Mobula Ray: Genetic weirdness

I'll admit, my interest in this world died a little bit when Isolda died. Because of this I decided to stop blogging the world when most or all of the first generation died off. Considering these first gen Stingers were close to the three hour mark, that wasn't far off. Anai Stinger usually live 10ish hours, but I had forgotten to length this version's lifespan. So they had the regular lifespan of about five and a half hours. The Ettins were over three hours old at this point, and the rest of the first gens weren't to far behind. The only surviving gen 1 Grendel, a male named Antonio, was over 3 hours old and already in the old stage.

It wasn't any of the first gens who died first though. Instead it was a second gen Grendel who died of starvation. I was quite disappointed to see that, since the room was filled with food, and I was fond of dumping food near them. There really wasn't a good excuse for him starving. Still, his death meant that there were only three males left, and one of those was the first gen. In another part of the world, Christian, the ex-loner Stinger male, finally had a child named Fidelio. Sadly, that child ended up being a fastager and died quickly.

Slightly weirded out by the Stinger dying, I copied down the fastagers moniker and compared it's genome to the base genome. Before I got very far in it though, I noticed that the Jungle Terrarium couple, Ezura and Sassacus, had a baby. As if that wasn't enough, the newest Stinger baby quickly suffocated to death... on land. So I added her moniker to the list to compare. I also noticed the first gen Grendel had histamine, so I moved him to the medbay to cure him. While doing so, I found Christian trying to eat an elevator. So I moved the both of them to the Jungle and paused the game. I was tired of the interruptions and was dying to know what happened to the babies.

Finding out what happened to the fastager was easy. The initial concentration of life was set to variant 1, which meant that this Stinger was dead when it was born. I debated if I should to fix this in the base genomes or not, and went with yes. This sort of mutation is unrealistic and mildly disturbing. While the first baby was easy to figure out, the second one was much harder to pin down. It didn't have any obvious mutations like the last one. I did eventually find out what happened, and it's even more interesting. File 1 is the baby who died, and file two is the original genome:

 150 Different in file 1 176   0 Emb B MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 6, Current Reaction, No Tissue, Unknown Locus: 2, chem=Antigen 5, thresh=0, nom=0, gain=68, features=Analogue  (0)
 150 Different in file 2 176   0 Emb B MutDupCut        128   0 Organ# = 6, Organ, Organ, Injury, chem=Antigen 5, thresh=0, nom=0, gain=68, features=Analogue  (0)

This mutation, if it was connected to a less vital reaction, wouldn't be fatal. It's supposed to injure an organ when the Norn is infected with Antigen 5, but it's mutated to shut off the reaction entirely. If I remember correctly, this sort of receptor setup speeds up or slows down a reaction, depending on how much of that chemical is in the Norn's body or if the chemical passes a threshold. It's been a while since I've messed with receptor genes, so correct me if I'm wrong in the comments. The only thing I know for sure is that the baby dies even with antigen 5 in its system. The only way I got the poor thing to live was by silencing the mutated receptor. Once I did that, her clone was fine.

When I unpaused the world, Ezura and Sassacus had another baby, a healthy female this time. After checking on the rest of the world, I noticed some of the second gen Grendels were getting old. Also that the Jungle was getting quite crowded, with 9 Grendels and 4 Norns. The Norn Terrarium was also a bit full. So I lowered the population limit from 40 to a more manageable 32. Seeing as the world already had 32 creatures in it, any new eggs wouldn't hatch.

And then, like Creatures worlds usually do after such an eventful time, they go silent. Eventually, I got bored and used the airlock glitch on a scent emitter. I think it confused a norn, because Ditte left the Terrarium to come check it out. It shocked her so much, she went grey! Or at least that's what I like to think. Really it was just her unusually short lifespan kicking in.