Even on Devorandum Aqua, there are exceptions to the rule.
The rule on Devorandum Aqua is that its warm tropical weather and gorgeous green islands are no substitute for the fact that you cannot afford to put even your toe into its pretty golden waters.
The golden color is from plankton-like creatures that do nothing all day and all night but eating and being eaten by each other.
All the way up the food chain, there are bigger eaters being eaten – the first and last submariners encountered an immense beast, comparable to a blue whale on Earth, which seemed to have a glowing mouth and glowing eyes … only to find out that the eyes were mouths, and the beast was consuming itself and looking to consume the submarine to stay ahead of its own self-consumption.
Of course, humans are adaptable creatures. We'll find a use for anything... for a good while, space pirates fell in love with Devorandum Aqua because it presented so many ways to attack ships, take the loot, and dispose of all the evidence … but they attacked the wrong one, and somebody sent an android to even the score. The android disposed of the pirates, and now stays as a sentinel on the planet as Devorandum Aqua's only resident.
So, now that pirates are out of the way, scientific exploration has started again.
My team wanted to know if there was an exception to the rule on Devorandum Aqua – are there creatures who are posing gaps in the chain of eating and being eaten?
The answer came by studying the seas of Devorandum Aqua at night by traveling over it by airship – there is a kind of creature, something like a very large sea bird, that travels in formation at night and creates a polygon of fire around itself – apparently some kind of chemical fire that burns in water. Large devourers that are like our whales cannot get through the fire, try as they might. Even the golden devouring plankton fans out in circles outside the fire, deterred from attacking.
Larger magnification shows that each bird has around itself its own ring of chemical fire to deal with the small pups of the large whale-like devourers who are trapped within the ring.
We watched this formation until dawn, at which time the birds made it unscathed to their choice of island.
This is a highly exciting discovery, and will certainly open the door to new explorations of Devorandum Aqua's surface at night.
There is that on Devorandum Aqua that will not be wantonly devoured – at least one species of life has come up with a way to resist the cycle. Who knows what other secrets the planet still holds?
This is one of a total of TWENTY renderings out of the same starting place on Apophysis... the rest will be coming along ...
