hello. i’m gonna propose some stats for the part. first of all, it would glow of course. you could be able to modify it to repel or attract species and how effective it is. its processes could be that it uses ATP to glow. maybe you can modify intensity of the light and it could also act as a light when in dark places. to further add to this, you can make it so that you can’t see at all in the dark if you don’t have it, and the chemosynthesiser would be able to point to more than one species per part.
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I am fairly sure for now the main functional purpose of the bioluminescent vacuole (in the 0.8.2 prototypes) is to increase the oxygen tolerance.
I suppose it could act as a signalling agent equivalent in the later stages.
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that does sound nice.
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I suppose it will be mostly used as a “decorative” part for now…
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It would be interesting if the bioluminescent vacuole also had effects with Radiation tolerance and Melanosomes.
What would be the scientific basis for that? No one has brought that up before and from my quick read of the bioluminescence Wikipedia page it said that bioluminescence evolved originally as a way to protect against oxygen. (and nothing about ionizing radiation)
How would that specifically work? Surely it couldn’t affect species that have no mechanism to detect the light? (which is sadly all microbes as on a microbial scale the bioluminescence light amount is very low, so hard to have a detector for it)
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Apparently, Vibrio harveyi does use bioluminescence for helping to repair DNA damage from UV radiation. This is not the same radiation found in Radioactive rocks. Perhaps Bioluminescent Vacuole could increase UV tolerance?
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Is it the case with many bioluminescent microbes instead of just one species to use the b-vacuole like that?
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Add photoresepters (not sure I spelled that right) that detect light
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I recall this was already suggested and then rejected for a good reason…
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photoresepters will fix that
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Will fix what? It’d just be an extra organelle without which one could still live as a plant well. I suppose there might be a reference to them when eyes are added but otherwise I don’t see why they would need to be a microbial organelle.
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Due to the scales / physics a photoreceptor on a cell is not able to detect a single cell’s emitted amount of light. This is why the idea was rejected when last brought up.
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Will photoreceptors be needed to unlock sight in macroscopic+?
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photoreceptors could be unlocked through evolving pigments of some sort. There definitely should be a method to get them that isn’t just “you have them now” but I’m not sure what it would be.
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Maybe raw Photoreceptors would function as the lowest “level” of eyes?
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I did forget what I ment by my last comment but yes that is true
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eyespots! (filler text)
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I presume these would only tell one if there’s something light or dark in a particular direction?
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Actually telling directions accurate is best done with concave eyespots. Default eyespots could tell you which way is up and what time of day it is… idk those seem a little redundant? Maybe eyespots should be super cheap, and making them concave could show motion? then upgrades will get you actual eyes.
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