#spectober

One last entry for this year!

Dwoll suggested "a family of creatures that have evolved to look like every letter of the Roman/English alphabet":

Grafficimex dwolli is a domesticated species of treehopper closely related to the neotropical genus Cladonota.

Its wild ancestor, the now-extinct species Grafficimex ignotus, had an elaborate pronotum "helmet" with a close resemblance to the English letter F. It proved to be surprisingly easy to raise in captivity, being docile around humans and happily using common houseplants such as Monstera as hosts, and it was also quite morphologically variable. Varieties resembling letters such as E, C, and U were quickly developed, and hobbyists began competing to breed more and more new shapes.

Now, after centuries of selective breeding, the English alphabet has been completed, along with a couple of recently-developed breeds with bulbous protrusions that resemble question mark and exclamation mark shapes.

(Breeds resembling the alphabets of other languages are also in development.)

At about 2cm long (~0.8"), Grafficimex dwolli is rather large for a treehopper, and much like the domestic silk moth it has almost entirely lost the ability to fly.

Along with being kept as novelty pets, often carefully lined up on plant stems to spell out amusing messages, these insects are also quite popular with beekeepers – the honeydew produced by Grafficimex nymphs and adults can be harvested by bees to make dark strong-flavored honeydew honey.

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Reposting our original set of prompts from the first year! Please, feel free to use these and mention us if you do! As far as tagging just use the tag #spectober2024 and/or #spectober.

Wanted to prioritize a Spectober/Spectember post before getting to asks.

The masaka share their evolutionary tree with countless species of four-legged (sometimes two legged) small invertebrates, adapted to all sorts of ecological niches. They have their brains and eyes on their posterior side, and the cephalothorax with mouth on their anterior.

https://www.mixcloud.com/SpectacleTheater/spectacle-radio-ep45-102719-they-fell-upon-the-men-one-by-one/

Just in time for all your parties tonight, our annual Spectoberween Spectacular!

An anonymous submission asked for a "live bearing bird":

Rimurimuornis ovovivipara is a future descendant of the broad-billed moa, in a timeline where these Aotearoan birds weren't hunted to extinction.

About 2m long (~6'6"), this fully aquatic bird grazes in kelp forests and seagrass meadows. It's a rather slow swimmer, propelled solely by its large flipper-like feet – because like all moa it completely lacks wings.

Its ancestors' laid incredibly thin-shelled eggs, and a combination of reducing the hard shell away even further to a more leathery state, then increasing egg retention time inside females' bodies, has led to this lineage evolving an ovoviviparous form of live birth at sea.

It also has long ribbon-like feathers along its back that mimic the appearance of seaweed fronds. While terrestrial moa have few large predators to worry about, Rimurimuornis has to contend with sharks, orca-like whales, and leopard seal-like pinnipeds, and if its camouflage fails its primary tactic to discourage attacks is defensive defecation.

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We're continuing into Spectober with another anonymous request, this one asking for: "Hominids that evolved with 6 limbs, 2 of which are wings. Limb placement is up to you."

Living several million years in a possible future, Anomalangelus anthropogenis is a bizarre case of a six-limbed primate.

Its additional pair of upper limbs originate from a heritable form of notomelic polymelia, similar to the Developmental Duplications condition seen in our time's domestic cattle. It has a rather chimeric genome that appears to contain ancestry from several different hominid lineages, suggesting that this strange little creature actually descends from something that was originally genetically engineered.

It's a tiny dwarfed species, only about 25cm long (~10"), with a highly arboreal omnivorous loris-like lifestyle, spending most of its life clambering around in trees. Although its extra limbs can't move independently, lacking a lot of functional musculature and nerve connections, they've been exapted into brightly-patterned display structures and also serve as attachment for a large gliding membrane – Anomalangelus uses its forelimbs to grab hold of these "wings" while airborne, spreading them out and stabilizing them to form a composite wing.

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The Dark Master requested: "Maybe a speculative Placodont or choristoderes. Feel free to do anything, just if they had continued to evolve and survive"

In a slightly different timeline to our own, the last surviving choristodere Lazarussuchus didn't go extinct during the Miocene. Instead it survived in European waterways until the Messinian salinity crisis, and dispersed down into northern Africa when the Strait of Gibraltar closed up.

During one of the "Green Sahara" humid periods its descendants made their way further south, and now Keravnodraco dominusobscuri is found in lakes and rivers throughout the rainforests of West and Central Africa.

About 1m long (3'3"), it hunts small fish and aquatic invertebrates in dark murky waters, using a unique set of electrogenic organs in its elongated neck to actively sense the bioelectric fields of prey in dark murky waters – and also generating electric shocks that can stun its targets or deter predators.

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