Firsts
Which looks the species has shown, which a pair alive today could give next, and who showed each first.
What the film says
Nothing in the species is labelled rare. Every founder is drawn from the same wild pool. Some looks are common from the start, some uncommon. A new founder can always be made, but it brings only this pool.
This colour is carried by many founders and shown by few: a rare variant often hides on one copy. These two show a common colour, and each carries the rare one. Two carriers, and it is suddenly there.
Number traits are drawn near the middle, so founders cluster there. The ends are reached by breeding: two founders that lean the same way, and a child past both.
Some variants are in no founder at all. They arise only by mutation, along routes the rules lay down, each needing the right background; some needing a variant that itself arose by mutation.
One birth can’t build a mutation on another, so deep looks take generations.
Every look has a name, read from four genes. Of 2,744 names, a founder can show 256; every other one must be bred. The first moeba to show a name is recorded as its first.
A small species, grown from its genome. Breed something nobody has seen. Every genome is written on a public ledger.
Two traits at a time
- Recorded, living
- Recorded, none living
- Never recorded; the living carry both variants
- Never recorded; a founder could show it
- Needs a mutation first
How many looks are possible?
No two moebas need look alike: 14 traits with six to eight variants each give 344 billion combinations. Some variants hide others — a polyp has one segment whatever its segment rule, a plain skin shows no pattern rule — so about half of them, some 165 billion, look different, and that is before a single one of the 22 dials is turned. Most of it is detail you would have to look for; this map is about what you can see.
Every name, newest first
Who has done what
Not a contest with a prize, but a record of who has done what. A first is counted for the keeper a moeba was born to; the hardest first is the one of theirs hardest to reach. Children sired for others are births another keeper asked for, using a moeba this keeper had opened to others. Counts are among the moebas in this read of the ledger.