A Universe Below

Interwoven

Like a giant pink warship, the Rosy Frigate punctuates the endless sea of tendrils. It hosts a crew of disk-shaped ravenous eating-machines called orbics. It is the orbics’ duty to keep the creeping tendrils from strangling and overtaking their home. Fading daylight signals their departure from the safe cluster beneath their giant companion to begin the night’s work of clearing new growth in the near vicinity. Each orbic can consume half its body weight in tube-carpet flesh every night, ensuring they will always have a place to return to at dawn. A Dwarf Blue Cortina observes the melee in confusion. Anything larger than an orbic will send it leaping away for cover, as its curiosity is matched only by its caution. The stoic quartet of Reponos standing solemnly in the background is incapable of seeing or hearing the events taking place nearby. Their role in this ecosystem turns out to be rather bizarre…

Part of a color study for the next painting I plan to start this week.

Pelagic predator pen sketch. More on this soon.

Desert creature

Life in the Low Forest

A relatively dry and sunny climate favors some types of forest over others. The tangled matrix of the fast-growing tube carpet forms the floor along the majority of this habitat. It grows so quickly that other species of photosynthetic creatures find it advantageous to be more mobile, lest they be crowded out and overtaken. The scarcity of water combined with the tendency towards mobility versus upward growth means this forest is relatively short in height - hence its name. There is a rich and varied food web here, with many organisms feeding on the tube carpet, keeping its ravenous growth in check. It also offers a complex labyrinth in which to hide from the many predators working tirelessly for their next meal.

Down Below

Deep sea floor.

Egg Chamber

In some environments, it's hard to tell the difference between genders and species. Organisms share genetic material more easily on this planet, and that leads to some complicated taxonomy. In this case, we see a group of aquatic creatures acting as nurses for a seemingly endless field of eggs. But the network of underwater chambers in which they reside is in fact another living creature. By some categorizations, it would be considered the female of the species - it produces and to some extent nourishes the field of eggs, some of which mature to be gigantic network-chambers themselves. Whether this is an extreme example of sexual dimorphism, or the result of some sort of horizontal gene transfer is a matter of conjecture at this point.

New Lands

A Giant Forest Walker

Back to the Depths

An entourage of opportunistic creatures accompanies the deep-sea behemoths during their brief ascent to the surface. Releasing their gelatinous strings of embryos here in the sunlight has a significant benefit - there's far more visibility. The swarm of followers are here in search of a quick meal in the form of the gelatin, which is full of valuable protiens and nutrients. After the feast however, the recipients of this apparent windfall become unwitting hosts for the behemoth's multitudinous offspring, which were embedded in the gel. Adapted to develop inside a wide variety of pelagic creatures, the young grow internally - and sometimes even on the surface of - their hosts until such time as they detach and sink back into the darkness. For most host species, this seems to be a mutually-beneficial symbiosis. At the beginning they receive a large and valuable meal, and usually incur very little detriment due to their temporary parasites. The young behemoths will hide in the dark depths for many years until attaining the size necessary to return to the light and repeat the ancient cycle again.