Biology of the Common Shade Crawler
Speculative Evolution piece based on an enemy from Orsoniks' beta game "Casualties Unknown".
Inspired by the cross-section work of an urchin by Alex Ries and my own dissections/notes as a biology student. I tried to design a very believable creature, but I realize now that I forgot to explain how they deal with nitrogenous waste (lets just say they compress it into regular excretions like birds do even though they are not under any kind of water stress given their habitat). (idk man they're an alien).
One of the sessile animals in CasUnk is said to contain large heavy metal crystals, so I decided that the shade crawler also uses these in its skeleton instead of calcium. This is reflected in the Plumbosses grouping (idk some high level phyla its aliens so linnaeus's system falls apart anyways)
It makes extensive use of hydrostatics and has no conventional muscle (in-game it never drops food, only its exoskeleton). They also usually EXPLODE into orange blood when killed so I figured them having the anatomy of a fuckin fruit gusher would explain that.
I tried to do some subtle worldbuildy things based on what I know of the CasUnk lore at this point, but I haven't found most of the lore docs in-game and haven't read the wiki. Expies are called EXGS (EXperimental GunSawian) in the document since "experiment" is confusing for a scientific doc and "expie" is too affectionate for the humans of the setting. Also I THINK they were called gunsawians as a blanket term in Orsoniks previous game gunsaw.
OH I also tried to explain why/how they made sound, why they were only found in the first layers (which have water pools), how they didn't get lost in the caves, why they have eyes, why they are bioluminescent, etc etc etc it was very fun.
