Hollow Moon Planetology: Blue Moon -- Vegetation by Sharon Dornhoff
((Sorry if the biology-speak gets a
little thick in this latest post, folks: if you're not interested
in botany or you couldn't care less how photosynthesis takes place,
just skip on to the last two sections, and read up on which sorts
of vegetation are typical of the Hollow Moon. If, OTOH, you're a
professional botanist who's outraged that I've got something
totally wrong, please pardon my zoologist's misconceptions! :-
D))
Lunar Vegetation: Gardening in the dark
Of the four Immortals -- Ka, Ordana, Korotiku, and Seshay-Selene --
who originally made Matera's interior habitable to life, Ordana
definitely had the toughest job. Because the Hollow Moon receives
only a fraction of the sunlight available to plant life on Mystara,
and none at all in the red- to-yellow wavelengths, unmodified
plants couldn't be introduced to Matera and expected to survive.
Without plants for photosynthesis, there wouldn't be oxygen for
animals or other organisms, so merely stocking the HM setting with
dark-growing fungi wasn't an option: fungi don't produce oxygen,
they USE it! Nor would magically-altering endangered plants to grow
without light be an acceptable solution, as this kind of drastic
intervention wouldn't be much different from having their original
species go extinct, after all. Something had to be done that would
adapt plants to extremely low light-levels, without changing them
beyond recognition.
One might ask why Ordana didn't just send every endangered plant
she came across to the Hollow World, and create all-new species for
the inner moon? After all, there's plenty of sunlight there!
Unfortunately, it's not that simple: Many plants, contrary to
popular impression, NEED periods of darkness, at least for part of
their life-cycle. Many flowering plants bloom only at night, and
are pollinated by moths or bats; others, particularly in the
tropics, rely on bats or nocturnal rodents to distribute their
fruits and sow new plants. Desert plants perform gas-exchange,
opening their stomata to take in CO2, only at night when they won't
desiccate. Far from a paradise for vegetation, the Hollow World's
eternal noon is actually a threat to the survival of many species
which Ordana -- once a treant, hence a plant and gardener of
plants, herself! -- accepts responsibility for. (Besides which,
Ordana could sympathise with how "uncomfortable" a plant must feel,
to be yanked from Mystara's familiar day/night cycle and left with
no pattern by which to time its photosynthetic activity; she'd
probably have felt pretty leaf-witheringly miserable, herself,
under such circumstances! ;-D)
Fortunately, Ordana's a very sharp lady... er, tree. She's found
ways around the twin problems of endless light in the HW, and not
nearly enough of it in the HM. In fact, we've already seen one of
her solutions: the Hollow World's Floating Continents! Sure, humans
may use them to tell time; but IMHO they're much more than just a
calendar, put there for the convenience of sentient beings --
they're how Ordana provides brief interludes of shade, be it on a
daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis, for those HW plants which
NEED darkness to complete their life cycle! For arctic plants which
only set seed if there's a shift from winter dark to summer light,
or "short-day" plants like cockleburrs that won't flower unless the
photoperiod approximates that of their native habitat's growing
season, the shadows of flying continents provide a substitute for
nightfall, allowing these plants to survive and reproduce in their
original, unmodified state, even in the absence of the day/night
cycle their physiology demands.
That's fine for plants that could thrive in the light, so long as
there was at least an occasional interval of darkness ... but what
about shade- plants? What about plants that depended on nocturnal
pollinators, or underbrush-species that wouldn't fit into the
existing ecosystems of the Hollow World's jungles? For those
endangered plants which couldn't adjust to life under Ixion's
eternal sun, more-drastic intervention was called for. (Plus, the
Hollow Moon needed some plant life, too!) Ordana had to give plants
the ability to live on very little light; and, in order to preserve
those plants' original characteristics, she needed to do so in a
way that left their physical and genetic structure as unchanged as
possible. What she eventually did, was to change HM plants'
chloroplasts and photosynthetic pigments, without changing the
plants themselves.
Chloroplasts*, pigments, and light-wavelengths
Plant life -- on Earth, Mystara, or any other world -- uses
chemical pigments to collect photons of light. Different pigments
gather different wavelengths of sunlight; the bright-green
chlorophyll a, for example, captures red or blue wavelengths (and
reflects green ones back to our eyes). These pigments, and the
chemical reactions of photosynthesis they make possible, occur in
organelles -- cell "organs" -- called chloroplasts, which all green
plants and most varieties of alga share. Unlike most organelles,
chloroplasts have their own DNA, distinct from the DNA of the cells
they are found in; this is because chloroplasts were once
free-living organisms called cyanobacteria, before they evolved
into the symbiotic partners of plant cells. The light-trapping
pigments of photosynthesis are assembled inside the chloroplasts,
and most of the instructions for producing these chemicals are
encoded on the DNA of the chloroplast, not the DNA of the whole
plant. By modifying its chloroplasts' DNA -- and ONLY the genes of
chloroplasts -- Ordana could change which pigments and wavelengths
a plant used to photosynthesise, without altering the rest of the
plant in any way. The process was even reversible, as she could
later replace the modified chloroplasts with normal ones, should
she choose to re-introduce the species to Mystara at some later
date.
(* - For the non-biologists: Chloroplasts are tiny green sacs found
inside plant cells. The chemical pigments which trap light-energy
-- green chloryphylls and red-orange carotenoids -- are found
inside them. Using photons of light as energy, green leaf-cells
assemble CO2 molecules from the air into sugar, on which the plant
can nourish itself. This is the process called "photosynthesis"...
synthesising sugar, using light as a power-source. DNA is genetic
material: the molecular "language" in which instructions for an
organism's growth -- how it's shaped, what the different cells do,
which chemicals its body makes use of, etc -- are written. Those
"How- To-Grow" instructions are the organism's genes.)
The first thing Ordana did, and continues to do, to plants destined
for the Hollow Moon, is to change the ratio of pigments their
chloroplasts produce. As light in the HM is very dim, she tripled
the absolute amount of pigments in each chloroplast, turning even
the palest of leaves dark, dark green. As red wavelengths are
missing from Materan "sunlight", she reduced the amount of
chlorophyll a (which collects mostly red and purple light) in
favour of the other two plant-pigments, chlorophyll b (collects
oranges and blue-greens) and the carotenoids (collect green, blue,
indigo or violet light). The latter sorts of pigments are
reddish-orange in colour, and are what give autumn leaves their
coloration, once a plant loses its summer chlorophyll; in the
Hollow Moon's vegetation, carotenoids and chlorophylls combined
give growing leaves a deepest-brown to pitch-black colour, all year
round.
The second change which is made to a plant's chloroplasts, before
Ordana will transplant it into the Hollow Moon, is the addition of
two new pigments to their repertoire: phycobilins and fucoxanthin.
In nature, phycobilins are found only in red algae and the
cyanobacteria from which chloroplasts descended; fucoxanthin is an
unusual carotenoid that occurs in diatoms and brown algae, but not
in true members of the Plant Kingdom*. Neither of these is capable
of synthesising sugars on its own, but they increase the efficiency
of photosynthesis by the other pigments, capturing those
wavelengths which the others miss and passing such photons on to a
molecule of chlorophyll a. Between them, phycobilins and
fucoxanthins make leaves that fall in the Hollow Moon change from
dark brown or black, when fresh, to a rich maroon shade almost like
the colour of venous blood(!), when they're dried up and dead.
That's assuming they're examined under artificial light, so that
the reddish tone of phycobilins is visible; under the natural,
indigo light of the Firmament, dead leaves still look black.
(* - Algae are too primitive in their reproductive methods and
structure to be "true" plants.)
The rest of the process of adapting vegetation to darkness, Ordana
didn't have to induce: the plants did that, on their own. Sensing
the low light-levels, shrubby plants in the Hollow Moon grow much
longer and "floppier" than their ancestors on Mystara had, hugging
the ground and spreading out in all directions, like creepers.
Leaves grow broader and thinner than they would under full
sunlight, and they're much softer so coarse cellulose-fibres won't
obstruct the few traces of light which strike them. Stems, runners,
thorns and even pigmented flowers harbour photosynthetic activity;
not even the feeble light of luminous insects, dropping by at a
blossom for pollen, is squandered! Leaflets, leaves, and even whole
branches shift their orientation, to follow the "sun" in its slow
trek across the Firmament, every month. It's no use for rangers to
look for moss on the sides of a tree, to determine which direction
is north, in the Hollow Moon: mosses, leaves, boughs and all spread
their green surfaces either dawnward, upward, or duskward, because
those are the directions from which the best light comes, no matter
what the time of year.
Why did Ordana go to all this trouble, instead of just saying
"Alacazam!" and giving HM plants the ability to live without
light...? Well, first of all, the whole point of the Hollow
World/Moon project is to preserve species' and cultures' unique
virtues; transforming plants in such a fundamental way would run
counter to the purpose for which the Immortals had saved them, in
the first place. Second, as a Hierarch of Time, Ordana knew very
well that subtle adjustments are the best form of divine
intervention, in the long run; her own quest for Immortality
would've taught her not to drastically mess with a situation, if
there's a simpler way to resolve things. The third reason was that,
without Ixion's support as a Full Hierarch, the patron Immortals of
the Hollow Moon have to allocate their resources much more
sparingly, as they maintain the setting; besides, "throwing magic
at it" is how Energy solves problems, not the other Spheres!
Fourth, it was a challenge for her to devise a low-magic way of
adapting plants to darkness -- kind of like a puzzle, for her to
have fun working on. And fifth and last, Ordana's a treant,
herself, and just didn't like the notion of plants growing without
sunlight: like undead things "living" without food or air or water,
it simply gave her the creeps.
The practical outcome of all this, so far as D&D campaigns are
concerned, is two-fold. One: lunar plants look WEIRD! Alive, their
leaves are black; their bark is black; their needles and thorns and
sometimes even their flowers are black! Dead and fallen on the
ground, as leaf-litter, they LOOK black under the natural light of
the Firmament... but shine a Light-spell or torch on them, and that
litter turns a deep, bloody red; only the dry, cracking texture
underfoot makes it seem any different from wading through an
abattoir. It's creepy, it's morbid, it's unearthly -- at least, it
should sure feel that way to Mystarans! -- and it makes it even
tougher to spot anything moving in the darkness, for PCs who lack
infravision. And, two: with the addition of so many extra chemicals
to their chloroplasts, and with their relatively-soft texture and
thinness, lunar plants' leaves are actually a good deal more
nutritious, pound for pound, than their counterparts on Mystara.
Therefore, even though plant life isn't very abundant or verdant in
the Hollow Moon, there's still sufficient foliage in lunar
ecosystems to support healthy populations of browsing animals,
because the individual leaves are much richer and relatively few of
them grow too coarse to be digestible.
Lunar plant life
Some kinds of plants are much more typical of the Hollow Moon
setting than others, although virtually all of them are extinct, or
nearly so, on Mystara. (The major exceptions are those plants which
were brought to Matera because an endangered nocturnal animal
depended upon them, to survive -- e.g. eucalyptus trees, in the
Wallaran dreamlands -- or which are raised agriculturally by
Immortal-introduced races.) Below are listed a few categories of
plants which have been adapted to darkness and transplanted by
Ordana, with great success; also a few types that just didn't
handle the transition, so can't be found there.
Some of the successes include:
1) Night-pollinated and night-dispersed flowering plants. As
already mentioned, many plants had to be sent to the Hollow Moon,
and NOT the Hollow World, because even though they grew in
sunlight, the task of carrying their pollen or distributing their
seeds was carried out by night- active animals, usually bats or
moths. Bat-pollination is common in desert plants such as cacti or
agave, as well as in a number of tropical trees; moths pollinate
yuccas, evening primroses, sweet honeysuckle, and a variety of
other trees and shrubs. "Bat flowers" are typically greenish- white
to light purple to creamy in coloration, and grow on larger plants,
tree trunks, or the squat stems of cacti; they're either very
large, or clumped together in a broad inflorescence, so that they
make sturdy landing pads for visiting bats, and most have a strong
fruity, musky, or fermented aroma. "Moth flowers" smell sweeter and
are a lot smaller than bat flowers, and have trumpet-like shapes
and various pastel colours, usually either white or (by artificial
light) pink or yellow. Beetle- and fly- pollinated plants also
appear in the HM setting, with their shallow, stinky blossoms that
draw pollinators with a whiff of dung or carrion-scent. There
aren't nearly as many night-dispersed plants (i.e. plants whose
fruits are distributed by nocturnal animals) as night-pollinated
ones, in the Hollow Moon -- fruits do tend to get spread around by
something, even if the ideal disperser isn't on hand -- but several
ancient varieties of Mystaran fruit trees, such as the figs that
once grew in Old Nithia but couldn't adapt to the drying of the
region in 500 BC, have been introduced there. Bat- dispersed fruits
tend to be sour and fleshy, with a green or yellow-green rind, and
sometimes grow straight out from the side of a tree's trunk, in the
subtropical midlands.
2) Mosses and other primitive plants. While the Hollow World is
home to giant seed ferns and towering lycopods from the past, it's
in the Hollow Moon where the humbler strains of ancient mosses,
liverworts, hornworts, horsetails, and other damp-loving, primitive
plants can be found in abundance. As all these seedless plants
require a lot of moisture to reproduce, and are highly susceptible
to desiccation, Ordana didn't take the chance on subjecting them to
the continuous glare of the HW sun, and adapted them to darkness
instead. It turned out to be a good decision: in the absence of
grasses, which can't handle the conditions there, meadows and
slopes on the western half of the Nearside became covered with
dense carpets of moss, and enormous horsetails sprang up like
bamboo-stands in swampy, low-lying regions, taking the place of
wetland hardwoods (which also haven't done so well, in the HM). So
successful are these plants -- so often overlooked, on Mystara! --
that sphagnum and other peat mosses have turned much of Stygia's
lower ground into spongy, acidic peat bogs, by their accumulation
and decay.
3) Carnivorous plants. While IRL insect-trapping plants obtain
nitrogen, not energy, from their prey, it's a convention of the
D&D game that man-eating plants derive actual "food", from
their victims. Accepting that assumption, it's a given that many
plants in the Hollow Moon will seek other sources of nourishment,
than photosynthesis -- some (demi)human, some not -- and will prey
upon animal life at, or around, the period of fulldark, when light
is scarce or non-existent. Virtually any of the carnivorous
plant-monsters described in the OD&D or AD&D rules can be
encountered on Matera, apart from large hardwood species such as
the killer tree or quickwood, and their aggressiveness will vary
over the course of a month, in proportion to the amount of light
available. (If there's no light, they're ravenous and will attack
anything that moves; if there's lots, they're photosynthesising
like mad and can't be bothered to hunt!) In addition to the
familiar, man-eating varieties, there are also plenty of smaller
relatives of the "monster" plants, which might otherwise go
unnoticed by PCs; visitors to the moon might come across a
foot-tall Cestian gobbler that eats mouse-sized prey, or a
pint-sized archer bush that can shoot bats right out of the air!
Note that some of these plant-monsters -- the amber lotus flower,
for one -- might be tricky for Mystaran PCs to recognise at first,
due to the colour-shifting effects of natural lunar light.
A couple of plant types that just didn't work out too well, in the
moon, are:
1) Grasses, including grains. While grasses are some of the most
successful plants in the world, they didn't do so hot, when
introduced to the western half of Matera's Nearside; the long wait
between light-periods did them in there. Grasses can grow okay in
the eastern lands, where dawn's direct light strikes quite early
after a fulldark, and a little light from Oceanus Procellarum
glints off the Firmament to fall on the Foecunditatis-
Tranquillitatis region. But the west is just too dark, thanks to
the Mare Orientale peninsula and other barriers to strong (for the
HM!) illumination; there, mosses take the place of grasses,
horsetails supplant reeds along lakeshores, and farmers must make
do with vegetables and berries in their fields, instead of
grains.
2) Large hardwood trees. Regrettably, though Ordana tried her best,
she couldn't get any of the larger species of deciduous tree --
oak*, maple, hickory, walnut, elm, etc. -- to grow well in the
Hollow Moon. Conifers, cycads, and non-flowering hardwoods such as
ginkgoes grow fine there, as do smaller hardwoods like fruit-trees
or aspen, but huge, spreading beeches and mighty banyans are
absent. HM druids use holly leaves or pine cones for religious
purposes, as no oaks means no "proper" mistletoe; slash pine and
larch are the "hard" softwoods of choice, for construction. Tree
squirrels are diurnal, as are most nut-cracking birds, so the
dearth of nut- bearing trees hasn't adversely affected the
all-nocturnal lunar ecosystems.
(* - Ordana's rather miffed about that, having been an oak in her
mortal life ... although Seshay-Selene's got no fellow-humpbacks in
the HM, and she's not complaining! :-D)
Non-Plant "Vegetation": Hollow Moon fungi, seaweeds, and
phytoplankton
Although they're not plants, a few other non-animal organisms ought
to be mentioned, as they also play a key part in the Hollow Moon's
ecology. HM algae and lichens have all undergone Ordana's
"chloroplast treatment", to adapt them to a life of dim, blue
light; fungi, being heterotrophs*, don't have any chloroplasts and
couldn't care less about how dark it is, so needed no special
preparation to survive there.
(* - Heterotroph = something that eats to live, e.g. a fungus or
animal.)
The simplest and most primitive "vegetation", of course, is
prokaryotic: cyanobacteria (the old "blue-green algae") have been
around for over 2200 million years. These, and their
non-photosynthetic bacterial relatives, are of course present in
the Hollow Moon, respectively as aquatic life and as agents of
decomposition. The only reason I'm mentioning them here, is because
one type of bacterium -- the chemoautotrophic sulphur- bacteria
found in tubeworms near deep-sea hydrothermal vents, which make
sugar using energy from sulphide-spewing "black smokers" -- also
exists in the hot geothermal caverns of Matera's kopru, and is the
primary producer for an entire subterranean ecology of which the
kopru are the top predators.
Phytoplankton on Matera consists of the same bewildering variety of
algae as that of Earth or Mystara; any attempt to recount what's
there is probably more than my readers care to hear ;-). One thing
that's odd about Materan seas, however, has a powerful effect on
lunar phytoplankton: because of their crystalline bottoms, most
lunar seas (except Mare Humorum) receive as much or more light from
underneath, during fulldark, as they get from above! In response to
this, many types of phytoplankton which are capable of movement --
dinoflagellates, euglenoids, motile green algae and free-floating
diatoms, for those in the know -- linger near the surface during
the lunar "daylight hours", then let themselves fall to the bottom
for fulldark, only to rise again in time for the lunar "dawn". A
permanent cloud of algae lies at the bottom of every Materan sea,
several inches above the crystalline sea-floor and just out of
reach of the slow currents which constantly sweep across it. Were
the crystal not so chilly, algae would certainly cover it and block
the light completely; as it is, they help the currents to keep the
seabed clear of debris, by incorporating the worst of the
bottom-muck into their tests. Like lunar plants, Matera's
phytoplankton is very dark in colour, appearing black under lunar
light and a dull, orangish brown in torchlight.
Larger Materan seaweeds, such as kelp, anchor themselves on
submarine "islands" of encrusted sand, especially around the
fringes of islands where they can benefit from "underlighting", yet
still not set their holdfasts directly on the frigid crystal. Lunar
seaweeds inflate their flotation-bladders to hover near the surface
during "daylight", then deflate them and sink to the illuminated
depths at fulldark. It's therefore possible to sail a ship across
clear water, in certain locations on the lunar seas, when the
Firmament is dark ... only to return to the same coordinates, and
find an impassable sargasso of newly-risen seaweeds there, when
it's light! Seaweeds on the moon are black under any light, living
or dead.
There's nothing special about Materan fungi: there doesn't have to
be. Fungi don't photosynthesise, so growing in the dark is normal
for them; indeed, the relative sparseness of true plants gives them
more places to grow, in the Hollow Moon. Lunar fungi take an
astonishing range of forms. In addition to the usual shelf fungi,
puffballs, moulds, stinkhorns, morels, and -- of course! --
mushrooms, there are fungi shaped like cups, crowns, deer-antlers,
nets, icky lumps of jelly, birds' nests (with eggs), flowers,
miniature trees, trumpets, elephants' ears, horses' tails, elves'
ears, and even human faces. Many of them also glow in the dark, for
no reason anyone's been able to figure out, and they come in a
complete range of colours from red to ultraviolet, and in any shade
from pure white to jet black. The various carnivorous and/or
poisonous fungi from Gaz10 and Gaz13 are present on the moon, along
with other dangerous or magical fungi from the OD&D and
AD&D games if you want them; edible species are well-known to
Materans, and are actively cultivated by the vesper elves and
Cynidiceans, as well as other cultures who've learned farming
techniques from them. (Please, PLEASE remember that fungi require
food -- i.e. rotting organic matter -- and adequate moisture in
order to grow, when you're placing fungal forests in the Hollow
Moon. I've seen too many modules where huge fungus-gardens provided
sustenance for whole cities of drow or goblinoids, without a drop
of water and without anything but each other, to feed upon!
:-P)
Lichens are a symbiotic hybrid of fungus and alga, or fungus and
cyanobacteria, which grow in harsh environments where there's too
little food for a pure heterotroph, yet too little moisture for
photosynthetic plants or algae. Bare rock-faces, desolate tundra,
or open desert are good enough, for lichen; in the Hollow Moon,
they're usually the first thing to sprout when a fresh patch of
magma cools down, after a volcanic eruption. So-called "reindeer
moss" is actually a lichen, and it's an important source of animal
fodder on the Oceanus Procellarum, being one of the few forms of
vegetation that will grow on the sand-crust "islands" where cryions
keep their herds. Lichens IRL do best if there are long, dry spells
alternating with brief, wet ones -- mean temperature doesn't matter
much, but the predictability of the wet interludes is important --
and the Storm Cycle ensures that Materan lichens get exactly the
conditions they need, so lunar lichens grow much, much faster than
those on Mystara or Earth.
Lichens aren't the only symbiotic organisms that photosynthesise,
on Matera. Many strains of phytoplankton have actually "partnered
up" with varieties of more-mobile zooplankton, to make it easier to
rise and sink with the changing direction of light. The most
spectacular examples of adaptation to the up/down lighting
conditions in the lunar seas are the siliceous "glass" corals ...
but they're animals, and will have to wait for the next post! ;-D