Chancy niche
Pointed by UncommonDescent, a truly weird creature....



Triops is a mini-trilobite. In a larger size it would be scary as hell, but at this size it's sort of cute.

It's weird in two ways.

1. The eyes themselves are not weird. They're typical arthropod eyes, two big compound eyes with one or more light-sensors between them. (Note that the AI generating the synthetic speech in the video doesn't know the word 'ocellus'.) The mounting is weird. Normally arthropod eyes would be on the sides of a very small head, surveying all directions at once. On Triops the eyes are inside the huge shield, pointing only forward. This defeats the advantage of compound eyes without adding any obvious counter-advantage.

2. It emerges from eggs only in an uncertain and brief environment. Dry lakes may go for many years without enough rain to be worth hatching, and only last a few days or at most weeks when they do get wet. Many insects have a long larval or non-reproductive stage and a brief flying or swarming stage. For example, the aphids who swarmed here last week. But the Triops pattern is more like plants than animals. Purely dormant for years if necessary, emerging into life only when conditions are just right.

The uncertain environment has one obvious advantage: Predators can't depend on Triops as a food source, and can't develop strategies for hunting it.

I guess Triops is just an extreme example of the Booker T rule. Find your niche and stick to it. Store your skills and amortize. In this case we have 350 million years of amortizing.

Sidenote on AI: A human announcer hired to do a voiceover would rehearse the script first, catch the unfamiliar word, and look it up. In the age of radio, announcers were expected to be thoroughly versed in the phonetics of most languages, and expected to have serious dictionaries on hand for unfamiliar words. The AI didn't bother to look up the unfamiliar word. It wasn't in the standard database, so the AI guessed badly, not following the normal phonetic semi-rules of English.

Labels: AI point-missing, Carver, storage

  ¶ 11:31 PM