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1. Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Jan-2025 14:53:57 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

   The next sci-fi author that wants to talk about alternate origin stuff should use Xenophyophorea. They're a deep sea organism that grows up to 20cm (8") but they're a single cell. They make specialized shells made selectively of minerals including uranium. We don't know how they reproduce and we can't find them in the fossil record.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Jan-2025 14:56:30 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     now those last two are just a matter of not having observed them enough yet (they hang out half a kilometer down at shallowest!) and we expect they probably reproduce like some other Foraminifera where they use alternation of generations, but we currently don't know for sure.

     Clearly it's a perfect chance to write a story about how they're actually biological resource miners sent to collect the volatiles from earth's oceans

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Jan-2025 14:57:22 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     after all, we can't find them in the fossil record (though there's theories that some other things we see might be very different ancestors of them), clearly they just showed up shortly before they were first discovered in the 1880s.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Jan-2025 15:01:24 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     a deep sea submersible once collected a spatangoid urchin 3km down that was wearing a cloak of over 200 Xenophyophores. It is unknown if the urchin was specifically collecting them, or the Xenophyophores specifically sought out the urchin to grow on.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Jan-2025 15:04:39 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     they're the dominant organism in parts of the ocean floor. It's been theorized that they are "ecosystem engineers": a creature that significantly impacts a habitat, such as how beavers significantly impact the flow of rivers with their dams.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Jan-2025 15:06:59 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm not SAYING there's an alien macroscopic single-celled radiation-powered thing xenoforming the earth's abyssal plain, but that you could look at the current state of the science and definitely make an argument.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Jan-2025 15:07:32 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     BTW, did you know that over 50% of the earth's surface is Ayssal plain?

     If they're invaders, they already won.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Jan-2025 15:21:05 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Infoseepage #StopGazaGenocide

     @Infoseepage I know, right? I would have loved a science education that focused more on the weird and interesting.

   • Infoseepage #StopGazaGenocide (infoseepage@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Jan-2025 15:21:06 JST Infoseepage #StopGazaGenocide

     in reply to

     @foone The ocean seriously has a lot of Katamari Damacy action going on.