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| Posted By: scarab | Date: 4/21/12 5:35 p.m. |
In Response To: Re: More concerned about the fact.... (OldNick) : I was reading up your amazingly well-developed concept of the single-orifice : Elite last night after someone linked it in another thread, and it : reminded me of my own Halo 2-era hypothesis. Its a single tube that starts that start from a single orifice, goes down into the body and does the whole stomache and intestines bit then comes back up to exit from the same orifice. I imagined that this would form during gastrulation. The details vary but, essentially, some cells migrate inwards along a line or around a central hole. Cells left on the outside form the skin and the nervous system. those that migrate inwards form the gut. A middle layer forms muscle and bone, etc. Now imagine taking a hollow ball of cells and poke it with an imaginary (very small) finger. This forms a depression and you are well on your way to forming a gut. Just stretch the animal into a worm shape in your mind and you can see that it has a blind ended gut. Now imagine that after the animal has been stretching and whilst cells are still migrating inwards - have the roof of the cavity bulge down to join the floor along the mid line. Don't cave in the roof of the initial indentation, just join the new stuff as it moves inwards. But don't have the cavity obliterated completely. You still have openings either side of the mid line - these will now form two tubes. keep the process going and towards the end let the floor and roof diverge again to create a single opening to the outside. You are left with an animal that has a single orifice that leads to a U shaped gut : Like you, I thought the mouth design was terrible, and the only thing it
Some can see almost as well backwards as they can forwards. : My theory was that they evolved as scavengers, feeding on the bodies of
Their ancestors may have but once you get hands its hard to see why they can't just cut off some meat and carry it to a safer location. This is why I struggle to find a purpose for their mouth fingers. Who nees them? They have real hands and fingers! : This eating process could still take a while, though, during which time
Its hard to understand why the eyes are on the side. It does feel like we need some excuse but you'd think that intelligent, tool using, social animals could butcher the carcass and look out for each other. Its hard to see Elites as prey. : Unfortunately for the eye-related part of this theory, Halo 4 elites now seem
Ah breathing.... Our lungs begin as an outgrowth from the foregut (if memory serves). This forms a tube that branches into two tubes that branch again to form the tree structure of the lungs. Now adapt this idea to an animal that has two gut tubes... Imagine two completely separate tubes that grow into the tissues that separated them. Imagine them divide repeatedly in a tree like pattern. let the branches from the two different origins writhe around each other but never fuse. They stay separate until the final generation. You are a programmer so I know that you are familiar with iterative branching. Each level of splitting is a generation. Anyway the final generation of tubes associate with the final generation of their opposite tube and have side branches that join them. Then gas exchange tissue forms in the walls of those connecting tubes (this is fairly similar to the atria of bird parabronchi). If you look into a Halo 2 Elites mouth you will see that the opening at the back looks like the fusion of four tubes. Two large at the bottom and two smaller ones above. lets say that the larger tubes are gut and that the smaller tubes supply the single lung. If the Elite breathes in through one tube and out through the other... then the Elite will have a one way flow of air through its lung. How does the Elite ventilate its lung? Look at the radiogram here. http://www.learningradiology.com/notes/chestnotes/hodgkinspage.htm Obviously the lungs are where the dark patches are but imagine that in an Elite the dark patches are actually empty spaces. Imagine that the lung surrounds the heart or it lies in front of it (I imagine that Elites have a dorsal series if hearts but that's for another post). Point is... imagine that the white patch in the center of the chest is the lung. And imagine that it splits the pleural cavity into two cavities, left and right. Imagine that they have a diaphragm just like we do. Also imagine that the tube on the left side of the body is the inhalant tube and the one on the right side is the exhalant tube. Put two one way valves near the mouth to enforce one way flow. If you have an opening from each tube into the corresponding pleural cavity then when the Elite breathes in... the left cavity fills directly from the left tube's opening and the right cavity fills from air that passes through the lung. When the Elite exhales... the right cavity empties through the hole in the right tube. The left cavity empties through the lung. So air passes through the Elite's lung in a single direction during inhale and exhale. Oh good grief - that was a wall of text and the only reason I wrote it was to answer your point about nostrils. :-) Make the two breathing tubes evertable like the gut tubes and they can hang out from the mouth to let the Elite breathe. Pythons do something similar. Their trachea can be extended out of the side of the mouth whilst they walk really large prey down their throats. I might clean this up and repost it at a later date with proper HTML formatting but I wanted to post a reply to you because I once wrote a long reply that lay on a forgotten browser tab and never got posted when I did a close-all-tabs. So I wanted to just write this and send it.
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