Sturdy background info part 2

Some more information about sturdy. 

  

   The titanocamelus has a long giraffe-like tongue that is able to reach and clean the entirety of the extended lower jaw, and is flexible enough to grab food pieces and pull them into its mouth to be ground up by the functional molars. Sturdy lives in the arid portion of the dome, traveling in small family groups or herds. They are mainly preyed on by hopper. Although not naturally aggressive, sturdy can be belligerent and may attack humans if they feel threatened, especially if the group approached includes a young specimen. Young individuals have a less developed hump and the extra teeth on the lower jaw take several years to fully grow in, during which time they are protected and cared for by their herd. Sturdy is difficult to domesticate, but can be hunted for food although this is dangerous both to the hunter and those who would eat the meat, which can be contaminated by hopper's deadly bacteria. Sturdy eats mostly a diet of fungi that grow underneath rocks and plants in the arid area of the dome. These fungi are most common near the nesting grounds, but are prevalent around the entire dry portion of the dome. These fungi grow quickly, and without a healthy population of sturdy to curtail their growth (sturdy eat a lot) they quickly become problematic. This fungus grows mostly under things because it is more difficult for sturdy to reach it there, although sturdy has evolved a clever way to deal with that. The fungus maintains itself by lingering in the deepest cracks and crevasses where even sturdy can't reach it. 

Sturdy background info

Well, this post may be boring to people who aren't me... But this is a bit of the writeup that I am doing for each creature. As usual, details are subject to change, but this is the gist of it. I have more, but I figure this is enough text block for one update. 

1.   "Sturdy" Sturdy Ungulate - titanocamelus polydentis

a.     Main food source: small fungus

b.     Main predator: hopper

            Sturdy is an herbivore, and gets its nutrients from scraping fungi from the undersides of plants, rocks, and debris, so it has evolved to have an under-slung double jaw, with one part where its upper teeth and molars meet, and a secondary part that has become elongated and has extra teeth angled up for scraping. The head is heavy and held low to the ground, and the neck is thick and powerful to allow it to swing its head back and forth in a powerful defensive motion. 

      Much like a camel, it stores extra fat in a hump on its back. To compensate for this extra weight, it has an additional pair of legs situated in the middle of its body. The ribcage has remained much like a buffalo or oxen, but there is a secondary shoulder girdle and set of shoulder blades for the front set of legs. The legs move in a wave pattern so they don't hit each other when walking. Due to the heaviness of its body, sturdy is generally quite slow moving. Its forelegs are longer to allow it to raise its head if necessary to search for food or scan for predators, since the head is too heavy to be raised up by the neck alone. The loose skin on the neck accommodates a wide range of motion and also is used to attract mates or intimidate predators. The neck skin has a series of small air bladders underneath it that can be inflated to give an impressive appearance. 

Revised terrestrial food web

Ok! So I updated the terrestrial food web. It's still not totally nailed down, but getting closer.

Here the colors indicate place on the food chain/diet

And here the colors indicate what habitat within the dome is that creature's natural habitat

Food web revision

So! After posting the food webs here, I decided to go through them again and give them a good revision. I made the original food webs quite early on in my planning process, so at this point I have a more detailed idea of what I want in many of the creatures, so I went through, made some notes, refined, and changed some of the elements of both food webs. It keeps getting more and more complicated, which might get me into trouble eventually when I have to execute all of these items. But I would rather have something complicated and more interesting than something simple but boring.

So now my food webs look like this:

I'm going to go over them and make a new version that incorporates these changes, which will be my next post.

Food webs

Here are the food web diagrams I worked out for both the terrestrial and the aquatic ecosystem of Dark Waters. There will be some overlap between the two systems, but I figured the diagrams were complicated enough to begin with. According to diagrams I found on wikipedia, the accepted notation for food webs is A ---> B means that A --is eaten by--> B, even thought that seems a bit counterintuitive.

These may be somewhat subject to revision as I proceed with the project, but the general form of the web and relationship of the creatures should stay mostly the same. The names I'm using thus far are shorthand, and some of these creatures have been further developed than others. In some cases I'm using the name of an existing animal that has some of the traits I want to bring to my creature ("clownfish" for example, will not be a clownfish, but will have developed resistance to the sting of the giant jellyfish and therefore can live among its tentacles without fear of predators). The colors relate loosely to that creature's preferred diet. Red represents the top predator, and green and turquoise respectively represent herbivores or fish that eat plankton.

Terrestrial food web

Aquatic food web