in the sheet?  Or what if the sheet attaches to the tube-cup combo to be close to the sun?  Then we're into something that looks almost like a plant, stalk on a cup with a leaf.  Maybe a few millions of these arranged together will make something like a moss.

From there, there are more and more articulated collections of these morphologies and chemical interdependencies - so that you end up with what is almost an animal.  The Quaternary taxa - which has ambulatory and flying and floating and swimming 'creatures' which are still collections of single-celled organisms.  Some of these might get to be megafaunal in size, sure!  Dog and cat sized things?  Why not - also, maybe these are amalgamated as well. 

That's...  Well really that's a way of looking at real-world biology, but here there's less specificity, and there's no cell-specialization to the point of being non-viable without the clonal organism.  There aren't blood cells in this ecology, or cell walls.  All the creatures, they'll break apart, maybe disintegrate completely, but they can maybe reform, in time.