Sutekh Hound

The deltadactylian sutekh hound (Setotherium spiroides), as is apparent by its common and scientific name, was named after its supposed resemblance to the “Set animal”, a creature which frequently appears in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics as the totemistic representation of the god Set. The exact identity of that creature is unknown, with speculations ranging from a highly stylized aardvark, warthog or saluki dog to something completely extinct or made up. The resemblance to this particular Martian alien is however almost certainly a complete coincidence. Though, funnily enough, Set was the god of foreign lands and deserts, so perhaps he would have been a better fit for Mars than his adversary Horus.

“Suts”, as they are sometimes nicknamed (serendipitously Sut is also the name of a demon from Islamic folklore), are common opportunists of the Hellas Savannah, often roaming wide tracts of land in search of small animals, as well as carcasses left behind by larger, more fearsome predators like the irsu. Their curved beak sees a similar use as that of various carnivorous and omnivorous birds on Earth, easily able to pick up small prey and food items as well as ripping loose flesh off bones.

Often, they are also seen flicking a sort of barbed tongue, the function of which remains elusive. Anecdotally, it has been observed that they use this organ to rasp off flesh or even lap up blood. Blood-drinking and sucking is a curiously widespread phenomenon across the Martian biosphere, though would be pretty unusual for scavengers, as open carcasses tend to lose all their blood rather quickly. The tongue, as has also been suggested, may instead have more of a function in the close association betweens suts and the local chiropede shrubs (left), whose polyps may sometimes excrete a kind of resinous substance from their cuticle during strobilation. Indeed, suts are sometimes observed licking these shrubs, though it is unclear if they really are licking up the resin or instead simply the morning dew. In any case, this cannot be imagined like the symbiotic relationship between an alien flower and a heron-sized hummingbird, because chiropedes simply do not reproduce like flowers (their “leaves” detach and live their own lives as centipede-like animals that do the actual mating). There is the so-called “Gardener hypothesis” by Röder (2331), who imagined that the shrubs provide the sut with a nutritious treat in exchange for protecting it against other predators. There is no observational evidence to support this. Maybe there simply is no connection and the tongue has a use more adventurous than most academics are able to imagine. I would know.

Unlike wild dogs on Earth, to whom they are often compared, sutekh hounds are not especially social, mostly moving across the savannah alone. Though, unlike other predators like the irsu, who are downright xenophobic, the suts usually have no problems when encountering each other. Sometimes they can even opportunistically team up to mob a prey animal or larger threat. Ultimately such camaraderie remains ephemeral, bonds broken as easily as they are formed. It is possible that it was not always this way. Geologically recent fossil deposits sometimes show dozens of specimens having all died in the same place. If this is evidence of past gregarious or even pack behaviour, it is possible that the deteriorating conditions of the planet may have eventually broken all bonds of friendship and family, the ecosystem no longer being able to support large groups and so everyone realized they are better off alone. However, as is usual with paleontology, especially Martian paleontology, such evidence is too ambiguous to make any such definitive statements. The bonebeds may also be easily explainable as predator traps, the suts, small-brained as they are, all accidentally falling into the same rocky crevasse one after the other, so accumulating in a step-wise manner.

Suts usually give birth in burrows to two or three young, which brings to mind the distant relative Syncarpus. Unlike that questionable parent, suts tend to care for all their young equally, leading to much more infrequent infanticide. This may be because the savannah is more abundant in resources than the shrublands and tundras. Sut mating has rarely been observed, though a colourful dewlap hanging below the throat seems to often come into use when determining who gets to impregnate who.

Like many Martian predators, suts seem to observe human astronauts/cosmonauts with an aura of curiosity. As is often speculated in these cases, this may be due to our superficial resemblance to the ushabtis, the smaller species of which the suts do hunt. No matter where man boldly goes, the cosmos has a strange tendency to remind him that he is made in the shape of not god, but prey.

References:

• Röder, Geronimo: The Gardener Hypothesis, in: Journal of Areobiology, 32, 2331, p. 89 – 90.

Chiropede Shrubs

Most of the common chirorbites  live lives not unlike arezoans. They are born from simple eggs or through live birth after two parents mate and impregnate each other and go on to live by feeding on smaller animals or plant matter. But not all of their members have forgotten their roots in what is actually Mars’ flora.

One sub-group of the Chirorbita reproduces in a unique way. The chiropedes, which have elongated bodies and often only a single eye, begin their lives as plants. When two adult chiropedes mate, they lay an egg into the ground which hatches into a tiny, worm-like larva that buries its head into the soil and becomes a sessile organism, whose tissues house photosynthetic zooxanthellae. As the frond of this plant grows, it begins producing leaves at its tip, which eventually form into a fan-like canopy. As some of these leaves mature, they begin growing a hardened tunicine exoskeleton, feelers and eyes. Eventually, some of them devour their own zooxanthellae, detach and begin life as their own independent animal, soon about to repeat the cycle. Most chiropedes are herbivores and feed on photosynthetic flechtoids, which is probably where they acquire the photosynthetic cells for the next generation from.

In some ways this bears similarity to the reproductive cycle of the unrelated skolex, but in them the sessile stage is diploid and the mobile one haploid, making them alternating generations like in earth-plants, whereas in the chiropedes both forms are diploid. The difference can be understood in simple terms as follows: If you were a male human and reproduced like a skolex, your sperm cells could undergo mitosis by themselves and become independent organisms once released. If you reproduced like a chiropede instead, it would be your whole penis detaching from your body and becoming independent.

While this seems extraordinarily alien, it is really not much different from the reproductive cycles seen in our own oceans’ cnidarians. There, free-floating jellyfish fertilize eggs, which hatch into a planula larva. Said larva attaches to the seafloor, becoming a polyp. As it grows, the polyp produces more jellyfish in a process called strobilation. Some parasitic flatworms, the cestodes, also reproduce through strobilation. The chiropede clade thus derives its scientific name, Strobilata, from this well-known process.

The existence of Strobilata poses a lot of phylogenetic questions for the Chirorbita. Some studies suggest that the clade might actually be paraphyletic, chiropedes being the ancestors to the more derived euchirorbites, like the spectacled chirorbite. If true, this would mean that strobilation is actually ancestral to the clade but was lost later on in some lineages in favour of a more direct reproduction. This is supported by the fact that some of the more basal pseudarticulates (though not all of them), like the menamin, also reproduce through cestode-like budding.

For the family tree of the Fractaria phylum as a whole, other fascinating possibilities open up. It is generally thought that pseudarticulates and polyfractarians, which are clonal colonial organisms, are only distantly related, sharing a common ancestor among simple, monovexillan fractarians. But two new competing schools of thought have appeared in recent years. One proposes that the pseudarticulates actually derived from polyfractarians whose gonosphores became independent from the whole organism. The second, more popular one, is that polyfractarians derived from a basal strobilating pseudarticulate whose organs one day stopped detaching from the polyp and instead started working together as a single sessile organism, eventually losing all complex traits like eyes, guts or a nervous system in the process. Actual evidence for either position has not yet been gathered.

On a final note, it is interesting that, while still attached to its polyp, a chiropede still has a nervous connection to the polyp and the surrounding chiropedes. One wonders how it must feel like in the final stages before detachment, when the chiropede already has eyes and is wriggling, to be your own being and yet still be part of a larger one. If your hand could think, what would it think?