Awbar

When people think of extinct life, they usually have images of fossils and artistic reconstructions in their head. Extinction is a phenomenon seemingly relegated to the far past, to dinosaurs and mammoths. In reality, extinction happens all the time, throughout the present. It is a process as natural as life and death itself. Yet, it leaves us mourning when it happens in front of our own eyes.

The awbar were a fascinating species which the first astronauts encountered on Mars, including myself on some of my early missions. They lived in a peculiar area of the Argyre Basin. Mars lacks a global magnetic field like Earth does, making it an all-around more irradiated and hostile place. However, some areas contain highly magnetized rock formations, which have managed to save some remnants of the prehistoric magnetosphere, creating local shields against UV and other harmful radiation from space. In these so-called UV-oases, flora and fauna can lead a more sheltered life and attain higher biodiversity than in other areas of the planet. The awbar lived in one such oasis - only one – together with the organisms it depended on.

The awbar is thought to have been a goniopod, a group of dinosauresque deltadactylians, but unlike its bigger cousins, the cecrops and syncarpus, it was generally not included within the more exclusive Thecocerata, as it lacked the characteristic hornlets inside of its beak. This decision has often been criticized, as the lack of that trait may instead have resulted from its specialized diet. Other unique traits were that it felt comfortable walking both on two and three legs and that it exhibited multioculy (having more than two eyes), a trait otherwise rare in goniopods.

It was a nimble creature, able to fit inside a human hand. From its back grew a fleshy fin, adorned with a peculiar oval spot. Undoubtedly this served some display function, but what exactly is now forever uncertain. Awbar lived in close association with a plant dubbed the sporangobush, a type of fractarian. Its sporangia ended in hairy bulbs, each hair drenched in some kind of viscous liquid. Awbar were most often seen climbing up the bushes and licking these furballs with their long, retractable tongue. Many authors have assumed that this could have been a symbiotic relationship. Assuming the liquid produced by the sporangia was some kind of nectar, the Martian may have been lured into licking up the plant’s spores. Inside the stomach and guts of the creature, these spores may have combined with those of other sporangobushes and exited the body through excretion, already fertilized. It is impossible to test any such hypotheses anymore, however. There may not have been a mutual benefit at all to such behaviour, the creature could have been licking the sporangia for reasons entirely unintended by the plant. Perhaps the liquid was toxic or unappealing to some herbivores but was unintentionally alluring to the little creature, the same way spicy plants on Earth have unintentionally garnered the attention of humans. Or the relationship between the organisms was much more intricate and complicated than we can ever imagine, seeing as how little we still know about these ecosystems.

The extinction of the awbar was not brought about by a catastrophe like the dinosaurs’ or through human interference like the dodo’s. It was the end of a slow process already well on its way long before man set his foot on the red planet. The magnetization held within the surrounding rocks had simply begun to fade. With each passing year, the local magnetosphere grew weaker and more radiation reached the soil. The changes must have been incremental at first. With each blooming, the number in each organism’s generations must have grown less, rates of cancer and other ailments must have risen and gradually lowered their lifespan. The margins and tall hills of the oasis became barren first, the eggs of the sporangobushes and tube-cycads in the soil simply failing to germinate. These blank spots were then quickly colonized by more UV-resistant flora and planimals from outside the region, like chiropedes and the aggressive red weed. From that point on, the collapse of the previous ecosystem progressed at a geometric rate, as now the local organisms did not only face environmental degradation but also competition from outsiders they would have normally been able to outbreed. Local nekhbets failed to spawn and were gradually replaced by wadjets and more delicate spongisporians died from mutations before they could bloom, losing ground to their thorny upland counterparts. The ecosystem transformed and many were simply not able to adapt quickly enough to the changes. It was a prolonged evolution of the landscape, observed by us humans over a span of about twenty years. When the shield was finally gone, very little remained of the previous ecosystem. The last sporangobushes failed to reproduce and aged into misshapen mutants before mercifully fading away. The last awbar was already sighted five years before their extinction.

It is a curious feeling, to know that these little creatures used to crawl over my feet one day and are now forever gone. Though less spectacular than the great fossils dug out from the ground, their loss is a much more personal one. A more painful one. It is the difference between reading about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in a schoolbook and seeing your own father pass away at the hospital. The many questions you ask yourself. Was this inevitable? Were there ways I could have helped? Why didn’t I try to help? Why did I not do more with the time we were given together? But such things, speculating about changing a past that can no longer be changed, hypothetical realities, is a futile misery. There was nothing I could have done. The magnetized rocks would have faded regardless of me being there or not and none of our expeditions were ever equipped to preserve species. We were just there to observe and study. And by the point I knew my father was sick, it was already too late for us to bond in the way be both wished we would have. Years of neglect had eroded any emotional foundation that could have been built upon. He was my father, and a good one at that, but he was never my friend.

Red Weed

On Earth, a view of plant life may envelop a person in warm, serene feelings. Plants are organisms we take for granted as helpful, passive creatures, sometimes even viewing them as if they exist solely for our own purposes, more tool than lifeform.

On Mars, a view of the local flora may cause, if it is capable of feeling, a sense of dread in the local wildlife. Perhaps in the distant past, the vegetables of this planet used to be just as passive and generous as our own, but millions of years of environmental deterioration have made even the flora savage. In the last savannah can be found giant, sponge-like growths that digest microorganisms from the air in cavernous guts while in the sparse shrublands there are bushes that send out their offspring to feed on other plants.

Arephyta, the Martian taxon most similar in morphology to Earth’s Plantae, once used to make up the majority of the planet’s flora, as the fossil record attests. But unlike our planet’s algae and plants, arephytes never evolved oxygenic photosynthesis. They are stuck with a much more archaic metabolism, where sunlight is used to turn hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide into sugar, the waste-product being elemental sulphur instead of oxygen. When Mars was young, this dependence on H2S was no problem. Volcanoes regularly nourished the atmosphere with sulphuric gases while the waterways and wet soils were likely filled with microscopic sulphate-reducers that created H2S as a waste product. But as the planet has aged and dried, so have the conditions which have allowed these organisms to flourish. Many arephytes have gone extinct eons ago, the last survivors of the most basal types now desperately cling to the hangs of volcanoes and hot springs, where conditions still provide a faint echo of the elder days. The thrones of the plant kingdom have been usurped by former “planimals”, the spongisporians and fractarians, which have bet on the right horse and engage in symbiosis with oxygen-producing chloroplasts.

However, one group of arephytes has managed to adapt to this changing world. Arthrophyta is a clade characterized by bilateral symmetry and segmentation, traits we usually associate with animals. But the major characteristic that differentiates them from their archaic forebearers is that they have gained an additional type of endosymbiont: sulphur-reducers. These are anaerobic areont-cells that the plant houses in tightly-sealed bulbs along its stem. The deal is simple: The plant provides anoxic conditions inside its body and waste-sulphur, the symbionts reduce this sulphur back into hydrogen sulphide. An ingenious cycle. With this, the arthrophytes have been able to maintain a wider distribution than their cousins, and in the past grew into their own forests in a world already dominated by fractarian scale-trees. Still, they were and are limited compared to their competitors. Being able to recycle one’s own sulphur is an excellent adaptation, but it is not truly the same as producing H2S. It is a closed cycle and so the arthrophytes are still dependent on any additional hydrogen sulphide they may receive from the soil.

One peculiar group of arthrophytes has found a solution to this problem: Carnivory. The ancestors of this group likely started out not unlike Earth’s sundew, growing in nutrient-poor soils and trapping smaller animals as an extra-source of nitrogen. As they did, putrefying microorganisms must have fermented the sulphurous molecules of the prey’s body and created waste H2S, which immediately came in handy. Over millions of years a close endosymbiosis was forged, which eventually resulted in diets far more sophisticated and terrifying than that of any venus flytrap on Earth.

When an animal steps into the tentacle-like leaves of the red weeds, it immediately becomes ensnared, each attempt at escape triggering more proto-nerve reactions in the plant to hold onto the prey firmer, eventually tiring and choking it to death. In an ordinary carnivorous plant from Earth, this is where digestion would already begin, with enzymes secreted from the plant surface decomposing the food. But these plants digest their prey with microorganisms inside their body, in fact in the anaerobic chambers that formerly housed the sulphur-reducers, now transformed into something that could be called a true stomach. And it is by the method that these plants get food to their stomachs that they have earned their sinister reputation… and colour. These are vampire plants. Each leaf is adorned by tiny needles, much like the hairs of Earth’s stinging nettle, but instead of injection, these needles are adapted towards suction. Through osmotic processes, a pressure difference is created between the stomachs and the veins leading up to the needles. Once a prey animal breaks away the needles’ seal and gets stung, they work like syringes and draw out the blood and other fluids from the organism, sucking it dry over time. It is a gruesome process, sometimes an audible slurping sound has been recorded by observers. Some plants even inject their prey with an acid that aids in decomposition of body tissues into a digestible sludge, much like a spider. The nutrients from the victim’s fluids are digested in the stomachs, leading to the production of H2S, nitrogen and other helpful resources. The excess water now courses through the predator’s xylem, an excellent boon when living in the dry wastes of Mars.

Due to the abundance of iron in the planet’s crust, many of the higher animals use haemoglobin, myoglobin and erythrocruorin to transport oxygen, much like many organisms on Earth do. This means their blood is likewise red and, now stolen, tints the natural colour of these arthrophytes from the inside. As many of their metabolic pathways do not require oxygen, it remains unknown what the plants use the globins coursing through their vessels for. Its colour, together with its aggressive, choking nature, is how the plant has earned its colloquial name: Red Weed.

By going on the offensive, these remnants of a forgotten flora have burned their way across the ecosystem, growing with an astonishing vigour and luxuriance. Whole areas of the sparse shrublands have become their own microbiome where the cactus-like red weeds form dense carpets and miniature carmine forests. Many different species and morphologies exist. Some have the typical broad, tentacular leaves like a sundew, others broadcast long, thin strings from their stems almost like tripwires. The latter’s tendrils creep like slimy, wet animals across the wasteland, covering field, ditch, shrubs and sleeping animals with living, scarlet feelers, crawling, crawling… A third type of red weed, the vampire-waterlilies, is only very rarely encountered, as it lies dormant for most of the year. But during the thawing season, wherever this extraordinary growth encounters a stream of water it straightaway becomes gigantic and of unparalleled fecundity, clinging and growing with frightening voraciousness. Its diaspores are simply poured down into the water to be deposited and covered into the sediment for the next season and its swiftly growing and titanic water fronds speedily choke the water, creating transitory pools in which amphibious creatures lay their spawn.

The greatest differences between the species usually lie in the “heads” of the plants, which are their reproductive organs. Something akin to the beautiful flowers or fruit has never evolved on Mars among any of the known flora. Instead, sickening sporangia grow from these sickle-shaped tops, dispersing wretched diaspores into the wind and soil. Some of the red weeds’ diaspores can be necroparasitic if they are ingested. Usually, they lie dormant inside the host’s tissue for its entire life, but when it finally dies of natural causes, putrefying chemicals will cause the diaspore to germinate and feed on its host’s corpse until bursting out of the decaying body. A very few do not wait for the host’s death.

Another advantage of the red weeds is that very few herbivores feed on them, usually due to the damage that their needles may cause on mouthparts but also because most herbivorous animals seem to find it unpleasant to bite into food filled with other animals’ blood. But there are a few that do feed on the red creepers, helping to keep their advance at bay. Bennus, rannus and other periostracans have solid scolecodont beaks formed out of former teeth and so are immune to the syringes’ stings. They simply bite into the leaves and rip them out, destroying any built-up osmotic pressure, and then chew with pleasure on the succulent snack. Perhaps they do not mind the taste due to their own omnivorous diet. Some onychognaths also have beaks, but the soft inner-linings of their mouths still make it difficult for them to bite into red weeds.

On a final note, it is interesting to discuss why such a type of carnivorous plant has not evolved on Earth, even though all the required mechanisms theoretically exist in our own flora. It is most likely a question of necessity, none of the oxygenic earth-plants needing to evolve such drastic measures like the metabolically impaired arephytes to stay in the evolutionary game of life. But it could also be a question of time. Carnivorous plants on Earth are only a recent phenomenon, most fossil and molecular evidence pointing towards an origin not older than the Late Cretaceous. Perhaps the humble sundew and the flytrap are still at a very early stage of their kind’s evolution. As Earth itself will inevitably sink in habitability and competition from the expanding C4 plants will drive such forms into harsher habitats in another 500 million years, perhaps strategies just as drastic if not more extreme than those of the red weeds will evolve here too. In a billion years, when the expansion of the sun has turned our home into another red desert, this will maybe also become a planet of vampire weeds. Perhaps they will even sprout legs and go by themselves on the hunt for the animalistic post-humans that will cling to the wasteland.

The Canals of Mars

One of the greater mysteries of Mars is that Lowell and Flammarion were apparently correct in their observation that large and seemingly straight linneae are present on Mars, though only very few of the ones we discovered match the maps drawn by them. These features are so far mostly concentrated in the shrubland regions, most beginning in the slope-regions of the southern highland and radiating out into the lowland deserts, sometimes joining with ancient craters. Sometimes these lines will join each other or at the same crater, with new lines also seemingly flowing out of the craters. While often only ten-or-so metres wide, some of these features have impressive lengths, the longest one so far discovered reaching from the slopes of Alba Mons all the way to the Milankovič Crater.

My own sketches overlain with those of Lowell. Though in my case, all the canals were actually buried underground beneath the sands.

What is weirder is that almost none of them were actually visible on the surface when we arrived, instead the “canals” were discovered by accident during seismic measurements, as they lie many tens of meters under dust and sediment. This further makes it doubtful that these are the same as Lowell’s canals. Though the excavation of one “canal” concluded that it was only buried a few centuries ago by a series of large global dust storms. Possibly then, Lowell and Flammarion had the luck of seeing these when they were still uncovered. It is also possible that far more such features exist across the Martian globe, though they lie now deep underneath dust and permafrost.

Now of course, it is very attractive to think that these may have been created by intelligent life, possibly as a form of irrigation system. Apart from their remarkable straightness, there is however nothing else that might corroborate artificiality. At least in the ones we excavated, natural geologic flowing features are observed and at the meeting points of the “canals”, where one might expect settlements, nothing has been found that would raise an archaeologist’s eyebrow. It should be noted, however, that we do not yet know how old these features are. Who is to say that after millions or billions of years, features like the Panama- or the Suez-Canal might still be recognisable as man-made?

Seeing no direct evidence to the contrary, it is nonetheless still preferable to interpret these features as being of natural origin. A common geologic feature observed inside their bedform are so-called antidunes, a form of ripple that forms in supercritically flowing water, which due to the lower gravity is expectedly more common on Mars than on Earth. The “canals” might therefore be the remains of highly unusual, massively sized flooding events. During times of intense melting, either through supervolcanic eruptions or freak heatwaves in the South, enormous amounts of meltwater may have flowed down the highlands into the deserts. The waters may have eaten their way through miles of previously super-dry and uncompacted sand and dust, which, once wetted, may have solidified into walls. On repeat-floods, these may have controlled the flow of water into straighter directions, eventually forming long, canal-like forms. This is more of an attempt at an explanation than an actual explanation and it is entirely predicated on the possibility that the low gravity of the Red Planet makes water behave differently than on Earth, because there is no Terran structure comparable to these flow-features.

Badarian Fly

Among the many differences between Earth and Mars is that what can colloquially be referred to as an “insect” is much more straightforward on one planet than on the other. Powered flight has evolved on our planet only four times and only once among the invertebrates, and once the insects made this important step, they occupied every niche available to flying animals their size. In contrast, the organisms that an average layperson might refer to as “Martian insects” can come from vastly different backgrounds, attesting to a long forgotten time when the air was thicker, evolving flight was as easy as going back in the water and vast swarms of aeroplankton made up large parts of the global ecosystem. Among the red planet’s small to microscopic flying organisms, one may find wadjets, the larvae of shellubim, spring-tailed furchordatans and even hummingbird-sized ballousaurs and pedicambulates, which parasitically feed on the blood of larger Martians. But most prominent (behind the wadjets and aeroplanktonic larvae) are the nekhbets, a group of tiny archaeocephalians.

 

 

Most iconic of this group, for it is encountered the most across the Martian shrublands, is Paradipterosaurus ranamusca, commonly known as the badarian fly. In it we can also observe the basic bodyplan of this clade, though it has become quite abstract in more derived members. As we can see, having evolved from a six-legged ancestor (perhaps an early stultusaur or maybe even something more ancient), nekhbets developed a unique arrangement wherein the front and back limbs became wings while the centre pair retained their walking function. The spine between these sections is largely stiffened and inflexible. As with the ballousaurs, who evolved their wings out of their hindlegs, this seems quite silly at first. One would think that the “draconic” configuration, wherein the middle-limbs become the wings, would be easier and more practical to evolve, but observation has shown that this four-winged form comes with many advantages which allows the organims a stable, controlled and flexible flight, somewhat akin to what is seen in some man-made drones. Indeed, it seems to have been a winning strategy, for the only “draconic”-winged onychognaths were a short-lived group of tagmasaurs that went extinct at the end of the Isidian, while nekhbets thrive until modern day.

The badarian fly buzzes through the shrublands, its long neck curled up and its legs tucked in, using its painted tail for manoeuvring while on the search for succulent young fractarian fronds. When found, the beetle-sized animal uses its tiny cheliceres to gnaw into the “plants”, feeding on the soft, jellicious tissues and sucking up any available liquid. A single fly is often too small to cause significant damage, but in groups or swarms they can become a serious threat to the organisms’ health. Many fractarians have thus evolved defences against this and other small, flying herbivores, such as bristles, hardened cuticles, deadly toxins, suffocating sap or even venomous needle-hairs. Some arephytes, who may also fall victim to this pharaonic plague, have gone one step further and became carnivorous, much in the fashion of the sundew. With the spongisporians, the badarian fly and other nekhbets share a more positive relationship. They will often inhabit the porous bodies of these sponge-like organisms, perhaps feeding them in turn through their excrements.

The badarian fly is among the many areozoans who annually migrate to the great tundra in the south, when the summer sun thaws the top-layer of the permafrost and makes the red fronds spring back to life. Although practicing internal fertilization, most nekhbets lay their unshelled eggs in the spring bogs and ponds that form here, similar to other archaic onychognaths. These eggs hatch first into eel-like larvae, feeding on microscopic water-flora, which then grow six long, webbed, almost frog-like limbs. As they mature, the external gills in the armpits of these "tadpoles" invaginate and become book-lungs. The webbing on the front- and hindlimbs stiffens into a tough membrane, while it disappears on the middle pair. Eventually they crawl out of the drying bogs and fly away to the north. While Haeckel's old axiom of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is not as true as we once thought it was, we may glean from this metamorphosis an insight into how these extraordinary onychognaths may have evolved in the eldest of days.