Encyclopedia Galactica:Ideru Moss Fish (Lifeform)
Ideru Moss Fish (Lifeform)[edit]
Summary[edit]
- Planet of Origin: Ideru
- Habitat: Salt lakes/Desert
- Diet: Photosynthetic/Herbivore
Details[edit]
The Ideru Moss Fish is a famously dimorphic lifeform native to the planet Ideru. For a considerable period of time upon early exploration of Ideru, the Moss Fish was a mystery -- seemingly isolated saltwater ponds formed in Ideru's geologically active regions would develop small populations of a small (guppy-sized) fish-analog, without any apparent connection to existing bodies of water. Eventually, DNA analysis of a seemingly unrelated primitive moss found in the deserts of the same planet yielded the answer.
The Moss Fish is, in fact, a chimera -- a lifeform demonstrating traits of both a plant and an animal, not uncommon for Ideru's sparse surface life. Ordinarily, it thrives in salt, still water, combining photosynthetic respiration with a primitive digestion of various other, more sessile waterbound plants and chimerae. It reproduces sexually, creating large numbers of small spores. It's the spores that are interesting. They settle in mud and are sensitive to the presence or absense of water. If they are in a submersed environment, they grow into additional small moss fish, as one might expect.
However, Ideru is tectonically active, and frequently, the small lakes on its surface are upset and spill out into the sandy dunes of its equator. If a spore lodges in dry sand instead of mud, it grows not into the mobile fish, but a fine, creeping moss-like substance which requires vastly less energy and behaves very much like a typical plant. In its moss-form, the Moss Fish grows to be several meters in diameter, with the majority of its small mass slightly subterranean, and reproduces asexually by budding more spores on its surface. Those spores, then, are picked up by the wind, and deposited either in the sand (producing more plant-like Moss Fish), or possibly into another saltwater lake, in which case they settle into the mud and produce the active, fish-like Moss Fish.
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