Foraging

Today Ahach took us to his foraging and hunting ground. He says he’s hunted here his whole life. This is a thermosynthetic biosphere, everything is fed off the heat from a plasma main. This main may be set to rupture at some point since the temperatures are much hotter than normal. The mains can be thought of like volcanos, they’ve been here since the planet being built, by some accounts five thousand years. One can be ready to blow at any time but that could be in any time frame from a minute to a century. The chance of it going while we’re visiting is slim but not zero.

The biodiversity here is staggering, unlike any flora or fauna we’ve seen. The majority of it is what Ahach calls “Fera”. They’re something like tall sea sponges on dry ground. They start sparsely and about ankle high where it’s cooler, and as the temperature rises, they get taller and taller until they were well over our heads.

Ahach says that when he was younger the sponge used to grow all the way up the plasma main but as the containment has broken down, the temperatures have gotten too high for the sponge and they died off.

There are zah and nicoe here by the hundreds. There’s some other flying creatures that I’ve never seen before. We heard some ekchok a few hundred meters away but Ahach said they wouldn’t bother us since there was so much food available to them. There were seeter and gunthar tracks but not as many as I would have expected.

Something big was moving around in the sponge but it stayed out of sight. I would have loved to have gone and seen what it was but Ahach said to leave it alone.