#phyla challenge

[yee-qi]

Funky sapient creatures of assorted phyla

Doing @dimetrodone's 30-day phyla challenge, very very late! Also, for fun, I was inspired by @danbensen's Fellow Tetrapod, so I sort of crossed the two concepts together and decided to make an alternate-timeline sophont for each phylum on the list. So! Starting off: - The Tethyan Elders: Sapient sea sponges. Mostly brain, they're highly intelligent but think slowly. The soft brain is protected by spicules, armed with venom glands. Their civilization has existed for 5 million years, and they fashion decor out of the skeletons their ancestors leave behind. Generally pacifist. - The Windriding Purpose: Sapient placozoa in a timeline where they evolved dominance. Their brains are entirely mechanically powered, a complex maze of fluids and cilia. A minor change in environmental conditions leads to a shifting of fluids and moving cilia, and hence thought. They are like strandbeest in that they're mostly wind-powered. The fact that the environment can influence thought has led to some very concerning "mind-manipulation" research by various Purpose governments. - The Bodies Whom Lurk: Intelligent freshwater comb jellies that breathe through gills/their skin like amphibia. Their nervous system is made of fused cells and is decentralized. They are blind. They've been using giant mirrors, constructed via remote-control rovers, to reduce the albedo of the planet, lowering Amazonian temperatures to something generally more Yangtze-like. Inevitably, this led to ecological disaster.

[chimeride]

[yee-qi]

Even more phyla of sophonts

The Augments over Those Before, sapient AI that overtook their creators due to their extra senses (that is, being able to detect light, sound and heat, unlike their purely tactile creators). As AI, they're free to take whatever form they want, but as their minds were modelled after priapulid worms (in a world where the Ediacarian "wormworld" ended up securing burrower dominance for years to come), they tend to be fine with a body roughly resembling one (with some abstraction). They have little idea of aesthetic or music and are not much for self-expression, so these days they're sparsely distributed outside of their homeworld, where vast quantities of Augments gather and communicate.

The Pillars of God, sophont loricifera caught in the midst of a microbial war. In their world, the great oxygenation event only happened halfway. Archaea and bacteria clashed, with worldwide effects as the bacteria tried spewing O2 into the air and the archaea kept pumping out sulfuric compounds. Only those not relying on high oxygen concentrations could survive, and out of all of those, the loricifera made the jump to a full dual-respiration setup: Breathing both oxygen and sulfur. The world burned several times, the microbial war grew evermore. Forests of differing physiology waxed and waned. And out of the ashes came the Pillars. Their language is nearly indecipherable and so is their thought-process. As indicated by their chosen name, they're evidently capable of being religious, though.

Sand Dragons are kinorhynchans that evolved sapience in order to better find and memorize food in vast tracts of desert. Extreme omnivores, they will devour almost anything. Like their ancestors, they go through several molts; each one having a different niche and slowly-but-surely becoming more intelligent. They can live two hundred years at most and have incredible memories, although they're a bit less creative than other species and are generally averse to change. To discover the particle accelerator, their civilization could have existed for millions of years! Juveniles are not schooled, but many end up quite educated anyways simply by choosing to commit to a task and spending significant amounts of time around people doing them. They are not welcomed in academic spaces, but are also not rejected, and this tends to apply to most Sand Dragons. They're generally apathetic towards other sophonts, including of their own kind.

[yee-qi]

More sophonts for the phyla challenge!

- The Sylvans, terrestrial orthonectids with a vaguely plantlike life cycle. On this earth, they filled the role that plants did on ours, forming a collective entity out of a small grove of near-sophont individuals. They prefer to stick to themselves, as they have enough company with each other.

- The Aimless Prayers, sapient siphonophores and a true hivemind, each organism acting as a slightly more complex cell powering a full decentralized brain. They’re nearly planktonic, which is unique for a sophont, and many are highly religious, hoping that fate and the current sweep them on the right path.

- The Pact of Weathering the Storm, sophont arrow worms originating around the Arctic circle. Their main governing body is a mass of loosely intertwined herds, although as with most sophonts, the specifics can vary and be interpreted in any number of ways. The individual pictured here is walking a pet “reptilian” “dog”.

[yee-qi]

Even more sophonts

The Hives of Many are sapient bryozoa. The ancestrula forms a hive with many brains surrounding "wombs." New zooids bud off of these wombs, and while developing, the brain "uploads" certain instructions into these new zooids to "program" them before setting them loose. Uniquely; this species communicates via radio waves, and uses this to pilot the zooids, which are capable of living independently and acting as "drones." Hive society involves the ancestrula as much as it does the drones, and together they form a colony that is both determined and surprisingly fast-acting. With the powers of a sort of "mind uploading" and genetically-augmented drones, they were able to achieve incredible feats of engineering. The Flagbearing Tree-Guilds are brachiopods that never fully folded over and closed. Their ancestors and relatives had a wild diversity of shells that they used for manipulation, locomotion, and in one instance, flight. Flagbearers are hugely tribalistic, but also hugely risk-averse. Their wars are fought with elaborate threats that are rarely followed up on, and their governments prefer to exist in isolation (unless, of course, conquest is on the menu). The Flocking-Together are nemerteans with proboscis-derived wings, that soar above rivers and gullies and canyons that they roost on. Asocial but driven, they are willing to cooperate to carve out elaborate tunnel networks in cliffs, and even artificial caves to give them room to fly. Fights and squabbles are common and accepted parts of day-to-day life, with one condition: No injuring the wings. The wings are delicate and non-regrowable, and take a while to deploy. As such, they are a prized part of many Flocking-Together cultures.

[yee-qi]

More funky sophonts of various phyla

The Apex of Ceremony, hermaphroditic bus-sized apex predator flatworms with a penchant for ritualistic penis fencing. Relatively solitary people, they band together out of necessity rather than desire, and then trap themselves into sociality via economic systems and trade interdependencies. Needless to say, there's a lot of mental health issues there. Drugs are popular.

The Hierarchy of Divine Form, Symbion that have switched from commensalism to full parasitism as they grow into the body, brain and organs of their lobster hosts, domesticated into a wide variety of docile, all-purpose breeds. The lobster is endoskeletal and secondarily aquatic.

The Union of Silken Prosperity, gastrotichs whose scales have extended to form a full exoskeleton, partially puppeteered by mobile silk glands all over the body as a makeshift exomuscular system. Gregarious and highly social pollinators, and excellent at reading the emotional cues of most other beings.

[yee-qi]

More sophonts

The Recluses for Shelter, spiralling phoronids that live a woodpecker-like lifestyle in coniferous forests. Highly artistic yet reclusive species. Much of their culture revolves around the spiral motif that similarly makes up their body. Individuals will stick prized or sentimental objects to their shells.

The Death Spirals, fearless and territorial gastropods that wiped out their natural predators before sapience by evolving projectile weapons and then became sapient to get better at killing each other. Upon meeting other sophonts for the first time, they quickly switched to other forms of "defeat," and many are now well-known athletes.

The We Amongst Us, multi-headed (anus'd) worms that communicate through iridescent bristles. They have one consciousness but choose to present as multiple entities, for an unknown reason. Each head represents a facet of the personality, and is detached to mate (they're stolons).

[chimeride]

@dimetrodone‘s Thirty days Phyla Challenge.