Oni2:Slaves of War/Neo-Biology

Definition

Neo-Agriculture is the act of adapting the Wilderness to the world of humans. The working assumption is that the Wilderness is primarily composed of plants, both extraterrestrial (from across the "phase veil") and also Daodan-mutated Earth plants. Some time after the events of Oni, Mukade is working at finding a way to live alongside the hostile life of the Wilderness, akin to Princess Nausicaa. This is as opposed to the slash-and-burn approach that some are taking towards the encroaching wildlife, and also opposed to the idea of giving everyone Chrysalises so they can adapt to the Wilderness. Below are some attempts at conceiving of what plant life would be encountered in the Wilderness, first looking at things that have already been done in fiction, then at some real-life freaky flora.

Fictional Precedents

• Myst III: Exile. After two games set in mostly lifeless worlds, Myst III (under new developers) moved in a more organic direction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAShllUlEK0. Notice that some puzzles involve divining the workings of plants and the minds of animals. Of course Oni is pretty much on the other side of the action/thinking spectrum from a game like Myst, but I think there's food for thought here.

• Plants with Eyes. Just watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc_Y1IXVSig. As far as I can tell, this was produced for a television show as a sort of throw-away tease segment, but it really stands on its own as a bizarre and super-realistic visualization of the very kind of stuff we might encounter in plants from another world, or plants that were more active than ours. Apparently they started with live-action footage of real plants, and then dressed them up with CG, but the results are surprisingly effective. Then again, some of our real-life plants are pretty impressive too, as seen below.

Awesome Real Stuff

"On and on it goes. It seems the more you learn, the less and less and less and less and less you know." -- Apollo Sunshine, "The Egg"

Let's look at real plants to get some inspiration. It seems that peering into nature closely only demonstrates how incapable we are of imagining anything stranger or more alien than the actual life that exists on this planet. Here's some stand-out examples:

Sensitive Plants

• Mimosa pudica is known by countless names in countless languages because people the world over so enjoy touching it. No, seriously. It's usually referred to in English as touch-me-not, and in most other languages a variant of the word "shy" is used in its name. You can see why in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLTcVNyOhUc.
  • The perfect orderliness of the folding leaves such as at 2:24 seems to belie our ideas about "organics" being "sloppier" than mechanical devices. Although it's been years since I played Myst III, watching this video reminded me of the stairs that can be seen at 1:09 in the game's trailer above (I actually forgot the game had all that organic stuff in it until I looked up the trailer to find those stairs!).
  • It seems to be a nearly universal reaction to become irritated at seeing someone messing with the touch-me-not, as you can see from all the comments on touch-me-not videos. One YouTube commenter observes, "Funny how people willingly pick, cut, step on, or otherwise harm plants, but as soon as the plant is capable of noticeable movement, suddenly they decide it has feelings and anyone who bothers it is a bastard." Hmm.

• The telegraph plant is a biological implementation of a solar tracker system; it uses leaflets to find the angle of the sun and then moves its larger leaves into place, to maximize its energy use vs. intake.

• Dancing grass

Explosive Dehiscence

Some plants get bored waiting for Mother Nature to send wind or insects to help them spread seeds or pollen, and take matter into their own hands.

• The White Mulberry tree spreads pollen by firing shots at half the speed of sound.

Carnivorous Plants

The very idea of a plant that eats meat is so bizarre that we would refuse to believe in such a thing if we hadn't all seen venus fly traps on TV. It seems that carnivory is a viable practice in areas that are too nutrient-poor for regular plants to grow. These plants dispel the notion that an organism needs to be motile in order to catch food. (And the section after this dispels the notion that all plants are sessile!)

• Everyone's seen the Venus fly trap catch a fly. It's actually the most primitive and slowest plant carnivore, as you'll see. But here's some interesting nuances that you probably didn't know:
  • It has a short-term memory. A single stimulus won't close the trap; it has to feel two movements within ~20 seconds in order to close. This seems to border on the whole "domain of the mechanical" thing once again.
  • The fly trap also allows smaller bugs to escape if trapped, and then re-opens early.
  • The other carnivores are extremely widespread, but the venus is only found natively within a 60 mile radius of Wilmington, North Carolina, USA (200 miles from where I live).
  • Scientists don't know exactly how it works. The theorized details could be instructive for us, though, if I could only understand it. It has something to do with elasticity, ion propagation, and osmosis. Basically, the triggering hairs cause a chemical reaction which causes water to move around in the plant. This is apparently the basic explanation for all plant movement, such as with the telegraph plant above.

• The most gorgeous meat-eating monster plant ever, the sundew, grabs bugs with sticky dewdrops that it extrudes onto those filaments, and in some cases curls up its tendrils to further trap its prey. Did I mention it's also gorgeous?
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drosera_spatulata_KansaiHabit.jpg
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drosera_derbyensis_ne1.JPG
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drosera_capensis_bend.JPG
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drosera_anglica_ne2.jpg

• The waterwheel plant grows in water and uses underwater, floating whorls to catch bugs.
  • Its flowers are only seen for a few hours before they are pulled underwater.
  • In the winter, it detaches buds called turions to sit at the bottom of the water. These survive extremely frigid conditions while the main plant dies. Once warmer weather returns, they "reduce their density" (at will?!) and rise to the surface in order to germinate and begin growing.

• The bladderwort has a complex vacuum-powered flushing trap that catches bugs instantly.

Motile plants

• Tumbleweed

Resurrection plants

Here's a Rose of Jericho. Here's a Rose of Jericho on water. Any questions?

Other Stuff

Dropping these terms here for now: host range, Okazaki fragments, mobilome.

• Tobacco mosaic virus: "Due to its cylindrical high aspect ratio, self-assembling nature, and ability to incorporate metal coatings (nickel and cobalt) into its shell, TMV is an ideal candidate to be incorporated into battery electrodes."

Phenetics

No need to try to invent an entirely new alien system of plant life. Truth is stranger than fiction anyway. We can use real-life plants as our guide for what sort of abilities and appearances the Wilderness flora will have, and how some of them may interact with the human body....