A work in progress: the pied stickler

It has been a while since I last posted something here. There were multiple reasons for that: the realisation that there are more than enough paintings for The Book lessened my enthusiasm to start new Furaha paintings. An interesting side effect of that is that I started painting a series of paintings completely unrelated to speculative biology, which was refreshing. So much so, in fact, that having finished three such paintings I became eager to do some more Furahan creatures.

Another factor is that the number of views and replies has been fairly low lately. Is a blog like this one too old-fashioned, or perhaps too complex? No longer interesting? Or is it too difficult to leave a reply? I thought so when I wanted to write something on someone else's blog. Ideas and thoughts are welcome.

 

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Anyway, here is a detail of a work in progress showing a 'pied stickler' (Perfixor artifex). The name means 'cunning impaler'. A part of the accompanying text follows.

Katarzyna Altanero, who devoted her life to the study of hexapod carnivores, described sticklers as ‘prototypical gregarious piluferentic centauraptors’. This statement shows that doctissimus Altanero was one of those people who, once they have learned something, think that people are born with that knowledge already in place. But the cumbersome jargon is correct. 

'Centauraptors’
These animals are obviously hexapods, but they have freed their front legs from all locomotion duties, a principle known on Furaha as ‘centaurism’. Here, the limbs have become weapons.  
Centaurism probably involves very quick evolution. The front limbs, liberated from walking, were free to quickly evolve suitable shapes for their new roles. At the same time the balance and locomotion of the animal changed drastically. The front part of the trunk became shorter and was tilted upwards, while the former middle legs increased in size and moved forwards.  
   These changes must have evolved hand in hand with specialisation to a specific way of catching prey. For instance, predators relying on speed should not carry massive heavy clubs, and those aiming to bring down armoured prey must have adequate weaponry and need only be faster than their prey. Scavenging centauraptors can be slow , allowing some of the heaviest weaponry of all.   

‘Piluferentic’
Centauraptor weapons betray an interesting array of forms. Some are pure clubs, others function only as ‘pointy end’ weapons, and in yet others the limb has more than one purpose. The limb type known as ‘axes’ have a sharp edge on the underside, useful to hack open a carcass, but the same weapon usually has a heavy bulge too, allowing it to double as a club to knock prey off their feet or to bludgeon the prey's head, blinding it.
   The stickler’s weapons are no exception to this ‘Swiss army knife’ approach. While its weapon is primarily shaped like a club, the former foot has become a sharp protrusion that can be swung into action. This sting explains the word ‘piluferens’, meaning 'lance carrying’.   

‘Gregarious’
As the word suggests, sticklers live in groups. In this species’ case, tasks differ between group members, allowing a fairly complex society that must run on advanced cognitive capacity. Do not underestimate sticklers; one may appear to study you with open curiosity, but its pack members may well be behind you, on their way to encircle you. They cannot digest humans but that makes little difference to the human involved.       
           

Equations I: Drake's equation

People with an interest in speculative biology will probably know Drake's equation well. It describes how many civilisations in our galaxy are at present broadcasting their existence by emitting electromagnetic radiation into the universe. If you are only interested in the purely biological side of speculative biology, then alien intelligence might not appeal to you very much. Still, it makes sense to think that any biological intelligence will be deeply shaped by the specific biological background, so alien intelligence is a part of speculative biology (probably until that in turn gives rise to machine intelligence; would that reflect its maker too?). I aim to write two or three posts on the biological evolution in our galaxy, starting with Drake's equation.

I do not have that much affinity with speculative intelligence. I once started to evolve an intelligent species on Furaha. The creature was derived from hexapod predatory stock, so its forelimbs were not used for locomotion, as an example of centaurism. Most such 'neopredators' evolved their front limbs into clubs or spears, as can be seen on the Furaha website. These modified front legs lost all their toes in becoming spears or clubs, but the proto-intelligent species belonged to a group of small neopredators that had in fact developed the grasping ability of toes on their front leg. This allowed them to radiate into a number of interesting shapes.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

This old and rather poorsketch shows this putative proto-intelligent species. It evolved on an isolated island and was supposed to have gone extinct shortly before humans came to Furaha, say only 30,000 years before. There would be some evidence of shaped clay or other things suggesting that the use of purposely shaped objects. at the time of human discovery, the island's ecology was supposed to be devoid of large species and to have remarkably little diversity. The idea was based on the presumed history of Easter Island, as described by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse. The story holds that overpopulation caused the inhabitants of Easter Island to cut down all trees and to destroy their environment, and through that their civilisation. Easter Island, seen in this way, holds a mirror to all of Earth, telling us to stop and think what we are doing. While reading up on Easter Island, I found that  these depressing ideas have later been questioned, and the case of Easter Island has even been labelled as a story of efficient adaptation. The trees are still all gone, so I find this rather depressing as successes go. 

I had tucked these proto-intelligent species away on a remote island where they would provide the Furahan equivalent of Easter Island, providing a lesson without ruining the entire planet. I later felt that I did not need such a heavy-handed approach so I erased the story entirely.

Back to Drake's equation. Below is a text taken directly from Wikipedia. The equation describes the number of civilisations, N, with which communication might be possible. It is assumed to be equal to the mathematical product of the following parameters:

R, the average rate of star formations, in our galaxy,
fp, the fraction of formed stars that have planets,
ne, for stars that have planets, the average number of planets that can potentially support life,
fl, the fraction of those planets that actually develop life,
fi, the fraction of planets bearing life on which intelligent, civilized life, has developed,
fc, the fraction of these civilizations that have developed communications, i.e., technologies that release detectable signs into space, and
L, the length of time over which such civilizations release detectable signals.

N = R   fp  ne  fl   fi  fc  L

I confess that I always had trouble understanding why this product represents the number of civilizations that are transmitting signals now. In an interview posted here Frank Drake said he started with the rate of new stars being produced because the equation was based on a continuous production of new planetary systems. As a result, the number of detectable civilizations is proportional to the rate of star formation. That makes sense, but still... Say that 10 stars are formed in the galaxy over one year. The equation ends with the average number of years that a civilisation actually transmit signals, say 300. The product would be 3000, modified by the other parameters. This suggests that the equation results in the total number of 'transmission years' resulting from one year's batch of new stars, and I do not quite understand why that would equal the number of civilisations that are transmitting right now. It seems more logical to start such an equation with the total number of stars in the galaxy and to modify that number. In fact, there are equations out there that do just that, and I found that there are several variants that are also called "Drake's equation".

Regardless of the different versions of Drake's equation, the message is clear enough: any estimate of the number of transmitting civilizations depends on a fairly large number of parameters, most of which rely more on guesses than on facts. The Wikipedia paper discusses that nicely, stating that N can vary from less than one to over 15 million. Drake himself arrived at about 20 civilizations in our galaxy. The more there are, the more you have to wonder why we never heard from them, which is of course well-known as Fermi's paradox. Here is a very thorough and entertaining book discussing 75 possible solutions to Fermi's paradox.    

Something like 20 civilizations distributed over one galaxy is not much. The average distance between such civilizations would be enormous, giving us little chance of hearing them. Note that Drake's equation is about how many civilizations are out there, not about our chances are of detecting them. Any considerations on actually detecting them must take the size of the galaxy into consideration. I could not resist playing with these ideas a bit.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

The figure above shows a solar system containing a transmitting civilization. This civilisation started transmitting at some point in time, here just 30 years ago. From that moment on the signal travelled into space with the speed of light. For every year of time it obviously travels over a distance of one lightyear. After just 10 years the civilisation stopped transmitting. Perhaps the inhabitants found more efficient ways to contact people on their own planet than wasting energy by blasting a signal in all directions. Perhaps they went the Easter Island way, by cutting down all their trees, by nuking themselves to oblivion, by using creative biological weapons, or perhaps their successors, machine intelligences, decided they did not want pets. Whatever happened, a shell of transmissions with a thickness of 10 lightyears is still expanding outwards at the speed of light. The signal strength will decrease quickly, as it is governed by the square of the distance (see here for an explanation, on sound rather than electromagnetic radiuation, but the principle is the same). I tried to find information about how far the type of unfocused signals earth sends out might be received with current equipment; here is one source saying that 21 light years is optimistic, which is not much at all. Another source, from a senior SETI astronomer, states that detecting Earth from 'a few hundred light years' require an antenna the size of Chicago. That's impractically large...

Here is a simple model of a galaxy with most stars in the middle. The image spans 1,500,000 lightyears horizontally and vertically. Over a span of 100,000 years, civilizations evolve and transmit for a while, in this case for any duration between 0 and 5000 years (as longer as all of human history). The thickness of the expanding rings show the duration the civilisation was transmitting. I assumed their signal could just still be detected at a distance of 25,000 lightyears, requiring fantastically sensitive devices. The brightness of the colour indicates signal strength: at 25,000 lightyears it fades to nothing. Note that signals can only be detected in the coloured rings themselves, not in their blank interiors. The result is clear: the total area of the galaxy that lies in a ring is very small, and those are the only areas where transmissions can be picked up.

 
Here it the same scheme, but with a shorter duration of transmission and a smaller distance over which a signal can be detected. There are thin small shells here and there, but you have to look carefully or you will miss them altogether. This is still a very optimistic vision, I think. If there are just 20 transmitting civilisations that require a ridiculously large antenna to be heard seems to mean that it's not surprising we haven't heard anything yet. But there is Seager's equation:  looks at the problem in another way, so that's one I will have a look at in later post.              

Evolving another aggie

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

What you see here is a sketch of the 'aggie', the favourite prey of the marblebill. The pages detailing the marblebill in The Book have this to say regarding the aggie:

"The marblebill’s favourite prey is the ‘Aggie’ (Agitator augur), a tree-dwelling fructivore. Once caught, the victim’s feeble attempts at defence have little chance of success against the marblebill’s armoured chest and abdomen. There is little time for resistance anyway, as marblebills usually disarm their victims quickly by snapping its cervical medullae."  

 "A troop of Aggies, admittedly not the brightest of beasts, may suddenly see a branch swaying and a baignac falling. Only when they hear the marblebill’s triumphant howl does it dawn upon them that one of their comrades had just now been sitting on that branch and been munching that baignac."

That's all that is known in the entire universe regarding the aggie. I have started sketching them several times, but was never too happy with the result. The sketch you see here is not the definitive aggie either. This particular one is a brachiator, just like the marblebill. The degree of adaptation of the marblebill to its arboreal brachiating life style suggests that its environment has been around for quite a while. If so, other species could be equally well adapted to an arboreal way of life. That does not necessarily imply brachiation (see here and here); the animal could be a jumper, a climber, or even a glider. But this one is a hexapod brachiator.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

In previous versions I toyed with the idea of using the second pair of legs as the main. In fact, here is an old very quick and dirty sketch showing that approach (Brynn Metheny also did one once, the 'pygmy esorifleu', which I discussed previously). In the 'Mark I' the body is suspended from the middle limbs, and the front and aft ends hang down. It must have evolved from basic hexapod stock, and it is hard to imagine an ancestral species with six more or less equally-sized legs preferring to grasp branches with its second rather than its first pair of limbs. You can see the 'Mark II' next to it. That sketch was ancestral to the marblebill's design, and they still swing from their front limbs.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Still, there may be a way to evolve a brachiator with 'middle limb suspension'; take a typical Furahan neocarnivore, one of those animals exhibiting centaurism. As you may remember their first pair of legs are not used for locomotion but to catch prey. If such an animal started climbing trees, it might keep its weapons intact, and adapt its second and third pair of legs for locomotion among the branches. Its offspring could become either become jumpers of climbers, using four more or less equal limbs, but they could also turn into brachiators. If so, they would swing from their middle limbs and use their front legs as weapons. In my mind, I  see the hexapod evolutionary tree sprouting a new branch even while I am writing this...
Then again, a neocarnivore taking to the trees might use its spears or clubs to hook a branch. Being at the front of the body they are well placed to do so. If these limbs then become brachiating arms they would resume a locomotor function again; I see another evolutionary branch exploding into view with an almost audible 'whoomph'. By the way, that latter branch is also the first official example of 'decentaurism', or the reversal of nonlocomotor limb use to a secondary locomotor purpose.

Anyway, back to the aggie. Have a look at some of its features.

• It sits upright, which may make sense for a brachiator: its body is held vertical while brachiating, and it might easily keep doing so at rest.
• Its limbs are attached to the body with joints that allow three axes of rotation. The brachiating arms are attached to the body through a short bone that ends at the 'shoulder'. Unlike Earth primates, the shoulder girdle is attached through bones to the axial body skeleton rather than through muscles only, but the animal still needs thick muscles to control the position of the body with regard to the arm. The unfortunate result is that the attachment looks much like a primate shoulder girdle; parallel evolution or a limit of my imagination?
• You might just make out the ancestral hexapod toe branching pattern (more about that here). 
• This particular aggie version has a pot belly. While sketching it I had forgotten about it being a fructivore with a preference for baignacs (remind me to show you a baignac one of these days). Fruits usually offer high quality food, so animals does not need many of them. While sketching I had low-grade food in mind, say fibrous leaves, and such food requires a lot of processing and a sizable gut. Specialising on low-grade food has the advantage that there will not be much competition, but the end point might be a slow animal that is not at all energetic: something like an Earth sloth. While sloths are preyed upon by harpy eagles, the dense parts of the forests are probably closed to eagles. But introduce the marblebill, and anything as slow as a sloth has a problem. So, the aggie cannot be too slow. It should probably lose its potbelly and resume a high-energy fruit diet. Of course, it should perhaps be better able to defend itself, or use its social skills, or perhaps...

...never mind; thinking about the aggie has once more led to interesting predators rather than their prey. One of these days I will design the definitive aggie; this is not yet it.

Birds with clubs and other smashers: clavigerism

I intended to write just one blog entry every two weeks this year, and am already breaking that rule. I could not resist, after reading a paper on an extinct Terran bird. The similarities to some Furahan creatures were simply too interesting to leave it alone, so there you are.

The bird, a flightless ibis, was described in a paper entitled 'The bizarre wing of the Jamaican flightless ibis Xenicibis xympithecus : a unique vertebrate adaptation' (Longrich NT, Olson SL; Proc R Soc B 2011, online 5 January 2011).

Click to enlarge; Longrich NT, Olson SL; Proc R Soc B 2011, online 5 January 2011

And here you see a reconstruction of the bird (top) and a comparison of its wing bones (bottom) with that of a still living ibis species. The authors make a case that the bird was flightless, and go on to say that the wing bones are odd for flightless birds. That holds for the hand in particular, with its thick and curved bone. The authors think it functioned as a club, and provide various anatomical reasons why they think so. After that, they discuss the club some more:

"We therefore propose that the wing of Xenicibis functioned as a club or flail. Several features of the limb would have facilitated this function. Kinetic energy is the product of mass and velocity squared; accordingly, weapons such as clubs and flails have a long handle to increase the angular velocity of the club, and are heavily weighted to increase the mass accelerated by the swing, and the centre of mass is near the end of the club, where the angular velocity is highest. Precisely this design is seen in the hand of Xenicibis, where the end of the wing is massive, and the proximal metacarpus and long forelimb could act as a handle. "

The authors of the paper also compare this odd ibis design with the front legs of mantis shrimps (Stomatopods), that function in a similar manner. The video above shows a slowed down version of a strike, and incidentally allows the shape of the club to be appreciated as well. It is taken from the lab of Sheila Patek, whose work on the biomechanics of their legs featured in this blog previously.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

A long time ago mantis shrimps were the inspiration for Furahan neocarrnivores. You will find more material on them on the Furaha site (go to the land page). One of them is shown here (one of its commoner names is 'pugile'). Compare its front legs to those of mantis shrimps and to the ibis; I think that the ibis still had a long way to go before its clubs measured up to those of other club bearers. Then again, they were probably meant to hit other ibises, not kill prey animals, and it might not be advantageous in the long run to kill fellow ibises; merely sending them off might be good enough.

Stomatopods, Xenicibis and Furahan neocarnovores may all be said to have developed their clubs from what originally were locomotor limbs. In the Stomatopod and Neocarnivore cases, the limbs in question were used to walk with, and in the Xenicibis case its ancestors used them to fly with. In all cases their freedom from locomotion opened the door for a new function, and interestingly the new function was a weapon in all three cases. I think that Xenicibis therefore qualifies as much as the other two as an example of 'centaurism' (more on centaurism here and here).

I am delighted that we now have an example of 'raptorial centaurism' concerning a fairly large animal on Earth. Both Stomatopods and Furahan Neocarnivores have evolved various kinds of front legs, functioning as different types of weapons: there are 'smashers' and 'spearers' in both cases (Neocarnivores have webs or basket-like thingies as well). It would be great if more diligent paleontological work would uncover a 'spearer' on Earth as well, but I will not hold my breath. Meanwhile, perhaps it is time to coin a phrase to start differentiating between the various kinds of weapons limbs may turn into. 'Smashers' sounds good, but is limited to English, and that won't do. Luckily we still have Latin. A 'claviger' is an existing word for club carrier, with the plural 'clavigeri'. Turning it into a principle would result in 'clavigerism'. I don't expect a follow-up paper on Xenicibis to use the word; then again, the authors used the interesting phrase 'volant species' for birds that actually fly, so perhaps they can appreciate a bit of biogeekery...

Alternate Future Evolution in Japan

Satoshi Kawasaki is a Japanese illustrator, author, or both. Normally I try to get the facts correct, but in this case I am forced to rely on Google's translation services. While these allow us all to sample texts that would otherwise remain closed, the results are not necessarily reliable. For those who do not now how to operate the Google translation service, simply go the main Google page, and there should be something called 'language aids' or similar just to the right of the search window. Clicking on it will allow you to paste in text, or to translate an entire web page. To see how well or poorly it works, have it translate a paragraph in your native language into Japanese, and paste the result in to translate it back again.

Following this link will bring you to an Amazon page showing a book of extinct animals. I think it is a safe guess that most people interested in speculative biology will also like palaeontology. If so, the cover of this book should convince you that Mr. Kawasaki knows his business, and seems to prefer the bizarre. He does not shy away from speculative biology either, and in his case that concerns life in the future on Earth. He has a very nice website showing life on Earth in various geological ages, starting at the Cambrium. Clicking on an epoch shows a world map for that age, and selecting a continent or sea opens a page with its inhabitants. From the Cambrium on each major era has its own map. There are four such pages for the future, resulting in pages for 5, 50, 100 and 200 million years in the future. But before you zoom off to look there, stop at the other ages as well, because here and there you will find animals indicated with an outline and a question mark, and these are quite interesting.

Click to enlarge; copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

In the present era, I found this intriguing dog with a human face living in Japan and China. The text says that the animal is not suffering at all, but that this is its normal face; at least I think that is what it says. The garbled translation suggests that the original text might be quite funny, but that is something I can only guess at. At any rate, images such as this one show that Mr. Kawasaki has a somewhat surrealistic sense of humour, which I rather like. If you do not, be warned, because similar themes will keep cropping up. If you take speculative biology as a completely serious business, do not bother visiting his site. Of course, taking anything entitled 'speculative biology' completely serious is a bit surrealistic by itself.

I will not delve into all the animals, nor discuss in any detail how life evolves in the future. I rather liked the way how chameleons leave the trees and evolve into a range of large terrestrial animals, looking a bit like present-day mammals as well as like dinosaurs. What I also liked was that intelligent beings seem to evolve here and there, only to vanish without a trace.

Instead I will focus on the world of 200 millions years into the future, and on one theme only: land-living cephalopods! Yes, there are land-living octopus and squid here. Dougal Dixon was probably the first to shoo cephalopods onto dry land in his book 'Life after Man'. The theme was worked out in more detail in 'The Future is Wild'. I think there are some significant problems with this concept. One is that the cephalopod body structure simply does not provide a good starting point for an animal that needs to withstand gravity. Tentacles in particular are an extremely bad starting point. In earlier entries (last one here) I explained my reasons for thinking so. In short, you can walk on tentacles, but once evolution has increased their efficiency, they are no longer tentacles, but will have become legs. The second reason to think that cephalopods will have a difficult time making it on land is that they are not the first to go there, so they will have to compete with animals with fully developed legs. In 'The Future is Wild' swamps were provided for the purpose, but the other animals were not whisked away to support the cephalopods. Perhaps an isolated island, where there are no land animals at all, might do the trick. Even then you have to hope that birds won't bother the new-fangled land-squids too much. Mr Kawasaki's terrestrial cephalopods do not seem to care one bit about such sombre estimates of their likelihood, but look quite alive. Let's have a closer look.

Click to enlarge; copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

This one is entitled a 'Purototerasukuido', and is described as a primitive 'Terasukuido'. Let me guess: 'sukuido' might be a Japanese transliteration of the English word 'squid', and 'terasukuido' might be 'terrestrial squid'. 'Puroto' could be 'proto-', so this might be a proto-land-squid'. The animal looks like it is lifted bodily out of 'The Future is Wild', so it seems like Mr Kawasaki is playing another joke. It is describe as a living fossil, and the statement that high fertility balances high mortality shows that Mr Kawasaki also thinks that such an animal needs all the help it can get to stay alive.

Click to enlarge; copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

Next: a goby squid. The text says 'Second is to leap out of the crab', which may mean that it is an ambush predator, waiting for a crab to emerge. It has six walking legs and two prehensile arms, which makes sense, I think. It somehow manages to look very attentive, indeed like a little goby fish.

Click to enlarge; copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

This is a 'Sleipnir', named after Odin's eight-legged horse. The first animal shown above is a functional hexapod, using two arms for predatory purposes. Perhaps this is another example of centaurism, but that is debatable. The Sleipnir lives in herds and is well-protected by scales. Its length is given as 200-250 cm, so it is quite large. The legs might still be tentacles, but they might just as easily have bones in them; perhaps this is an example of a tentacle turned into a leg.

Click to enlarge; copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

An African predator? Yes, the 'chitopasu' is a sprinter; is there a cheetah in that name? In this case, the text clearly states that there is no skeleton in its legs. What a pity. Note that the illustration is apparently not by Mr Kawasaki but by 'UME'.

Click to enlarge; copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

The Zeburasukuido must be prey, and it is (I guess its name means 'zebra squid'). Note that the mouth is underneath the animal, while he eyes are on top, just like its ancestors. I do think that the eyes should probably be smaller, as eyes do not generally scale in the same way as body size. Having such large eyes makes it look much smaller than it is supposed to be. Count its legs: there are ten this time! All this leg variability suggest that land squids are not a monophyletic group; that means that the species shown here are not descended from a single species. Instead, their resemblance suggests that various groups of cephalopods all made it onto land, bringing their different body plans with them. Not impossible, but what would drive such a tendency?

Click to enlarge; copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

Finally, a brachiator (that's an animal swinging from its arms). It looks agile, as it should be. Its legs are attached to the underside of the body. If these animals indeed hang from branches much of the time, instead of sitting on them, the attachments of their legs might wander to the top of the body, making life a little easier mechanically.

I really like the sense of humour that permeates these creatures. It would be nice to have Mr Kawasaki tell us a bit more about his creations, and perhaps he will respond. Until then, have fun with his website and his creations.

The Future is Wild... and it is Manga!

My plans to write posts less frequently are thwarted (I've always wanted to use that word) by being spoilt for choice. Greenworld should be good for two posts, Avatar is nice, particularly the odd choices the designers made when it came to locomotion, some bandes dessinées deserve attention, etc. I decided to continue with the Japanese theme a bit. I guess that readers who really like speculative biology will have come into contact with 'The Future is Wild' (TFIW); after all, there was a television series, there are books, there is theme park in France and there are websites. In fact, a commenter on the blog once expressed irritation with an overdose of 'The Future is Wild'. I sympathise with that, as I have felt the same from time to time. After a certain point you know the images and the animals, and repeated exposure to the same images or clips no longer excites the viewer. Apparently a new TV series is in the making as well as a cinema version, so there should be lots of new images. This post is about the 'old' TFIW animals. In Japan they have turned it into a manga, or comic book, published by Futabasha. In several European countries, France foremost, comic books are regarded as an art form: the neuvième art (ninth art). Like films, their styles differ appreciably between countries, which adds to their enjoyment: 'bandes dessinées', 'comics' and manga are not the same at all. My knowledge of mangas is rather poor; it seems that almost anything can be turned into a manga, and TFIW was no exception.

Click to enlarge; copyright Takaaki Ogawa

This is its front cover. As you can see it mentions Dougal Dixon, John Adams and Takaaki Ogawa, who I gather is the artist, i.e., the mangaka. I picked up a copy through Ebay, but if you want to you can easily order it through Amazon in Japan, which has English pages. You may well wonder how you turn a documentary about animals into a manga. Easy: just add a story. That is what this book does. In fact, quite a few wildlife documentaries do exactly the same. There are about 250 pages, containing 8 stories as well as a glossary, and introduction and some other bits and ends. There is some anthropomorphism, in which animals' emotions are shown on their faces in a way recognisable to humans (by the way, the image language the Japanese use seems to differ a bit from European usage, but not so much that the message is lost -I think!-). But adding anthropomorphism is again not too dissimilar from what happens in some nature documentaries (the best do not). The various TFIW stories have different themes. I have picked out images from two stories. One story deals with an individual adult toraton (I will assume you know your TFIW, and if not, the internet will provide). A young toraton disturbs a swampus, which bites it on the neck, and the startled youngster swings its head out of the way and accidentally pokes out one of the adult's eyes. That is the setting for the following page.

Click to enlarge; copyright Takaaki Ogawa

Mind you, manga are typically printed on somewhat grayish paper and aren't that big, meaning that the contrast of these scans is much better than what you see on the printed page. The images are quite large, so you can have a good look (but downloading might take time!). You can work out the story for yourselves: the young animal dies, and the adult has lost an eye (it later dies as well). Did I mention that you should learn to read right frames before left frames, in the reverse order you are used to? I might be wrong about the story line, not being able to read the text in Japanese. If I am, I hope that any Japanese readers will correct me. The reason to choose this picture was not primarily the sad story of one toraton's death; instead, there is an interesting scene in the foreground of the last frame. Here is a detail:

Click to enlarge; copyright Takaaki Ogawa

Stomatopods, my favourite! Mantis shrimps, and on land too! Were they in the TFIW documentary? I think not, otherwise I would probably have remembered. After all, they were the inspiration for Furahan hexapod predators, exhibiting centaurism. These mantis shrimps seem to be devouring a frog together, and as far as I know current mantis shrimps are firecely territorial. So these are social terrestrial mantis shrimps; impressive. I wonder what would hapen if squid and mantis shrimp somehow would make it onto dry land. Personally, I doubt terrestrial squid would have stood much of a chance: the squid have to develop a feasible mode of walking, and the mantis shrimp have that already. I wonder whether the mangaka added the stomatopods for his own amusement? The remaining images are of the squibbon / megasquid story. I discussed the megasquid before, and decided that I did not think walking on tentacles was at all likely, and certainly not for something as large as a megasquid. For squibbons the story might be a bit different, but still they seem unlikely. But never mind that now.

Click to enlarge; copyright Takaaki Ogawa

This page I like for its graphical qualities. I can only guess that the story alludes to the squibbons possible intelligence; are they pondering the age of Earth or the size of the Universe?

Click to enlarge; copyright Takaaki Ogawa

Thirteen pages later there is this lone squibbon. being social animals, a lone squibbon is probably a sad squibbon.

Click to enlarge; copyright Takaaki Ogawa

The next page seems to show a happy ending: other squibbons offer bioluminescent thingies (fungi?). Looking at TFIW in this way may take some getting used to, but I rather like it. Computer generated images still tend to look a bit stiff or awkward, and as long as they do so, I prefer drawings or paintings. Paintings are often much livelier and they also appeal to the imagination more than CGI renderings. This manga is lively, and, provided you increase the contrast, the graphic qualities of some pages and panels is good. I found that it does not matter that much that I cannot understand Japanese. I am obviously missing some information, but I certainly cannot complain about a lack of a sense of wonder: there is quite a bit of that.

Alex Ries and the Birrin

Those on the lookout for speculative biology that catches the eye as well as the imagination could do much worse than to have a look at the work of Alex Ries. I have kept an eye on his website for several years, and had drawn the mistaken conclusion that he probably stopped working, as the site hadn't changed for quite a while. I was wrong, and should have searched in other places. It would not have taken that long to find him again on Deviant Art. (you will find more paintings on Deviant Art by typing his name in the search box). But what is more interesting than my shortcomings are his messages there that he is planning a book on his extraterrestrial creations. He is certainly not alone in wanting to do that; in fact, aspirations of producing a book are a recurrent theme among those who spend considerable time on their speculative biology creations. His remarks reveal that the book might revolve around an intelligent species, the Birrin, so perhaps that species is a good place to start looking.

Click to enlarge; © Alex Ries

This one image speaks volumes. The first is that Mr Ries really knows his business as an artist (I wish I could paint in such a assured manner). Obviously, you can also see that it is an intelligent species (or at least it has intelligence in the toolmaking sense, and I am not certain that that is enough to qualify). Something else that struck me is what the body plan of the Birrin reveals about its planet. There is no indicator of scale, but the objects and choice of perspective suggest that the Birrin is at least one meter tall. It must live on a low-gravity world. I think so because its legs are rather spindly and stick out sideways, instead of being held vertically underneath the body. On Earth such limb positions only work for animals that are rather small, up to the size of a coconut crab, but most animals with such limb designs are smaller that that.

The reason for this is that gravity affects animals of different sizes in different ways, a subject known as scaling. It is less complex than it sounds. Suppose you make an animal twice as large in the sense that its height, width and breadth are all twice the original amount. The large one will weigh 8 times as much; that is because weight relates to mass, and mass relates to volume, and volume relates to length by a power of three. Now the cross area of its legs will be four times as much as in the original animal, because area relates to length by a power of two. The strength of legs is relates to their cross section, so what we have is an imbalance: the animal's weight has increased more than the strength of its legs. The solution? Increase the cross sectional area of the legs out of proportion. That's why elephants have thick columnar legs held under the body, and spiders have thin ones that can stick sideways. Can you have a large animal with spindly legs sticking sideways? You can, on a low gravity planet. Alternatively, the material the animal is made of are incredibly strong (how about a skeleton of biological carbon nanotubes?). The Birrin doesn't look very small but has thin legs, so I assume it lives on a low gravity world. I wonder what really small animals look like: hair-thin legs?)

Anyway, I cannot resist plugging the concept of 'centaurism' once more; the Birrin looks like its manipulative front legs have evolved from walking legs, so there we are again...

Click to enlarge; © Alex Ries

Here is another fine animal, one with (largely) radial symmetry. It is good to know that tetropters and spidrids are not the only animals in the fictional universe with radial symmetry. They have their counterparts in the known universe, with anemones and starfish and the like, but sadly we know of no animals walking around with any degree of elegance. I like the anatomical details of this one. I have no idea whether or not it is supposed to live on the same world as the Birrin.

Click to enlarge; © Alex Ries

Click to enlarge; © Alex Ries

What an intriguing shape. It is probably so intriguing because it is not immediately obvious what part does what, or why it is where it is. That is what makes it convincingly alien, I think. Is it a passive floater? It has a rather large bladder, apparently larger than a mre swimbladder would require. What are the membranes for, I wonder; perhaps they are a sea anchor to make it fave waves head-on?

Click to enlarge; © Alex Ries

This one I found on Deviant Art. This animal is an excellent example of convergent evolution. I do no just mean that it is similar in some ways to seals, turtles or plesiosaurs, with its apparent 'swimming with wings' design. I was thinking about 'convergent speculation', meaning that it resembles a design that someone else has also come up with. In this case that someone is me, but you see this happening everywhere where people sit down with a sketch pad and create new animals (while writing this I hesitated a bit with the word 'create', because creationists have tainted it to such a degree that it is difficult to use without evoking wrong connotations). The animal I was thinking about follows:

Click to enlarge; © Gert van Dijk

See the resemblance? Mine was just a very rough sketch, but it conveys the general idea; they are 'AYUS' (As Yet Unnamed Species) from the 'Fishes IV' class. There are differences too, such as the apparent size differences, with mine at about a meter, and his perhaps at humpback size. But look at the similar design of the mouth parts. Before anyone thinks otherwise, I am not saying that either one of us took the idea from each other's work. That cannot have been the case anyway, as mine was done over 10 years ago and has never been published.

It's a simple case of convergent speculation! Of course there are clear influences to be seen in some people's work pf others'ideas, I think that Alex' work looks all his own. Anyway, there are a limited number of biological principles to go around, so all of us tend to arrive at the same ones, having all been subjected to similar ideas. Luckily, there are infinite ways to arrange such similar ideas (and if that sounds a bit like Mr Spock, so be it).

Be certain to have a look at the websites I mentioned, as there is more to see there. But not enough to satisfy the appetite for more... I hope Alex Ries will be successful in getting his book published, because his work makes me very curious to see more of it.

Odd walkers

Even the title is odd! (And yes, that was an intended pun.) I cannot help but be fascinated by how animals walk, hop or otherwise move around. This time we go for a somewhat bizarre approach: is it possible to walk with odd numbers of legs, such as three or five?

Why not? To obtain a first look of how a pentapod (five legged) animal might possibly look like, I adapted the Matlab program I had used to animate the octapods on my site. (you will find them on my site: go to it here, chose the yellow 'land' icon, and then go to the 'walking with...' icon). It was simple job to change the number of legs to five. Obviously, there is gait to consider: what should the phase differences between the various legs be? The first choice would be to have a 'skipped walk' , in which one leg is at 0 degrees (the same as 360), and the others are at 72, 144, 216 and 288 degrees. It's just a question of assigning a phase to a particular leg. Anyway, there it is.



I then thought I would experiment with legs moving in pairs as well. Of course, there will be one left to move on its own, so what you get might be two pairs and a single. So here we go:



Odd? Indeed. There is an animal on Furaha with a similar gait pattern. I do not remember mentioning 'secondary bilaterally symmetrical neospidrids' before, even though they are quite common. What happened is that some spidrids, octapods and therefore without a left/right symmetry axis, started lifting some of their legs to catch prey. They used three legs for this purpose, so these three 'raptorial appendages' are an example of centaurism. This leaves them with 5 to stand on. This induced bilateral symmetry, but with the plane of symmetry going through one leg!. This leg is in the median plane, and is noticeably bigger and stronger then the others. It is the neospidrids' jumping leg, providing most of the force of its jump. The adjacent legs help with propulsion and with steering the animal while jumping. In slow walks you get a gait more or less as shown above.

Copyright Gert van Dijk

You might think that no animal on Earth walks like this, but you would be wrong. True, there are no animals with five locomotory legs, but there are several using five appendages for locomotion. The following video, from YouTube, shows one. Have a look at the adult kangaroo. Moving slowly presents kangaroos with a odd problem: their legs aren't exactly designed for that, and for some reason they do not alternate the movements of their hind legs. These move in a pair, and so do the front legs. It is the tail that does the trick. Look very carefully: when the hind legs are swung forwards, the kangaroo rests on a tripod formed by its tail and the two front legs. This tripod alternates with a phase in which the tail and front legs move forwards while the animal rests on the stable area formed by the large feet. A pentapod on Earth!



And to make it even more wonderful, consider the tail. It is of course a stack of vertebrae, but it must take some strength to keep it from buckling. Isn't this an example of 'walking on tentacles', in particular the Mark II Walking Tentacle?

Now it is time to reduce the number of legs to three. Quadruped animals lose a leg if unlucky, and there are many videos to be found on the internet of dogs and cats who seem to manage quite well as three-legged animals. But I know of no animal on Earth that uses three similar legs for walking, and for once there seem to be nu Furahan alternatives either, or at least they have not been discovered yet. So I whittled down my 'octapod' design to only three legs, and introduced a phase difference of 120 degrees so the legs are not in phase. Here it comes:



Could it walk? Certainly not as shown here. This model was designed for octapods in which there are always legs on the ground, which means the legs can be placed wide apart. If you have just two legs, or three for that matter, the feet should be placed much closer to where the centre of gravity projects on the ground. Just try to walk with your feet at least 60 cm apart and see where that lands you. I could adapt the program, and may, but that will take time.

The only recourse left are the worlds of science fiction and of mechanics. In SF a 'tripod walk' can only be associated with one thing: Well's War of the Worlds, and the tripod mechanical marvels in which the Martians strode around eradicating anything human. For good engineers they were remarkably poor biologists, but never mind that. So how did the tripods actually walk? Somewhat to my surprise I could not easily find clips of the Spielberg movie. Why is this? Aren't there any? Surely Spielberg's computer people solved the problem of having them walk in a believable fashion? I did find a very entertaining video made by 'mrgrotey' of a tripod as shown in Jeff Wayne's adaptation of War of the Worlds. Its original location on YouTube is here, but there is a more elaborate website as well. Have a look:



Before the tripod starts to dance, you will see it walk. Note that it moves with 120 degree phase differences between its legs. Is that they only way to move with three legs? Not really. You could have two legs moving as a pai with the other one as the odd man out, or have all of them move together. Someone has already worked that out. On Peter Balch' site I found three animation showing just that, and here I will only show one, so you will be tempted to pay his site a closer look. The support diagrams are very nicely done.



Note that the feet are planted very close to the midline, so there should be no problems with keeling over, or at least none that cannot be solved by a suitable brain, biological or otherwise. It seems to be the only design in which the legs are not attached to the body in a triangular pattern but along a line.

Finally, you may wonder whether someone has built a machine that walks on there legs. In fact, one such has been shown earlier on this blog, but I have found another. Here is where I found it. Unfortunately, I can't seem to copy it for you here, so you should follow the link. . You can see that the designer chose to have the legs wide apart, so for the beast not to fall it has to move the projection of its centre of gravity close to the legs that remain on the ground. Only then can it afford to move the third leg. The only other solution would be to actually build something like the tripod animation above, but I am certain that taking care of what an animal brain does naturally (sensing, adapting and correcting) is extraordinarily difficult to do with a computer. So the little machine shown through the link is quite brilliant: it is a walking tripod machine!

How much more Speculative Biology is there? II

Thanks to those who took the time to help prepare a list of other fictional biology systems. I will use the results to update the list of links on my Furaha page. I had hoped that there might be new worlds completely unknown to me, but so far it seems as if we have all found the same sites. Perhaps there is something interesting going on in Japan or China. If there is, please let me know!

Josh was quite right about the beast I showed last time: it is indeed a shallow-beaked Grogan from Venus. You can find it, and three others like it, on the website of the inimitable Dr. Grordbort. 'Dr Grordbort' is a steampunk subsidiary from Weta in New Zealand, the people famous for the special effects in King Kong, The Lord of the Rings, etc. Should you wish to, you can buy marvellous ray guns in steampunk fashion from Weta (although you may find them to be a trifle costly).

Last time I had erased the name of the shallow beaked Grogan from the image, as that would make it a bit too easy. To rectify that, here it is again. I cannot make out the name of the artist, which is a pity, as I would like to give credit where it is due. If you look at the other animals on the site, the number of legs seems to vary. The Grogan seems to have six originally, and the middle one is split halfway. Arthropods on Earth can have a biramous leg design, with one branch forming the walking leg and the other part can be something else, such as a gill. But the split occurs then very close to the body, so the two branches are completely separated mechanically. In the Grogan's case, the split occurs halfway down, which doesn't seem very handy, as the top branch, that seems to be there to grasp things, would wobble along when the animal walks. Still, the grasping legs are intriguing: could this be a Venusian example of Centaurism? (discussed here and here). The neck looks odd as well, but could work, I think.


Next, a lively image of a Grogan hunt. Steampunk adventurers don't go in for conservation, it seems, but prefer to view wildlife lined up in their sights. What ho!


By the way, a Weta is a large New Zealand insect. If you care to look closely at them, you will see has a pair of appendages at their rear end: cerci. In my musings on Centaurism, I wondered whether centaurism occur on the hind end of animals as well. StevenH came up with the earwig, with a pincer at its rear end. Wikipedia treats cerci as being derived legs, so, if that is true, there is 'posterior centaurism' as well. How nice to bring two threads together.

In the hope of uncovering unknown fictional biology from Japan or wherever, I repeat my question to let me know of any unknown worlds. Again, I will whet the appetite asking you for the source of the following image. It's from Weta, but you have to be more specific than that.

Click to enlarge

Centaurism II

A while ago I discussed the goumoun, a six-limbed animal. I thought that freeing a pair of limbs for another purpose definitely occurred more than once in evolution, but that this principle sadly had no name. So I took it upon myself to call it 'centaurism'. Do not get me wrong: I am not claiming eternal fame for this invention, nor do I think evolution biology will suffer at all if it does not spread beyond this page.

Just treat it as an intellectual game. The original centaurs in Greek mythology had the body of a horse, but where its neck and head should be you would find the torso, arms and head of a human. Ancient Greeks were notoriously vague about the evolutionary history of their mythological beings, so we know very little about protocentauroids. Nothing, in fact. Did they walk on six limbs? The Greeks were probably more inclined towards a form of creationism: 'Poof!', leading to 'here's one I made earlier'.

On Furaha, the ancestors of neocarnivores did walk on six limbs in the typical hexapod fashion. There is nothing wrong with walking on four limbs, as tetrapods on Earth show, and indeed on Furaha. There was therefore ample room for evolutionary experimentation with front limbs in hexapod Furahan animals. They accordingly evolved into clubs, spears, lances, hatches and even nets (in the Microraptoria). If you want to see a few examples, simply travel to the land page on the Furaha site and have a look. Here's one of them:

Copyright Gert van Dijk

But centaurism is not confined to the goumoun or to Furaha. In fact, there are quite a few examples on Earth. Let's start with animals that started with four legs: are there any that stopped walking on all fours and got up on their hind limbs? Definitely; there are ostriches and other ratites, kangaroos, predatory dinosaurs and people, to name the most obvious.

What do they all do with their freed front legs? Some animals use them for grasping purposes at some times but to walk with at other times. Examples are the giant panda, lots of primates, as well as the kangaroo. If kangaroos move very slowly, they move on five limbs: the hind legs swing forwards while the body rests on the front legs and the tail.
Other animals do not appear to do very interesting things with their front legs, such as ostriches. I have seen a male ostrich flapping it to attract females, but that is about it. In fact, some Furahan analogues do exactly that, but, having freed not just two but four limbs, they look even odder (the Grec on the land page is a perfect example). The same probably goes for the front limbs of Tyrannosaurus. I know that its arms were less weak then they look, and am aware of theories saying the beast used its arms to help stand up from a lying position. But all in all these puny arms do not impress me at all. Faced with animals that do not do anything interesting with their freed front legs, perhaps the definition of centaurism should include a new non-locomotory purpose for the freed legs.

That thought reduces the list: primates are still in, as well as those predatory dinosaurs that used their front limbs to do something interesting with. That group goes under the name of Maniraptora. One of the most intriguing examples would be Therizinosaurus, here shown as seen in the BBC documentary 'The Giant Claw', a 'Walking with Dinosaurs special'. Not that much is known about the animal apart from its front legs with their huge claws, so the claws are to the right scale, but the rest is educated guesswork.

BBC Walking with Dinosaurs Specials: The Giant Claw
Click to enlarge

There is no reason to limit the principle of centaurism to animals starting with four walking limbs. Crabs are decapods ('ten-leggers'), but walk on eight legs. The front pair, the claws, are modified legs. In fact, the modifications are not that extensive, as is shown on an excellent animation on the internet from the University of Alberta and explaining how crabs' claws evolved and work. Here is a non-moving fragment to entice you to go and visit the original.

Click to enlarge

There are many other arthropod examples. Here is another one: Amblypygi or whip scorpions are spiderlike, but no longer walk on eight legs. Instead, one pair has evolved into long whiplike sensory organs. The next two photographs are from 'Life in the Undergrowth', another BBC documentary. It has some excellent footage of these animals. The whips are the thin limbs between the pedipalps and the walking legs. If you need more, check up on Uropygids in Wikipedia.

BBC Life in the Undergrowth
Click to enlarge

In conclusion centaurism is fairly common. The modified legs are front pairs in all cases. I have not found any examples of a hind pair of legs becoming centaurised. That is probably because of 'cephalisation': the front end of a body commonly has the most sensory organs, food goes in there, etc. Once you have cephalisation, any manipulatory limb is best placed at the front. But if anyone can think of a sound evolutionary way to free hind limbs from locomotion in an animal that is already thoroughly cephalised, AND that might fit on Furaha, I will consider making a sketch of one.

The goumoun, or 'Centaurism I'

A while ago I discussed Glapumt'ians, a creature from a French series of bandes dessinées (comics) called 'Valérian et Laureline' by Christin and Mezières. It is time to return to their universe with the goumoun. Here he is, in the first frame he appears in. Note that he walks in a trot. Unlike Ralph the Glapumt'ian the goumoun only occurs in one album: 'Bienvenue sur Alflolol'. The story if that Galaxity, i.e., Earth's power centre, has turned the planet Technorog into a technological powerhouse, with extensive mines and factories. And then the original inhabitants come back in family groups. They turn out to live for some 16,000 years and left the planet for an outing some 4000 years ago. Now they wish to pick up life where they left it, on their home planet of Alflolol. The dumbfounded Earth people do not really know what to do. A such, the tale is fairly typical of the time it appeared: 1972, with echos of the 'military-industrial complex', the establishment', etc. Laureline immediately bonds with them, while Valérian hesitates between following her and more or less doing his job. The Alflololians like a good party, and manage to wreck the neatly managed planet by camping in the wrong places, going out hunting leaving a wake of wrecked installations, etc. The following illustration shows the cover of the 1974 Dutch version (In Dutch Valérian is called Ravian, probably because of associations with the tranquilizing herb 'valeriaan'). The 'fish' they are hunting (a furutz) doesn't like hydrodynamically sound, with all those protuberances, but this series isn't about biomechaniscal rectitude. He looks exciting!

Click to enlarge

The goumoun is the pet of one family of Alflololians; he is definitely relatively intelligent and from day one the goumoun and Laureline become the best of friends. As I noted before, this series makes no attempt to make alien species truly alien. The facial expressions on the goumoun's face are as easy for us to read as those of other people, or, come to that, of Glapum'tians! In the course of the story Laureline is carried away by a monster looking like a giant octopus brachiating through the jungle. Valérian is afraid of hitting Laureline by mistake with his impressive-looking space gun, but luckily the goumoun comes to the rescue.

Click to enlarge

The thing I like about the goumoun is that he has four walking legs and two other legs that function a bit like arms. There doesn't seem to be a thumb, and we never see him actually pick up objects with them, which is a bit odd; why have arms if you do not use them as such. Then again, kangaroos don't do that much with their front legs, do they? Of course, many predators on Furaha have a similar arrangement of limbs, with four locomotory limbs and two front legs adapted for hunting. In their case, evolution started with a six-legged design. In time, the first pair of limbs lost its locomotor role and became free for other purposes. There is a page on such animals on the Furaha site (go to the land page), but here is one of the animals on it anyway: While thinking about the concept of freeing a frontal pair of legs from locomotion, it struck me that I was unaware of a name for this evolutionary trick. This event has occurred on Earth quite a few times on Earth, but does not seem to have a name. If there is indeed no name for it (and please tell me if I am wrong!) one must be invented: let's call it 'centaurism'. The goumoun is an example of centaurism, and so are the neocarnivores with their raptorial specialisations. I think centaurism is a worthy subject for a future essay, so I will get back to it. Later. Meanwhile, if you want to read the album, you may not be in luck if you are restricted to English, as there does not seem to be a translated version. But in France the series is an established success, and you can even buy a statuette of the goumoun: