Post by DarthGrievi on Apr 24, 2010 2:54:32 GMT
(Yeah, my scanner's dead and gone...)
(I'm pressed for time as I'm posting this, more later.)
Biology
The Quroche are best described as "amoebic", though that's a rather inaccurate term. Unlike amoebas, they are indeed composed of multiple, specialized cells, just like the vast majority of sapient life. However, instead of the standard, predictable "skeleton, muscles, organs" body plan, their structure is more like that of an enormous single-celled organism.
The outer skin of a Quroche is almost entirely transparent, but thick and rubbery to the touch. It serves as a highly flexible exoskeleton, and is a main anchoring point for most of their hydrostatic "musculature". The majority of the Quroche's body cavity is filled with fibrous, muscle-like cells suspended in a thick fluid, sometimes incorrectly referred to as "cytoplasm". This fluid is light purple in color, like many of the plants and sedentary animals on their homeworld, providing camouflage. Suspended within and held in place by the "muscles" are a series of specialized organs, usually combination glands/nerve clusters/filters/pumps. At both the mouth and the snout, the outer skin has hardened and become opaque, forming tooth-like structures, while on the head and back it has formed a set of display filaments, tipped with small, colored disks.
Externally, the Quroche posses few major features. Beyond the aforementioned filaments and teeth, the snout also contains a set of 18 simple eyes, nine to a side. There is no mouth or breathing apparatus here, but there is a large cluster of nervous tissue to process sensory information from the eyes. The true mouth lies at the end of the "tail", and consists of a circular opening lined with numerous small, tooth-like projections, designed for rasping and boring through the equally tough and thick skins of the native fauna. The internal fluids are then sucked out and reconstituted/reused as their own. The Quroche are able to do this due to a lack of any formal immune system, thus preventing an inflammatory response to the foreign matter. The primary defense against infection is their thick skin and their filtering organs. The mouth also serves as a breathing chamber, using muscular contractions to expose small, contained portions of the "cytoplasm" to the relatively oxygen-rich atmosphere of the planet.
The Quroche posses three main limbs; two simple legs and a single manipulation tentacle, forked to provide better dexterity. Due to the rather imprecise nature of the Quroche nervous system, the legs only truly have two states: relaxed and fully extended. The relaxed state is somewhat stiff, but with enough give to act as a shock absorber, while the fully extended state is completely rigid. At low speeds, the Quroche are quite clumsy, kicking themselves forward rather erratically with rapid, jerking movements, occasionally using the manipulation tentacle or the snout for added support. At high speeds, though, is where this mode of locomotion shines. Quroche, at full clip, have been clocked at speeds in excess of 65 miles per hour, bounding along like a more spastic version of an Earth kangaroo. The manipulation tentacle, indeed, the majority of the body, however, does not suffer from this fault of having large blocks of musculature controlled by a single nerve impulse, and are capable of finer movement, though they do still appear mechanical and jerky to those accustomed to the more fluid motions of many lifeforms. It works for them, however, and the limited number of muscle block groups allows for the simplification of the nervous system, a necessary measure due to its highly distributed nature.
Though the display filaments were originally intended for just such a purpose, they have, over thousands of years, developed into sense organs as well, the cluster on the head especially. These stiff filaments are capable off picking up vibrations in the air, though far less reliably than most other sense organs, operating best at subsonic ranges. This is convenient for the Quroche, however, as they are incapable of naturally producing sounds within ranges normally audible by most races. The best they can manage in the audio department is a deep rumble, sustainable for a bare few seconds, produced by "ingesting" a large pocket of air and rapidly vibrating it within the body whilst expelling it, much like a crude resonator. This is the primary form of communication between Quroche not in visual contact with each other, such as at long distance, and is sometimes used as a supplement to the complex gestural language that most Quroche communicate by.
Reproduction
Quroche start their lives within a small sack of gel, originally connected to the "mother", but in modern times more often than not amputated and put on life support due to the large number of complications that can occur, many ultimately killing the parent. These gel sacks are formed when two Quroche exchange internal fluids, either intentionally or unintentionally, combining their DNA and causing the formation of a tumor-like sack between the manipulation tentacle and the snout, wherein the embryos develop. Often times, only one parent will develop the sack, but it is not uncommon for both to do so, or sometimes neither.
After about sixty Earth days, the sack ruptures and anywhere from three to seven small (four to five inch) young are expelled, and for the first few years of their lives are fed regurgitated fluids from the "mother". The young are almost miniature versions of the adults, but entirely transparent (except for their organs), without teeth or display filaments, and lacking all but a single pair of eyes. They remain with the parent for several Earth years before becoming mature enough to fend for themselves, usually not long after their teeth have fully developed.
Evolution/Primitive History
The Quroche developed as scavengers, akin to leeches and hyenas in their ecological niche. Following sapience, they formed tools to fell their own prey, but beforehand, they fed almost entirely off the kills of other creatures. The odd arrangement of their sense organs was evolved as a defense strategy to facilitate this type of lifestyle. In order to feed, they must bury their mouths relatively deep into the carcass, thus obscuring their vision. Early on in their evolution, when life was entirely aquatic and being macroscopic was the new and upcoming fashion, those with sense organs on their back ends survived, as they could detect when something larger, more often than not a predator, was approaching and flee. Over millennia, cephalization proceeded in reverse of most other creatures, with the posterior end becoming the more specialized. Eventually, though, the posterior effectively became the anterior, and the ancient Quroche ancestors stopped moving mouth first and began moving snout first.
Life moved onto land, and the Quroche followed, adapting their primitive flippers into equally primitive limbs and tethering tentacle into one designed for support, later manipulation as they grew more intelligent. They soon found that banding together ensured their survival, and by using creative strategies, they could, on a good day, get their mouths on a fresh kill by scaring away the victorious predator. Language developed not long after, then tools, and from there, a basic nomadic society, wandering the fungal savannas to locate their next meal. After several thousand years, the Quroche managed to domesticate a species of small predator, which they then used to hunt for them, allowing them to, for the most part, settle into one place.
