Organ Design

untrustedlife wrote:

Sounds like a good idea, we were going to have that anyway though.

For this

Nikola, that was not meant for you i was talking to the person who mentioned bio-luminescence. /:

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

I think we put some sort of function determining system (such as for horns and tusks, used for defense or for rooting up roots) into the skeletal editing system.

Have we added in an organ to help digest or neutralize otherwise toxic plants yet? It would be something like an appendix, or special compounds in the saliva or something.

Someone ought to get around to compiling a list of the accepted organs. Would you be able to Calli? I don't mean to put you on the spot, so don't feel pressured to say yes or bad for saying no.

Guest wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Gryphogrox wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Please take this to Organ Design.

Sorry, about that, wasn't sure where to put it.

Continuing: This organ is definitely a specialized one, and would have to be a sac attached to the digestive system and an orifice of your choosing.

The orifice would also need a catalyst and some muscles would be needed to hold in the hydrogen.

A catalyst? Simple enough. An electric organ, the same found in creatures such as the electric eel, two teeth with a very small but pure quantity of metal(Copper can come from a number of species and should still be decent when in very poor condition) not touching but close, the organ connected to one tooth, and the other tooth able to send the electricity somewhere else safely, perhaps back to the organ. Probably exactly how the two-headed dragon's lighting head in How to Train Your Dragon worked. Or was that one more like flint?

NickTheNick wrote:

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

I think we put some sort of function determining system (such as for horns and tusks, used for defense or for rooting up roots) into the skeletal editing system.

Have we added in an organ to help digest or neutralize otherwise toxic plants yet? It would be something like an appendix, or special compounds in the saliva or something.

Someone ought to get around to compiling a list of the accepted organs. Would you be able to Calli? I don't mean to put you on the spot, so don't feel pressured to say yes or bad for saying no.

If I can do this sometime next week (after I've defended my Thesis Proposal) I'll make a start on a wiki page for it or something. That way other editors can add to it, but it won't be as much of a mess as this thread.

@ Xazo: Interesting. It's sort of like a taser-mouthed electric eel. Somebody go look up the chemical composition of the charge-generation organs in an electric eel, and how they're immune to their own shocks. That's probably the best model to start this sort of thing off of.

Electric eels are an interesting case. On the one hand, they seem to be immune to shock since they use it against others, but at the same time eels fighting over a mate can kill each other through those same shocks. Most of the organisms they prey off of are smaller than them, so the effect of the shock on them is less than on the target.

However, eels are also known to conduct electricity through their body in a manner that avoids the vitals. Electricians work with one hand in their pocket so that if they get shocked the charge goes through their hand, into their leg, and into the ground. However, working with both hands would run the electricity right through your heart.

So positioning is important, and it seems they are not as immune to their own shocks as we think, but altogether this still doesn't explain why they are even so accustomed to electrical conduction in the first place.

EDIT: After some more reading, it appears that they are protected from shocks by insulating layers of fat. They just have a higher threshold that needs to be met before they are shocked or electrocuted themselves.

So grounding and blubber are both options for the electroteeth. Good to know.

Mysterious_Calligrapher wrote:

So grounding and blubber are both options for the electroteeth. Good to know.

Blubber should be simpler, since electricity simulations don't have to take too much into account that way, and grounding is not always an option if you're a dragon.

Dragons won't be possible, and that's a separate topic anyway. It does not pertain to electricity.

NickTheNick wrote:

Dragons won't be possible, and that's a separate topic anyway. It does not pertain to electricity.

I think dragons are very much part of this topic, as what defines a species is more about the organs for dragons than most other creatures, since you don't just deform a crocodile to make it able to lift a body weight that would be problematic for even wings, and shoot out jets of fire, but a deformation could get you pretty close to a T-Rex.

A big creature flying? Maybe. With the right athmosfere (a very heavy one) in a low-gravity planet could be possible. However, spiting fire i dont think. The closest thing could be spiting acid or venom, which would take a long time to be ready again.

However, such a big creature, that is able to fly wouldnt need an extremely complex system to spit things. It would only need sharp claws or teeths to kill any prey they want. Moreorless something similar to the giant eagles on LOTR. They can alredy kill any other creature, and there is no way any creature can kill them, so why bother evolving anything even fancier?

Xazo-Tak wrote:

I think dragons are very much part of this topic, as what defines a species is more about the organs for dragons than most other creatures, since you don't just deform a crocodile to make it able to lift a body weight that would be problematic for even wings, and shoot out jets of fire, but a deformation could get you pretty close to a T-Rex.

I'm getting confused at to where you're going here, so I will just try and reiterate how this discussion has developed:

I said that one option an organism can use to avoid shocking themselves is grounding.

You said that dragons don't have that option.

I said that dragons don't conduct electricity anyways, so that's not important. They breathe fire, different topic.

Now you are saying it is the same topic because species are defined by their organs? Then your example is that a crocodile can't mutate to become like a dragon, but can mutate to become like a T-Rex? If anything, that is just going further off topic.

What do species being defined by their organs and crocodiles being limited in their mutational abilities have to do with dragons not conducting electricity and hence not being relevant to grounding?

Looks like there's a disagreement in what your post meant.
Best solution is to ignore everything up to and including "Dragons won't be possible, and that's a separate topic anyway. It does not pertain to electricity." since what that was supposed to mean is somewhat debatable.

Okay. To clear up what I meant, I was trying to say that right off the bat, Dragons won't be possible in game, so whether Dragons would have that option or not wouldn't matter.

Next I was trying to say, even if they were possible, they are fire-breathing, not electric-charging, so they aren't even related to grounding, which was the topic at hand.

Guys, I promise you relative gravity, density, and the atmospheric composition will be taken into account when determining the size and weight of what can fly. It's pretty much impossible to have anything actually "breathe" fire, if only because fire is belgiumming too hot for airways, and the zapper tooth probably works best if you're something like a komodo dragon, lying in wait for something and then giving it a quick bite. In this case, it would probably be stunned and much less energy to finish off, much like the komodo dragon waits for its prey to succumb to infection.

So can we table the dragon discussion (again)?

NickTheNick wrote:

Okay. To clear up what I meant, I was trying to say that right off the bat, Dragons won't be possible in game, so whether Dragons would have that option or not wouldn't matter.

Next I was trying to say, even if they were possible, they are fire-breathing, not electric-charging, so they aren't even related to grounding, which was the topic at hand.

The electricity is for lighting hydrogen. You can't just have something shoot fire straight out the throat.

Still, the heat from the fire will damage more the creature spiting the fire than whatever is on the other side.

Plus, the way of igniting things with electricity is making the electricity go through a small space of air, forcing it to jump through it as a spark (which is called an electric arc). The hydrogen requires 500ºC to ignite, while the electric arc produces from 2000 to 3500 ºC. The problem of this is that both sides have to be attached to the creature, and be made out of living material. There is no material that can suport that heat without just disintegrating. Another problem is geting the ~10 Amps required for the arc to form. So not even the ignition of the hydrogen would be possible.

Geting the hydrogen, on the other hand, is relatively possible, althrough it would take a really long time to gather all. However, where do you keep it? Unless your creature had a presurized compartiment where it could store hydrogen at high pressures, any usefull amounts of hydrogen would take a really large space.

Finally, hydrogen burns belgiumly fast. When your creature spited the hydrogen, chances are it would explode instantly, blowing the creature into pieces, without damaging nearby creatures too much.

Daniferrito wrote:

When your creature spited the hydrogen, chances are it would explode instantly, blowing the creature into pieces, without damaging nearby creatures too much.

And unfortunately, natural selection has little sympathy for kamikaze organisms.

NickTheNick wrote:

Daniferrito wrote:

When your creature spited the hydrogen, chances are it would explode instantly, blowing the creature into pieces, without damaging nearby creatures too much.

And unfortunately, natural selection has little sympathy for kamikaze organisms.

Thell that to bees (or wasps, i cannot remember which ones), that die whenever they use their sting to inject poison. And there are ants that have a caste that its only purpouse is geting close to enemy ants and explode its acid sacs, killing itself and all nearby ants in the process.

Kamikaze animals exist in nature, but usually only in huge colonies, where the death of a few can save the whole colony. That is, when benefits outweight the costs.

Pretty sure the creature wouldn't explode, but without some sort of unknown sort of skin, it would get a nasty, likely fatal burn in its throat.
Assuming the hydrogen comes from bacteria in an organ and an earth atmosphere, if the creature closed off the passage to its lungs, contracted a number of muscles in order to squeeze out all the air from the organ to the mouth, and then ejected the gas from the organ at a very fast speed through a very small opening in the mouth passing between the electric teeth, then the creature could avoid being burned. Very tough lips would still be a good idea though.

shouldn't parts be a little bit more.. err .. procedural, I mean, electroteeth are all fine an good, but what if one wanted electrospikes (etc) I don't think we should be hard-coding all of this, and if we are , we need more variety. ALOT more variety

Daniferrito wrote:

Kamikaze animals exist in nature, but usually only in huge colonies, where the death of a few can save the whole colony. That is, when benefits outweight the costs.

And that's the little sympathy.

NickTheNick wrote:

Daniferrito wrote:

Kamikaze animals exist in nature, but usually only in huge colonies, where the death of a few can save the whole colony. That is, when benefits outweight the costs.

And that's the little sympathy.

Actually, that's quite a lot of sympathy in terms of evolution.
Dem beez kami like crazay.

Not really. It is quite challenging, at least in terms of earth-based evolution, because as Dani said it pushes the species towards become large, small-sized, and expendable, traits quite different than those species on Earth with the highest intelligence.

NickTheNick wrote:

Not really. It is quite challenging, at least in terms of earth-based evolution, because as Dani said it pushes the species towards become large, small-sized, and expendable, traits quite different than those species on Earth with the highest intelligence.

That's true, but that does not rule out the possibility of the queen of an extremely large colony being of extraordinary strategic intelligence.
If evolution had played out slightly differently and had queens instructing bees, it would rapidly evolve bees to the point where colonies with queens would not be farmable, because if a more detailed system of communication evolved, the queen would know that somebody was regularly taking honey, and soon put a violent stop to that or leave.