Sticky Novelty Creatures - PACK of 10

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Poor Trichoplax. It doesn’t know how to swim,” Prakash said. “This is going to be the shortest paper ever.” Ultimately, Prakash hopes to understand how Trichoplax can survive the violent forces of its own mutinous body—as well as harsh environments like the rugged California coast, where a six-foot wave can pummel tiny ocean creatures with the force that a 1,000-mph wind would have on a human being. The test took place in one of Prakash’s recent inventions, a Ferris wheel–inspired contraption he calls the Gravity Machine. Composed of a thin plastic wheel full of water, the Gravity Machine rotates vertically in front of a powerful microscope, acting as an aquatic treadmill for microorganisms. Even in the narrow disk, which is less than half an inch wide, Trichoplax is so small that finding it with the naked eye is like searching for a dust mote in a gymnasium.

Pixies have a whopping 1 hit point. But their innate ability to turn invisible, 15 AC, andselection of spells make them difficult to catch. Of course, pixies are social creatures who live together in groups, so turning a dagger to one pixie could mean being swarmed by a dozen others. Using pixies in your game An iconic faerie, pixies appear as tiny elves with delicatewings. They’re as curious as they are shy.A pinch of their dust can grant the power of flight to friends or confuse foes. Often hunted by mages for their dust, pixies rarely reveal themselves.

Some scientists believe that Trichoplax, with its stripped-down body plan and easy-to-manipulate genome, could be a useful model organism for medical researchers. It’s especially intriguing because it breaks the rules that most lab animals follow: Unlike mice or fruit flies, Trichoplax has an indefinite life span, rapidly heals, and never—so far as scientists can tell—develops cancer. “We’re always trying to figure out what the rules are,” says Billie Swalla, a biologist at the University of Washington who studies regeneration in weird animals like acorn worms, which can regrow their heads. Studying rule breakers like Trichoplax, which can tear themselves apart and heal in minutes, could yield insights into the treatment of human injuries like damaged spinal cords, she says. Hags can really shine — er, glower — in combat. A sea hag’s Death Glare is terrifyingly powerful against low-level adventurers. It forces a frightenedcreature to make a DC 11 Wisdom saving throw or drop to 0 hit points on the spot.

Later that morning, I reconvene with the team. Prakash’s cold has gotten worse, and Soto Montoya and Zhong are swaying with exhaustion. Still, they sit down, pull the remaining slides out of the seawater bath, and start looking for more animals. Although there’s still a fair amount of uncertainty about how the earliest animals are related to each other, recent genomic-sequencing studies suggest that placozoans were not the common ancestor to all living animals, and that either sponges or comb jellies came first, David Gold, a paleobiologist at UC Davis, says. Although Trichoplax comes from an older lineage than most animal groups alive today, “there are a few groups that appear to be older,” he notes. A D&D party might encounter a hag after investigating a case of missing babies or afterdiscovering a town that has been torn apart by gossip, false accusations, or even nightmares.A solitary green hag or sea hag can be the primary villain for a 1st- or 2nd-level adventure. A lthough he’s one of the youngest scientists to fall for Trichoplax, Prakash is far from the first. The weakness for the amoeba-like creature often begins unexpectedly, when it squirms into a researcher’s field of view. The German zoologist Franz Eilhard Schulze, who discovered the animal, spotted it as it crept along the interior of a saltwater aquarium meant for other species. Smith saw her first Trichoplax when it glided across her microscope slide while she was examining some sea sponges. Even if placozoans are not the oldest animals, they’re still some of the weirdest. Trichoplax’s genome, published in 2008, contained a surprising twist, Athula Wikramayake, a developmental biologist at the University of Miami, says. Despite having the simplest bodies of all animals, placozoans carry many of the same genes as humans do, including numerous genes involved in building brains and other complex organs, like those in the digestive system. Placozoans contain far more genetic complexity than scientists ever guessed, Wikramayake says. “The question is, what are they doing with it?”I n Prakash’s lab, located in the leafy bioengineering quad at Stanford University, he and his graduate students, postdocs, and lab technicians are less concerned with figuring out where Trichoplax fits into the story of animal evolution than how it manages to live such a full life—creeping along the ocean floor, sensing its surroundings, eating algae—with such minimal equipment. “Where does behavior come from in a system that doesn’t have neurons?” he asks. He’s also interested in the shape-shifting animal’s basic physical properties: “Is it a liquid? Is it a solid? Is it something in the middle?”

The Feywild represents the intrinsic power of nature: its wildness and beauty, its chaos and unscrupulous dangers. Denizens of the Plane of Faerie can be equally imposing. Even the weakestamong them can create dimensional rifts. The strongest collect knowledge and power over their long lives and don’t part with any of it for free. When the team leaves for the lab, I retreat to my dorm room at the Monterey hostel, defeated. I am not hardcore enough to hunt wild Trichoplax, I think. I take a nap. At 11:32 p.m., my phone lights up. It’s a video text showing Zhong and Soto Montoya huddled around the microscope, looking buoyant. Zhong has found a Trichoplax. “That’s it, 110 percent,” Prakash says. “It’s beautiful, beautiful!” On a computer screen that shows the display from the microscope, Trichoplax looks like a glowing, pulsing orb surrounded by cosmic protoplasm. Soto Montoya finds a second, bigger animal. They sign off and keep scanning each slide, one by one, until 4 a.m. Dusk hag: This type of hag might share its prophetic visionsfor a price, but such informationwill likely lead to suffering rather than good fortune.Like Trichoplax, Prakash and his 15 to 20 graduate students, postdocs, and lab technicians seem to move in a thousand directions at once. One day I watched as Prakash taught a new doctoral student, Hannah Rosen, how to suction Trichoplax out of a petri dish full of seawater and settle them on a slide. Move too slowly, and the animal will attach itself stubbornly to the syringe, Prakash explained, his hand darting toward the slide with the speed and precision of a heron’s beak. To prevent Trichoplax from creeping off the slides, Prakash has built a small well out of double-sided tape, which he calls a jail. “For the first 30 designs we made, it figured out how to break out of the jail,” he said, with obvious fondness. “It can slip under even the tiniest of gaps. It’s quite remarkable.” In the computer simulations that the Stanford lab has built based on Trichoplax’s body and motion, Prakash and his team have begun to tweak aspects of the animal’s biology to create new properties that don’t exist in nature. When the team virtually strengthens the protein bonds between Trichoplax’s cells in a computer model, for example, the resulting animal is stiffer and displays new patterns of motion. For Prakash, Trichoplax is a kind of primordial Play-Doh—a way not only to understand animals that exist today but also to discover synthetic animals and materials that could exist, he says. W hen Prakash and his team reach Monterey, a red tide caused by billions of plankton has turned the water so dark that it looks like obsidian. Crouching in the sheltered harbor of the Monterey marina beside a sailboat christened Diablito, Prakash slides his arm elbow deep into the water and draws up a length of fishing line. This time, the trap is intact.