(NEW MAP) Regional Climates and Ecosystems: SUGGESTED Overview - Printable Version

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(NEW MAP) Regional Climates and Ecosystems: SUGGESTED Overview - Bears Armed - 11-27-2019

The related thread for the OLD map is @ https://theidu.us/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2067 .

BASIC PRESUMPTIONS

Presumption #1: The Planet
Although our pattern of lands and waters differs from that of RL Earth, this still is an ‘Earth’ in all fundamental respects: Astronomical position, positions & sizes of the solar system’s other members, lengths of the day and the year, frequency of eclipses, age, basic chemical composition, types (and approximate ratios) of rocks & minerals present, basic atmospheric composition, basic biochemistry, and so on.

Presumption #1.B: Departures and Arrivals
When old nations CTE, and new nations arrive among us, this often involves history being retrospectively altered so that IC the current situation has “always” been the case. What I think has probably happened (sort-of-IC) in these cases is that the areas concerned have been “swapped” for ones from Parallel Earths with different histories. This involves a phenomenon, sometimes called ‘Fractal Reality’, that has already been evoked to explain some such changes not only elsewhere in NS (along with explaining the fact that many NS nations can claim to occupy the same RL nations’ locations...) but even by some of the earlier players in this very region. The accompanying changes to IC memories and histories would then be either an [inexplicable?] side-effect of the relocation or direct action through whoever or whatever had deliberately (whether using “sufficiently advanced science”, outright supernatural powers, or something else…)made the swap.
This phenomenon would also explain, obviously, the “movement” of various nations from our older map into the current one…

Presumption #2: Coordinates
We need to determine climates for the nations on our regional map. This is necessary not only for sorting-out “reasonable” ecosystems but also for determining their likely weather for use in role-plays, their agricultural possibilities, and even their basic habitability.
We need to know latitudes and scale to determine the nations’ ‘proper’ climates, and related details such the probable directions of ocean currents and the relative lengths of daylight & night locally through the year.
Modifying the suggestions that I made about the old map (and that were partly based on details already agreed by various other nations’ players) to fit the new one, and going with the Equator being along the line that our Cartographers have already designated, what I now suggest is:
(1) That we take the northern edge of the map currently shown as being a bit further north than the Arctic Circle, but not actually as the North Pole: 65[sup]o[/sup] or 70[sup]o[/sup] North, perhaps. (Would the Cartographers be willing to consider extensions if & when players of nations close to that line specifically request them?) Also, of course, that we treat the map as being symmetrical so that the north-south scale is the same on both sides of the equator.
(2) That we use degrees themselves for the map’s scale, rather than miles (either standard or nautical) or kilometres or leagues or whatever, which means that we don’t have to worry about using any ‘projection’ system — with the inherent inaccuracies over large distances which that would automatically entail — to depict the planet’s curved surface on a flat map.
People can find the lengths for degrees of latitude and longitude at any particular latitude, and thus the [OOC/“external”] dimensions for their nations sizes using either of two online calculators that I’ve already found ( http://www.csgnetwork.com/degreelenllavcalc.html and https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gccalc.shtml ) or alternative ones that they find for themselves or that other players have found and listed in this thread.

Presumption #3: Climatology
The fact that the waters around the North Pole on our world are not as enclosed as their counterparts on Earth-RL, combined with the plausible lack of either a land-mass or an enclosed (or, as in RL’s Arctic, almost-enclosed) sea centred over the South Pole, means that although there would still be zones of permanent snow on the highest mountain ranges — especially at higher latitudes — our world would probably lack any major icecaps. This would make the world moister and warmer, on average, than is Earth-RL. The wide expanses of open sea surrounding our continents, although now slightly more constrained than on the old map, would still allow currents to circulate quite freely and redistribute that higher warmth more evenly so that the high latitudes here would be warmer than those of Earth-RL while the tropics would be slightly cooler than the higher average temperature might otherwise suggest. These circumstances mean that temperate forests could exist closer to the polar regions, and also that they could stretch further inland so that — depending on the positions of major mountain ranges as well, of course — we have less desert or even steppe than would have been predictable for continents of these sizes at these latitudes with a more “Earth-like” situation. There could still have been some relatively minor glaciations, but we would not have had a major ‘Ice Age’ here during the Pleistocene epoch.
EDIT (30th January 2020; added sentence): This also means that seasonal migrations from north to south (or vice versa) by birds are likely to be less extensive than on RL Earth, but there will still be cases in which they occur and even intercontinental migration should still be considered a possibility.
(I’m currently thinking that we might have had a milder ‘Ice Age’ covering part of the rather earlier Oligocene epoch instead, here, to help explain some details in the evolution of the wildlife around then. Some geographical features caused by this might still be visible, in northern lands and mountain ranges (and now in those relatively close to the southern edges of the southern continents, as well…), although erosion would probably have softened them significantly during the intervening millions of years. If any player who runs any of these nations absolutely want their lands to have had more recent glaciation then I’d suggest that those lands’ actual geographical features might have been “swapped-in” at some point from other Earths with different geological/climatic histories…)


Presumption #4: Plate Tectonics
(The player who runs Malabra agreed to their parts of this when we discussed the situation a few years ago…)

There was a single large ‘supercontinent’ here at the start of the Mesozoic Era (or “Age of Dinosaurs”), but this broke up — and the central ocean, which probably began that period as a sea extending some way into the supercontinent from the south — opened up during the early stages of the Cretaceous period. Our four continents today are basically on four separate tectonic plates, with at least the eastern pair and probably the north-western one as well all moving slowly northwards but not necessarily always moving at the same speed as each other… The south-eastern continent has probably been disconnected from any of the others for longest, and might be moving in a different direction: These points — which would be likely to affect the patterns of mountain ranges, and the likelihoods of earthquakes & volcanos in different areas, as well as ecosystems — would [presumably] be a matter for the owners of nations now on it, as well as for cartographers, to consider.

I don’t know how much of this section’s remaining paragraphs would carry over onto the new map, but on the older one…
On the old map, much of the area that had become occupied by the nation called Malabra was actually on a sub-plate that broke away from the main southern one just after the middle of the Cretaceous period and began to collide with the northern plate during the earlier stages of the following Paleogene (the first of two periods into which the former ‘Tertiary’ is now split). The effects of this collision included a mountain-building process in the northern continent, which helped to explain the ranges now existing not only directly north of Malabra but also paralleling the continent’s southern coasts for some distance westwards from there, as well as some uplift and “buckling” elsewhere. They also “tipped” the continent slightly, raising coastlines in the south (cutting off a sea that had extended northwards and then eastwards with its inner end covering the northern parts of what is now Bears Armed’s main section and some other areas around that, which has long since drained away, and uniting some quite large islands that had formed an archipelago off of the south-western corner with the mainland) while lowering them in the north (and separating some areas from the mainland there to form the large islands that exist today). The main rivers in Malabra had previously flowed northwards, but the mountain-building dammed them up and created an inland sea until the waters cut through a ridge to establish the pattern of southwards drainage that exists today. (A similar phenomenon occurred on RL Earth, where the precursor of the River Amazon had originally flowed into the Pacific rather than the Atlantic but the flow of waters was re-directed by the creation of the Andes range…).
What is now the north-eastern corner of the South Continent was also a large island or even an archipelago at various times.

Land-bridges between north and south have existed temporarily at a few stages during the Cenozoic, at either one end or the other of the Iapetus Sea but never at both ends simultaneously. The first of them formed as a reaction to Malabra’s collision with the North Continent, which temporarily pushed upwards the bed of the shallow sea “behind” it. The latest bridge at the western end formed (during parts of the Miocene epoch) around a series of islands that had been thrown-up by a volcanic hotspot over which the two plates were passing on their slow journey north.

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- Bears Armed - 11-27-2019

Presumption #5: Evolution and Faunal Exchanges
(Part One)
Life may or may not have developed separately in parallel here and on more RL-like Earths to startwith, but species and even entire ecosystems have undoubtedly entered our Reality from one or more RL-like Earths at various times as well which helps to explain the modern similarities. These entries were commonly separated by quite lengthy periods of time during which evolution happened independently here, and new arrivals could not always succeed in displacing the earlier natives that already filled comparable ecological roles, which helps to explain the modern differences. The more moderate nature [on average] of conditions here meant that native species had typically faced less evolutionary pressure than had newly-arrived rivals, which helps to explain the success rates of the latter. Small animals generally have shorter lifespans than do larger animals, meaning that they had more generations in which to evolve to fit local conditions in between new groups’ arrivals, and thus were less likely to lose out to those rivals. There were only a few major “exchanges” during the early epochs of the Cenozoic era (“Age of Mammals”), mostly coinciding with significant geological or climatic changes on one or both of the worlds involved (and thus, in some cases, with the dates assigned by RL scientists for the transitions between Epoch as wells…), but they apparently increased in frequency — although perhaps with fewer species involved on each occasion — during the last two or three million years. The most recent few centuries have even some seen entire ‘nations’ “swapped” into (and out of) this reality, in some cases carrying entire ecosystems with them!
Our two four continents’ floras & faunas had already diverged from each other to some extent before the end of the Cretaceous. Any area that had broken off from one continent & then collided with another one, as Malabra did in on the old map, would probably have carried some species with it….

Presumably the Cretaceous fauna of these lands included numerous species of [“non-Avian”] dinosaurs of various kinds, gigantic marine reptiles of various kinds, crocodilians, and probably pterosaurs too, as well as the “early” mammals and birds and other relatively small animals. We can discuss what sorts of dinosaurs & other large reptiles you want to have had present here…

Presumption #6: “The Doom of the Dinosaurs”
There was a ‘mass extinction’ event in the IDU’s world at the end of the Cretaceous period, approximately coincident in time with the one that happened on RL Earth, that killed off the [“non-avian”] dinosaurs & most if not all of the other large reptiles: In my earlier thoughts about the region’s ecosystems even the Crocodilians had become extinct at some point, but that seems less likely for the new & expanded pattern of continents.
There was a meteorite impact involved in the event here, as has now been shown for RL, but the different pattern of lands & waters obviously means that it can’t have hit in the same place (which somebody else who was looking into this matter for similar reasons says has now been identified as just about the worst place that it could have hit, as far as the dinosaurs [etc.] were concerned…) and had identical patterns of effect. I suggest that the body involved here, which might have been slightly larger than its RL counterpart to start with, broke up into several pieces on its way in and gave this world a set of smaller impacts (leaving smaller, & thus even less identifiable, craters)] — simultaneously enough for their effects to combine — for a comparable total effect overall.

Presumption #7: Evolution and Faunal Exchanges
(Part Two)
All the groups of mammals and birds that survived this event in RL also survived it in the IDU, if they were present here before that anyway which some (due to limited geographical ranges on RL Earth which meant that they’d never been able to reach the IDU…) were not, as did a few more groups of mammals and at least one of birds: There were also some endemic lineages in both of those classes that made it successfully through the catastrophe.
Lineages of mammals and birds that reached the IDU’s north-eastern continent from a more RL-like Earth during the Cenozoic seem (on the basis of lists already provided by the players of various nations) normally to have done so from either Europe, Asia north of [approximately] a line running east-west through the Himalayas, or North America: Those that reached the south-eastern continent included some that were probably from the same regions, too, but also quite a few that are more likely to have come from Asia south of that line (although apparently not from the tropical forests of that continent’s south-eastern parts) instead: On the new map, arrivals from those tropical forests as well — and from Africa, or Madagascar, too — become a bit more likely than was previously the case.
Malabra received its anomalously South American ecosystems no more than half a million years ago, and some species from [probably] India arrived in that land’s western areas even more recently — although still well before the first arrival here of Humans which itself happened no more than 15’00 years (and maybe no more than 10’000 years, but we can discuss this…) — as did the arrival in the mountains to its north & north-west of some species that seem to have come from a RL-Earth’s the mountainous areas between India & China.
The ecosystems arriving when some entire nations were “swapped in” from elsewhere may have been more diverse in origins than that, and of course this can continue if the nations’ players want it to do so.
The land-bridges that sometimes linked our continents allowed a limited amount of expansion by various groups of animals, and to a lesser extent plants, from one continent onto the other. There are also quite a few cases where the continents share groups, or even species, for whose passage no such bridges seem to have existed… but almost all of those taxa are ones that also exist (or existed, anyway) on Earth-RL and so presumably entered the two continents by two separate routes from one or more RL-like Earths instead. Maybe the remaining anomalies spread from one of our continents to the other via another Earth during those interchanges?
In fact, there are even a few groups of animals (e.g. Lagomorphs, Bats) for whom various combinations of earlier fossils and greater diversity suggest that early evolution took place mainly in the IDU with a subsequent spread to those more RL-like Earths that also have them!
The south-eastern continent seems to have received significantly fewer species from RL-like Earths during the last few million years than did the northern continent, so that even its larger mammals are more likely to be from lineages with longer histories of ‘native’ status and there is therefore an even higher proportion of endemic genera or even endemic families in its fauna & flora than for those of the northern continent.

The higher average levels of warmth and moisture don’t just allow temperate forests to be more extensive, they probably allow many plants (especially in between the equatorial rainforests and the polar regions) to grow a bit more vigorously than they would have done in the closest equivalent areas on more RL-like Earths too, thus supporting higher densities of herbivorous and omnivorous animals which in turn support higher concentrations of, carnivores, and scavengers. Combine this with the fact that the lengthy periods of relatively stable condition would have encouraged a phenomenon called ‘niche partitioning’, in which the members of long-running lineages diverge into sets of differing forms that each specialise in slightly different lifestyles, and I can “reasonably” give areas here greater numbers of animal species than the closest equivalent areas on a more RL-like Earth would possess.

NEW CONTINENTS
Looking at not only the north-western continent’s latitudinal range, but also the existence of a nearly complete land-bridge in the present day, I suspect that its flora & fauna share many basic elements — and probably even some individual species, particularly from among the larger mammals and birds — with those of the north-western continent.
The main sources of flora & fauna for the south-eastern continent, however, would depend on whether it is moving towards or away from its northern neighbour. If they were formerly connected then the basic stocks might be similar, but if they have been separate since the Mesozoic then those of the south-eastern landmass could — like RL Earth’s continent of South America, or even its Australia — be very different indeed. Furthermore, it seems probable that whatever species this landmass acquired by “leakage” from any more-RL-like Earth would have been more likely to come from one or the other of those continents, or at least from Africa or Madagascar, than from either Eurasia or North America. In either case, though, fairly “recent” land-bridges (or “rafting”) could easily have allowed some species to cross from NE to SE (and maybe also from SE to NE, as well).

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- Bears Armed - 11-27-2019

CLASSIFICATION & NAMING OF SPECIES

Levels of Classification
Biologists’ definitions for the term “species” has changed over the years, and every version has faced problems when applied in some situations. The most common definition used nowadays can basically be given as “A group of organisms that share common ancestry with each other more recently than with the members of any other group, and within which — if they practice sexual reproduction — any sexually-mature adult that produces male gametes is theoretically capable of producing viable & fertile offspring with any sexually mature adult that produces female gametes.” Its main problems involve organisms that use asexual reproduction instead, defining “viable” adequately when there is actually a continuum of possibilities (particularly for certain groups, e.g. the genus Canis…) rather than just a simple ‘yes/no’ question, setting the cut-off point between two species where one is descended from the other and so there has probably always been reproductive compatibility among the members existing at any one time, and types of organism that have relatively wide ranges within which the varieties at either end are no longer compatible with each other but can still be linked through one or more other mutually compatible populations living in between them. Despite these potential problems, this is still a good enough definition to use in most cases when considering living types of organisms that reproduce sexually — which includes most of the types that I will consider in these articles — and consequently is the one that I will use.

Every species must be placed within a nested sequence of ‘higher’ groups: The “obligatory” ones are the genus (plural = genera), family, order, class, division (botanical) or phylum (zoological; plural = phyla), kingdom, and —added to this list quite recently — domain. Other levels may also be inserted between these where it seems advisable for clarity, but this is generally atthe classifier’s discretion.
The relevant ‘domain’ for most if not all organisms that I am likely to discuss is the Eukaryota, which contains every living thing except for the ‘Archaea’ (formerly included among the Bacteria, now counted as a full domain in their own right), ‘Bacteria’ (formerly included for a while among the Plants, and then treated as a separate kingdom, but also counted as a full domain; less what is now the Archaea, but plus the ‘Cyanobacteria’ which were also formerly include among the Plants under the name of “Blue-green Algae”), and — if one actually count them as “living” — Viruses.
The two kingdoms whose members I am most likely to mention here are the ‘Animalia’ (all of the multi-cellular animals, from Sponges “upwards” in complexity) and the ‘Chlorophyta’ (all of the “land plants” plus the Green Algae, Red Algae, and a smaller group of algae called the Glaucophyta),and in those cases this detail should usually be obvious enough that I don’t need to specify it very often. All fungi, and the slime-moulds, form the kingdom ‘Fungae’. Brown Algae, and most if not all of the other groups traditionally grouped together as “Algae” comprise (along with a group called the ‘water moulds’) the kingdom Chromatophyta. All of the other kingdoms currently recognised contain only single-celled organisms.

Mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibian, and “true” fish (i.e. not ‘starfish’, or “shellfish”…) are all in the phylum ‘Chordata’, collectively forming the subphylum ‘Vertebata’.

I might add some details here about further phyla, and about ‘divisions’ of plants as well, later on.


The Giving of Names

Every genus must be given a single-word name in ‘taxonomical Latin’, which must be unique [and not just in spelling, it can’t be homonymous with another one either] except that any particular name can be used once each in Zoology and in either Botany, Mycology, or Bacteriology.
Every species must be given a two-word name (a “binomial”) in which the first part is the name of its genus and the second part is its individual identifier: The second part only has to be unique within that actual genus, so the same one can be used for other species too as long as they are in different genera. The name of the genus is always begun with an upper-case letter, and the species’ individual identifier with a lower-case one. In some cases names may be expanded to three or even four parts, thus: Genus (Subgenus) species subspecies, in which case all elements after the first must match the first in gender. These names are normally written in italics, or sometimes underlined, to set them apart from the surrounding text. In some situations the surname of the person who named them and the year in which this happened are added afterwards, but this is not something that I’m going to bother with here so I won’t bother to explain the rules involved either. When the same name is used repeatedly before the first occurrence of another one that shares the same initial letter all of its terms except for the last one may be abbreviated to their initial letters followed by full stops, for example when listing the species one could say “Genus speciesone, G. speciestwo, G. speciesthree, G. speciesfour, “Anothergenusspeciesone, A. speciestwo, A. speciesthree,” and on.

International committees lay down the rules about how these names are to be announced & recognised, which nowadays normally requires their use with an adequate definition (including a good enough description of a chosen ‘type specimen’ for others to use when identifying organisms found, and details of where it lives or lived) in a suitable peer-reviewed publication: They also set the rules under which names that have been officially recognised can, if certain limited conditions apply, be changed.

The name of any group above the level of Genus should always be written with an upper-case first letter but should not be set aside like that of a species or a genus by using italics or underlining. Each must be a single word, although possibly a newly-formed compound one, in ‘taxonomical Latin’. There are only a few rules about the forms for names to be used at these levels, for example a family’s name is formed from the name of one of its constituent genera, although from its ‘genitive’ case rather than its usual spelling, with the ending “-idae” in Zoology or “-aceae” in Botany, Mycology, or Bacteriology. The names of order follow fixed patterns for birds and for fish, both of which alter the name of one of the constituent families by replacing the “-idae” with “-iformes”, but not for other types of animals; and for orders in Botany (etc.) the families’ ending “-acaea” is replaced by “-ales”.
There are also specified endings for some of the optionally-used levels below that of order, but not for all of them: The ones that I’m most likely to use here are for Zoology, in which a superfamily of two or more families replaces one family’s “-idea” with “-oidea” (although this ending is also sometimes used at higher levels as well…), an epifamily (between superfamily & family in rank) uses “-oidae” instead, a subfamily (next level downfrom the family) uses the genitive form of an included genus — that from which the entire family is named, if present here — but with “-inae” rather than “-idae”, an infrafamily does likewise but with “-itae”, a parvfamily with “-irae” (Wiki says that in RL the correct from is actually “-od”, but both the Bears IC and I myself OOC don’t like that idea… and this level isn’t used much in RL anyway… ^_^), and a tribe (a rank that can also be used directly between family and genus) with “-ini.When I name a group whose rank can’t be determined by these rules I will explain its rank at the time.
For these purposes the term ‘clade’ can be used as meaning “a group of organisms that contains a single ancestral species and all of its descendants but no species that are not descended from that ancestor.” Some taxonomist today prefer to define species’ relationships using sets of nested clades, ideally based on a series of two-way splits, without necessarily giving those clades particular ‘ranks’ as in the traditional system: In some cases they may even just identify clades as something like “the lineage consisting of X, Y, and Z” without actually giving them real names.Both the Bears IC and I myself OOC prefer the more traditional system, however, and will generally still use that method where possible.

Taxonomical Latin
The rules for “taxonomical Latin” are rather different from those for Latin in general. The most relevant ones here are:
1.) You can use elements not only from Latin itself (whether ‘classical’ or ‘late’), but also from Classical Greek as well and can even form compound names that combine elements from both of those sources. The only elements normally allowed from English or other modern “civilized” languages are the names of people or places, and even then only if either combined with other elements of more ‘classical’ origins for the names of genera, or with Latinised endings for the individual species’ designations. However, you can use the relevant “everyday” names from the native languages of less “civilized” modern peoples, even if those have also been adopted as the ‘English names’ as well! Thus, the existence of such RL scientific names as Puma concolor, Equus zebra,Llama llama, and Okapi johnsoni.
2.) Although reversing the spelling of one genus’s name to use for another related (or, at least, similar) genus gives you results that probably don’t make sense in “proper” Latin, there is accepted precedent for doing this in taxonomy. For example the famous Argentine palaeontologist FlorentinoAmeghino, who discovered many species of fossils in South America during the late 19th& early 20th centuries, named quite a few new genera for those and used this method to come up with the names in a number of those cases. I have used it for some genera here, partly because of not having enough access to the relevant native languages to find out what names they use for the types of organism concerned.

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Latin is not a subject that I’ve actually studied much, but I have picked up the meanings for quite a few terms used in RL organisms’ scientific names, and how they work, over the years; have at least some access to various Latin/English dictionaries (in my local library) and to “dictionaries of science”, to find other terms; and have sought t& received some help in NS’s forums as well.
If you know this subject better than me, and spot any errors here, then please let me know so that I can fix them. Also, if you think that I am using any particular element too much, feel free to suggest synonyms with which I could replace it in some of those names.

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