Aduro--An Alien Planet

Project subscriptions has been officially scrapped for the moment due to technical issues. It seems none of the gadgets on the blog site seem to work like they're supposed to. I'll revisit this another time when I figure out how to put a subscriptions button on the site.

In the meantime, here's something a friend and I have been working on for awhile...

This is another of our school oceanography "genius time" projects. If you never read the nothosaur post, basically what happened is we were set loose once a week to research or put together any project we wanted, so long as it was ocean-related. There have been some really cool ones, like a Minecraft underwater city and a to-scale paper model of a megaladon jaw. My last one was rather disappointing, so my friend Amanda Schroeder and I decided to team up and create an alien ecosystem.

The planet's called Aduro, and so far, we've mostly focused on the water-related aspects of it for the sake of the class. However, we've got a good dozen other drawings of flora and fauna dwelling on the landmasses, which we plan on editing to perfection and eventually incorporating into the final project. What we've got now is the animals in and around the ocean--microfauna, fish, coastal creatures, and shorebirds--and a basic outline of the planet. Here's some of the pictures from the Prezi presentation we put together, and a little of the back story on each:

Aduro: My drawing, Amanda's editing

Here's a map of the world. There's three main continents (Matir, Insula, and Hex from top to bottom), each with a separate species of humanoids (except Matir). The little dot in the center of Insula is a crystal island formed from the glowing photoprotein nitor that is the basis of the world's food chain. We have yet to figure out exactly how nitor circulates through the systems of the world, but we have come up with ways in which it influences life in the oceans. The crystal isle is one of them. Another is the mangrove island (the little dot on the far right, near the equator). The mangroves grew over a shard of landmass that floated out to sea after Insula originally broke up, and the trees put down roots that anchored it to the seafloor. Those mangrove trees are now fed entirely on nitor particles from an underwater hydrothermal vent, and the animals living on the mangrove island subsequently ingest a lot of the photoprotein through eating the fruit of the mangroves:

Juvenile plant person: Amanda's drawing

The plant beings of the mangroves are actually mobile, sentient plant matter. They evolved on the island from shoots of the mangroves themselves, and now live and reproduce in much the same manner as any other plant. They're genderless (as they reproduce asexually) and have no mouths (as they feed through the roots that they can untwine from their legs), and cannot leave the island because of a species of vegetarian shark that live around the island. Ironically, that wouldn't be a problem for just about any other species.

Glowmonkey: My drawing, Amanda's editing

 The Matirian Primates (or glowmonkeys) share the island with the plant people, but they're regarded as pests. They're the remains of the race that's supposed to reside on the biggest continent, Matir, but they were driven from their homeland by a series of violent eruptions and forced to settle in the mangroves. They've since devolved into tree-dwelling primates. Their diet of nitor-fed fruit causes their blood to glow, and modified hairs in their pelts with blood vessels running through them have developed into camouflaging patterns (the trees also glow).

Draenost merperson: My drawing

We created two species of merpeople--the Veneriferous and Draenost. The Draenost (top) are the more evolved of the two, having learned to make tools and to organize into a complicated social structure. The Veneriferous, by contrast, are more primitive hunters (though no less effective), utilizing a poison that they release into their surrounding water after attracting prey with their attractive, plant-like frills. There's continual war between the two species, as the Veneriferous have no mind for boundary lines and the Draenost are very territorial.

Veneriferous Merperson: Amanda's drawing

This last one is my favorite. It is the Silent Ikking Fish, and no one knows what ikking is, save that this fish does it silently.

Silent Ikking Fish: My drawing

My thanks to Amanda, who can brainstorm, draw, and photoshop like none other. I'm pretty sure this is the coolest project I've ever had occasion to do in school. 

To my readers, I hope you found this interesting (though not exactly applicable in the real world). Keep an eye out for any future posts, and as always, happy reading!

S.R. Koch.