Lily Star

Artwork

Weight:
15lbs

The **Lily Star** (*Viridaster lilium*) is an original species created and designed by TheAgent41. The Lily Star inhabits the *The Hole* universe, an original universe created by TheAgent41.

## Appearance and Anatomy

The lily star is a small free-drifting asteriform distantly related to species such as the giant starfloat. Over the course of its evolution, the lily star, along with other asteriforms, has gradually evolved to tilt forward on its "face", its mouth permanently facing down to the ocean floor and the siphon once used for propulsion closing up. The lily star is among the smaller species of asteriform. Its body appears from the outside to have radial symmetry, but its internal anatomy reveals it to be primarily bilaterally symmetrical. From the tip of one flipper to the tip of an opposing flipper, the lily star measures approximately one and a half feet in diameter and weighs only 15 pounds or so.

The lily star's skin is smooth and rubbery. True to its generic name, the lily star's skin is light green in color with dark green spots and dark green stripes running from the central body to the tip of each flipper. The underside of its body (i.e. the front facial area on a pisciform) is yellowish-green. Like nearly all other pinnapodes, the lily star's circular mouth is permanently held agape. Unlike the giant starfloat, the lily star does not possess long feathery tentacles. Instead, its feathery appendages line the inner circumference of its mouth. These feathery pads catch both tiny bits of food and oxygen, doubly acting as gills.

Whereas pisciforms hunt using infrared-sensing heat pits, asteriforms have developed electroreceptive organs on their ventral side, with the densest arrangements of them being around the mouth. Using these organs, the lily star can detect other carnevites swimming underneath them or near them and can reach out with their "tongues" accordingly. As the lily star does not have these "tongues", it instead will rhythmically pump water in and out of its mouth to consume passing detritus. The lily star is more derived than the giant starfloat, as the location where its ancestor's siphon was is completely closed up, lacking even the bowl-like depression.

## Ecology

### Behavior and Intelligence

Like its larger relative, the giant starfloat, the lily star is a passive free-floating organism that has unfortunately left its mental faculties underdeveloped, even compared to its distant pisciform relatives.

However, one behavior unique to the lily star's taxonomic family is its grouping habits. Lily stars are almost always seen in groups of three to five. Each lily star in a school is related to every other member; in fact, they are all cousins. When lily stars are born, they are born as unconnected individuals. Soon after birth, however, they will extent pisciform-like spermipositors and connect them. However, this is permanent, linking the siblings together for life where each will share sperm and nutrients with the others.

### Diet

Lily stars are opportunistic filter feeders. Using their electroreceptive organs, lily stars are capable of detecting the electrical currents given off by moving carnevites. By doing this, they are capable of producing a crude-but-effective visual map of their surroundings in their brains. If a lily star detects that moving carnevites are underneath them, it will begin rhythmically inhaling and exhaling in an attempt to vacuum up any organisms it can. Because lily stars rarely move, they don't set off each other's electroreceptive organs.

### Reproduction

Lily stars, as stated above, spend their lives adrift at sea with no company aside from their siblings. Constantly sharing sperms with each other when needed, lily star populations are maintained exclusively through inbreeding. While this would normally spell doom for a species due to the process of inbreeding depression, lily stars and all other members of the family Conexumbilicidae have adapted polyploidy, meaning they have more than two paired sets of each chromosome. This greatly reduces the chances of homozygosity, causing harmful and deleterious mutations to be expressed far less frequently.

Each lily star will birth a single offspring at most, and each will synchronize its reproductive habits so as to ensure that each gives birth simultaneously. Like all asteriforms, newborn lily stars have a functioning siphon like that of a pisciform, allowing them to swim. However, whereas giant starfloats take several Earth years to transform into a more asteriform-like shape, lily stars do so almost immediately, fusing their spermipositors together and closing their siphons within hours of being born.

## Trivia

* The scientific name *Viridaster lilium* loosely translates from Latin as "green star lily".

## Gallery

Artwork