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Razor Reef Microflora — Description
Aeneid I Crew Loses Boat in Alien Reef

Two researchers on Ilion found themselves in deep water when their boat began to lose air in the reef off the coast of Aeneas. The small inflatable motor craft was torn to shreds by razor-sharp crystals growing out of the rocky shelf. The sailors dragged their ailing boat away from the churning waters and into the open sea, where they were picked up by the Starrus and treated for cuts and scrapes.

Marine biologist Josef Veihmeyer was more than a little shaken after the incident. “At first I didn’t get why Nav was freaking out. She had the motor turned portside but the boat wasn’t going anywhere. Water filled the boat, then blood filled the water when I cut my leg on something sticking up through the flooring. The place was so shallow, we walked a fine line between swimming and crawling on broken glass. Clearly something didn’t want us there. I’d rather switch places with the rainforest team right now, even if it means spending the day wading in primordial goo.”

Plans to continue exploring the reefs have been suspended until a safety assessment could be made. “There has been no loss of life here since Odyssey II,” said Director of Health and Safety Cameron Lionberger. “We’re working hard to keep that streak going. I think there are other places to investigate that don’t pose such a high risk to our crew. ”

Microbiologist Sandra Salazar took a different standpoint in her report. “The habitat is nothing like anything we have on Earth. Superficially, it appears to be a variant on coral reefs, but the samples we picked off the wreckage showed no sign of colonial animal growth.” Instead, the broken crystals were coated in a single-celled organism identified as a type of pseudofungus. The biofilm was visible to the naked eye. “Every pseudofungus we’ve seen feeds on decaying matter. The water from the nearest beach does not have enough organic material to supply a colony of this size. We’ll need additional samples from the reef to test our current hypothesis: that the fungus is predatory, and uses its cutting power to lacerate large animals that are washed in with the tide.”

This would, of course, seed the water with the nutrients necessary to feed the fungus. So far, the geologists here on Earth have yet to identify the mineral composition from the photos sent with the latest report. The high-resolution micrograph (above) shows the intricately serrated edges that convinced the researchers that the formations are the result of hundreds of years of microbial deposition.

“It would be a shame to pass up such an extraordinary find and leave our questions forever unanswered,” Salazar concluded.
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In reality, the pseudofungus is a farmer. Architect cells lay down the calcium carbonate structures that give the razor reef its name. These normally divide mitotically to produce more of themselves, but waterborne chemical signals induce some of them to differentiate into shepherd cells and harvesters. Shepherd cells are responsible for tending the Dactylia herds. Dactylia agricolarum is another species of pseudofungus that filters decaying matter and plankton out of the water and concentrates it in finger-like protrusions of the cell membrane. Harvesters pluck these off and feed them to the architect cells so they can continue to build and reproduce.

In this image, all three cell types are visible. Architects are secreting a combination of minerals and glue to build up the structure’s edge. When they are near death, their cytoskeletons will harden into diamond-shaped barbs that give the razor its cutting edge. A single harvester (middle left) is in the process of swallowing a D. agricolarum finger with one of its antennae. This one is eating for itself. If it were harvesting for the architects, it would attach the fingers to membrane proteins specialized for this purpose. Meanwhile, the shepherds are busy fending off a predatory bacterioid that is plaguing their herd. They do so by cleaving off individual cells and flinging them into the current. The bacterioids don’t mind this treatment, however; it helps them disperse.
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This is the original ballpoint pen drawing. I used a blurred-and-grained edit in my post on Spec Evo to mimic the look of an electron micrograph. I added the scale bar to this one for your convenience.