The Wormwood Coast

"When you see beauty in desolation, it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you" - Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation

[hedgehog-moss]

I’m amused by this new sea fact—giant sun fish, which can weigh more than 1000 kg, are actually plankton because the name plankton (meaning ‘drifter’) encompasses many kinds of organisms that share an inability to swim against the current. The biology book I am reading wrily states that any creature that drifts through life aimlessly is a form of plankton.

[almostrealzine]

Almost Real: A Speculative Biology Zine (Vol. 3 AQUATICS)

Dive into worlds of imagination with the Almost Real zine series' 3rd volume: inspired by aquatics, and powered by 15 amazing creators.

ALMOST REAL: A Speculative Biology Zine’s 3rd Volume is FUNDED with 3 days left!

Read the update here to find out more about our stretch goals, and see what other bonuses we can get our contributing artists!

[wormwood-coast]

The elaborate mudclaw is a common inhabitant of tidepools along the Wormwood Coast. They are highly social creatures, communicating anything from fierce territorial displays to cooperative partnerships with the brightly-colored sails along their back. The claws between the primary pair of sails are not true jaws, but rather a mechanism for holding fast-moving prey in place while the mudclaw extends its radula from its underside to feed.

[nyktomorphia]

My loose interpretation of a keprem based on what little was said about them on @wormwood-coast - an arboreal crustacean thing, inspired by a sort of mix of trilobite, lobster, and deep-sea crab. All of its claws can be broken off to detoxify its food, especially the ones on the tail that would be swimmerets on an actual lobster.

[dozen-times-vanished]

Oh my god I love it!!! Thank you so much!!!! This is such a sick design!

[wormwood-coast]

Trinity Fungus

The trinity fungus is a slender, pale mushroom that grows in small clusters on the forest floor. Rather beautiful (if one appreciates that sort of beauty), but not, at first glance, remarkable in any way. However, beneath the ground they hide secrets even still.

The first oddity is that the main “root” of the organism, from which the smaller hyphae branch and spread into the soil, is ring-shaped. It plunges into the soil, then loops back up to reconnect to the fruiting body of the mushroom. The root ring can be several yards in diameter, with the smaller filamentous branching extending hundreds of times as far. Such size is not unusual for a fungus, but no other is known with such odd topology.

This is hardly the end of the mystery, though. Wherever the trinity fungus is found in the wild, it occurs in triplets of three individuals, with their root rings intertwined in the configuration of the borromean rings. This is a linkage such that no two individual rings are linked, but the three as a whole are interlocked together. The purpose of this is little understood, but some few things are known:

1. If not allowed to form borromean ring associations, the fungus will die, apparently of starvation. The association is necessary for feeding.

2. The roots of the separate individuals do not need to be in contact in order for them to survive. Even with the individual root rings completely isolated from each other in plastic tubing, the mushrooms will thrive in the borromean configuration and die otherwise.

3. Radioisotope analysis shows that the fungus does not absorb any nutrients from the soil.

The source of the fungus’s food is unknown. The role of the borromean configuration is unknown. The mechanism by which the fungus interacts with its ring-partners, even in the absence of physical contact, is unknown. Speculation suggests that like all members of their kingdom, the fungus feeds on decay.

The nature of the decay is unknown.

[nyktomorphia]

Fanart for @wormwood-coast, an Annihilation-inspired speculative biology project. (I tried to draw a keprem, too, but I don’t have enough information to figure out what it looks like...)

#artistsoninstagram #creaturedesign #sciencefantasy #worldbuilding #worldbuildingart #fanart #thewormwoodcoast #annihilation #speculativeevolution

[wormwood-coast]

Hey what the fuck this is so good???? Thank you so much I’m losing my shit this is amazing!! Fuck!!!

[wormwood-coast]

Keprem symbiotes: Part 1

A snapshot of some of the key organisms found in the pools of water formed by the hollow cavities in keprem claws. The claws are left embedded in fruit to inject enzymes which help digest it, and the cycling populations of the creatures living in the water help regulate the timing of the process.

Keyhole slug: flattened worm-like creatures, similar in shape to flukes or marine flatworms. Their name comes from the fact that they have a large hole in their backs through their bodies, like a squashed doughnut. Most of their many mouths are located in a ring around this inner edge. They are primarily grazers and often play a role in keeping pools clean of algae and detritus. They also drive periodic changes in mineral levels by shedding their microscopic teeth every full moon, allowing the claw metabolism to track the lunar cycle (to which the olam tree also responds in various ways, for unknown reasons).

Hammerhead shrimp: the larval stage of a terrestrial crustacean. Unlike in hammerhead sharks, the “hammer” of these creatures is vertical, not horizontal, with one eye projecting upwards and the other downwards. The distance between the eyes may be as great as the length of the animal’s whole body. Hammerhead shrimp are high-level predators, and there appearance in the claw pools signals that the ecosystem has attained enough stability to support a many-leveled food chain and thus sets off a huge cascade of chemical changes.

Opal feather worms: The interior of a keprem claw is filled with several small antechambers, beneath the surface of which are deposits of fat. Opal feather worms burrow part of their body into the keratin walls of the claw to feed on this rich resource, leaving their iridescent black gills protruding to extract oxygen from the water. They have three distinct biological sexes, each of which can fertilize the eggs of one of the others and be fertilized by the third, in a kind of “rock, paper, scissors” situation. Because it is less energetically costly to simply fertilize an egg than to carry offspring, each sex has a selective advantage against the sex it can fertilize and a disadvantage against the one which can fertilize it. This means that which sex is dominant will cycle through the three possibilities over the course of several mating periods, a repeating signal which regulates the claw.

(The opal feather worms were inspired by two real animals - the bone-eating snot flower and the side-blotched lizard. Check them out if you're curious!)

[wormwood-coast]

Microcosms of the keprem

The claws of the keprem are one of the most sought-after resources of the Wormwood Coast, highly prized by collectors who will pay exorbitant sums for such biological marvels. The fresh claw of an adult can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars on the black market, provided that a scavenger is willing to brave the vicious retribution of the keprem to obtain them.

Really, there are two things being sold - the claws themselves, and the miniature ecosystems they contain within. The claws, often presented cut in cross-section like nautilus shells, are valued for the beauty and complexity of their internal structure, the delicate and carefully-sculpted chambers that keep the life swimming within in a precise balance. The water collected from the claws’ interiors, teeming with unique communities of rare invertebrates, is sold to the pharmaceutical industry as a treasure trove of novel bioactive compounds. Occasionally it makes its way into the hands of religious sects, with all manner of ideas about Wormwood or purifying elixirs or What The Scallops See, but nothing ever seems to come of their many practices.

Economics aside, the fauna of the keprem claws is one of the evolutionary and ecological wonders of the Wormwood Coast. These claws serve an elegant dual purpose for the massive arthropods - allowing them to swing like spider monkeys from their long, many-jointed legs through the dense canopy, as well as providing them their most important source of food. The keprem are specialist consumers of the olam fruit, a plant made devastatingly toxic by the influence of Wormwood. To combat this, the claws of the keprem contain dozens of enzymes which they inject into the fruit in order to detoxify it. However, this process can take more than six weeks, so upon finding a suitable fruit, a keprem will stab its claw through the skin and then snap it off, leaving the claw embedded in the fruit to be returned to once it becomes edible.

The timing of the release of the digestive enzymes is also critical to the process. To this effect, the claws are hollow, and quickly fill with rainwater in the wet olam forests. Much like bromeliads, many species gather around these small pools to lay their eggs in the water. The inner surfaces of the claws are rich in specific nutrients to attract certain species at certain times, and the complex inner chambers partition different species at different depths in the microhabitat (the eight-inch length of the claw is plenty deep enough to define different habitats for creatures of the scale that make their home there). This miniature ecosystem is established such that the complex rises and falls of the populations of the various species as they grow, reproduce, and consume each other serve as a kind of ecological clock to time the various steps of the digestive process. It was once thought that these communities contributed chemically to the breakdown of the olam toxins, but it is now believed that their regulatory role is far more significant. Hundreds of species are known from keprem claw pools, dozens of them endemic. The makeup of these communities can vary greatly between keprem populations, with some even playing host to small vertebrates like frogs and salamanders.

It is remarkable that the keprem do not appear to supervise the development of the complex ecosystems they catalyze. The remarkable aspect of the claws is that they are self-sustaining - their physical and chemical structure will automatically gather the proper species together and facilitate a community structure with the correct properties to regulate olam digestion. In doing so, they provide one of the only connections linking plants back into the food web of the Wormwood Coast.

[amnhnyc]

Scallops are built like clams and mussels, with shapely shells, soft, headless bodies and simple brains. Shellfish like these may not seem alert. But scallops see in all directions. Their mantle—the thin body part that secretes the shell—is fringed with up to 100 miniature eyes, each with its own tiny retina and lens. Scallops live on the seafloor, rather than buried in sand or attached to rocks. When their shells are open, they can monitor their surroundings at all times. 

Two rows of limpid blue eyes peer from the open shell of a sea scallop. Scallops have the most acute vision of any bivalve. Their multiple eyes sense light and movement, helping them guard against predators like starfish, sea urchins, and sea snails. A scallop can also see when the water is clouded with the microscopic algae and other particles it consumes. 

Meet more marvelous creatures in the exhibition, Life at the Limits, now open at the Museum. 

[wormwood-coast]

What Dwells Below

Something lies in the deep off of the Wormwood Coast, at the bottom of a chasm plunging miles below the abyssal plain. It is vast, and ancient, and hungry, and nothing more is known. Nothing more can be known, for witnessing it is utter annihilation.

And yet. Shuffling through the abyssal mud, peering down into the darkness beyond darkness, there are witnesses.

Scallops, millions of them, each with their hundreds of tiny sky-blue eyes, gaze into the unnameable and are not destroyed. They teeter on a needle-sharp peak, with eyes and brain complex enough to just barely capture its cosmic scale, yet not complex enough to be shattered. They do not understand what they see, and yet they contain its image, and even the image of such a being is a thing of power. Without light or food the entity in the chasm sustains them, is a part of them. It takes root in them, and grows an eldritch and unknowable fruit of their bodies and minds. And yet the scallops do not mind, simple enough, oblivious enough, to reap their harvest from beyond the beyond. Thus life blossoms where Wormwood has made bitter.

Truly, it is a miracle that such a mind can exist at all. But without it the Wormwood Coast would be a wasteland. For the scallops are food for birds and fish and all manner of things, an ecosystem powered from Below by merely the memetic power of a reality-warping concept couched in a handful of mollusk neurons.Theirs is a strange flesh, those cells born of darkness, and as their cast-off shells dissolve back into the ocean, that power that makes up every part of them is carried with it.

[wormwood-coast]

Tideworms

Tideworms are fundamental to the Wormwood Coast ecosystem for their role as primary producers that don’t depend on photosynthesis. Instead, they extract energy from an unlikely source - the rising and falling of the tides.

A tideworm spends its entire life anchored inside of the hard, mineralized tube it builds, encrusted onto a rock in the intertidal zone. At low tide the worms retreat into their tubes and seal the top shut to avoid desiccation, but as the tide comes in, their heads emerge and they begin to feed. Each individual has a single long feeding tendril ending in a methane-filled bladder. The core of the feeding tendril is made up of chains of spring-shaped proteins, so as their buoyant floats rise with the tide, the “springs” expand and the tendrils stretch as they’re put under tension. Then as the water recedes, the stored potential energy is released to drive the worm’s metabolism. With sufficiently high tides, a single worm can generate about 1/3 of a watt of power per cubic meter of methane, more than enough to fuel a small, sessile invertebrate.

Because the worms take so long to reach maturity and reproduce, they are highly dependent on the safety of their tube for protection from predators. However, because tube-building is so energy-intensive, several groups of tideworms have become parasitic, evicting other worms and stealing their ready-made tubes. To combat this, there has been an incredible morphological radiation in tube structure in order to make invasion and colonization difficult. For example, some worms build tubes with complex arrangements of inward-pointing spines, or coat them in secretions that are nearly impossible to adhere to, so that only the most specialized worms can inhabit them. There is also a vast range of sizes found across taxa, from less than an inch to several yards long.

Because their main limiting resource is vertical space, not horizontal, nearby tideworms have little competition and so can form dense colonies with complex social interactions. For unknown reasons, the most productive of these aggregations show high diversity of species and even genera. Uptake of inorganic nutrients from the environment (phosphorus, nitrogen, minerals, etc) appears to be regulated by the colony as a whole, implying that these “pseudo-reefs” function as distinct ecological units and that inter-species signaling among tideworms may play a major role in structuring local ecosystems.

[wormwood-coast]

...for it was a cursed land, the very sunlight poisoned. The branch and its fruit were made bitter, and were called Wormwood, for the star that fed them was Wormwood, and none should have survived. The olam tree and its corrupting seed, the deaths-head moss, the darkfire root. All things that walked and flew and crawled and slithered ought to have vanished, the gossamer of their food web torn to tatters.

But life. Life finds what it always does.

The intertidal shores were colonized by worms, the first life wriggling back to blossom in the silent wastes. Young then and ancient now, the tube-building polychaetes grew slowly, drawing life from the very motion of the tides. Slowly, so slowly, like canyons or crystals or dreams, but grow they did, monumental in their small stillness. Further out into the deep, and more slowly still, the seabed became littered with the gradual accumulation of black scallop shells, castoffs from the vast migration of mollusks drawn by some strange call to that empty abyssal plain. They were witnesses, with their hundred-eyed sight, to terrors and wonders which sustained their bodies even as it took root in what they had of minds. From desolation, a dazzling multiplicity began to emerge...

-Spirobranchus Trismegistus III, Meditations on the Second Fauna