#fedivolve From a journey of four billion years, you arrive at the present day. you are phytophthora nicotianæ, the pathogen responsible for a devastating plant disease known as black shank.

though you are most famous for your work in killing tobacco, you are also adept at infecting onion, tomato, and a wide variety of other plants. your host range includes 255 genera from 90 families of plants  

you can cause root rot, crown rot, fruit rot, leaf infection, and stem infection! no part of a plant is safe from you–one of the best plant killers ever evolved on Earth. congratulations!  

you thrive in hot and moist conditions, but your sexually produced oospores  can survive harsh winters. your asexually produced zoospores  are quite agile with their exceptional flagella and can infect hosts faster than the plant-cultivating animals can keep up with. you are a most formidable pathogen!

the animals are very angry with you for killing so much of their tobacco–but this plant is poisonous to them anyway, you think they should be a little more grateful for your help. it’s not as if it matters what they think, though, your descendants will likely remain on Earth far longer than theirs–they are making the whole planet nice and warm for blights like you to thrive.

THE END

Your full evolutionary tree:
domain: archæa
kingdom: proteoarchæota
superphylum: asgard
phylum: heimdallarchaeia
domain: eukarya
(unranked): bikonta
(unranked): diaphoretickes
(unranked): archæplastida
phylum: rhodophyta
subphylum: cyanidiophytina
(unranked): TSAR
(unranked): SAR
(unranked): halvaria
(unranked): stramenopiles
phylum: gyrista
subphylum: pseudofungi
class: oomycetes
subclass: peronosporomycetes
order: peronosporales
family: peronosporaceæ
genus: phytophthora
species: nicotianæ

Author: thank you for playing, everyone who participated!  I’m glad I could share some interesting information about evolution and the nature of life with you. oftentimes people treat evolution as something with intention and direction to it and as a simple contest of which organism is stronger–I hope to have conveyed that the reality is far more complicated, interesting, and beautiful than that  Life is a sacred, special thing–do your part to protect its continued existence.

if you enjoyed this poll-driven interactive narrative, you might like my ongoing interactive cyberpunk YA story, #Aetherglow ( @aetherglow ), or my other works at my website, https://translunar.academy

see you around the fedi ~

#fedivolve You aren’t interested in killing trees. big, flashy displays of power like that are not your style. you are a more subtle disease artist, the kind who can devastate the plant-collecting animals’ food supply with the lightest touch.

domain: eukarya
(unranked): bikonta
(unranked): diaphoretickes
(unranked): TSAR
(unranked): SAR
(unranked): halvaria
(unranked): stramenopiles
phylum: gyrista
subphylum: pseudofungi
class: oomycetes
subclass: peronosporomycetes
order: peronosporales
family: peronosporaceæ
genus: phytophthora

which important agricultural product will you claim as your own personal blight canvas, phytophthore?

#fedivolve You decide not to limit yourself, and focus on inventing methods of planticide that will be effective on as many targets as possible. you are a formidable blight, with hard cellulose cell walls, able to reproduce sexually or asexually, and infect damn near anything you want. you can devastate an entire ecosystem. a suitable name is needed for your genus: Phytophthora, “the plant destroyer.”

domain: eukarya
(unranked): bikonta
(unranked): diaphoretickes
(unranked): TSAR
(unranked): SAR
(unranked): halvaria
(unranked): stramenopiles
phylum: gyrista
subphylum: pseudofungi
class: oomycetes
subclass: peronosporomycetes
order: peronosporales
family: peronosporaceæ
genus: phytophthora

having firmly established your place as one of the most feared and reviled of organisms in this current holocene epoch, you have only one thing left to decide, and it may take us a few polls to find it:

What is your very favorite plant to kill, phytophthoran? (part 1)

#fedivolve In a runoff election your mycelial hive-mind decisively decides to work toward the downy mildew disease. your mycelium grows deep through the structure of your hosts, until you reach the leaves and rot them away with damp spots of purple-brown mold, from which you disperse your spores. rotting away the upper structure of plants causes canopy collapse, allowing the sun to burn the plant’s fruits. your effect on a plant is devastating–so much that you become commonly known simply as blight–and very effective for your continued survival as you infect a wide range of hosts in all cool, damp regions of the Earth. you and your like-minded sisters become the family Peronosporaceæ.

domain: eukarya
(unranked): bikonta
(unranked): diaphoretickes
(unranked): TSAR
(unranked): SAR
(unranked): halvaria
(unranked): stramenopiles
phylum: gyrista
subphylum: pseudofungi
class: oomycetes
subclass: peronosporomycetes
order: peronosporales
family: peronosporaceæ

It’s the quaternary period of Earth’s cenozoic era, and there is big news in the plant pathogen fandom: the animals have started conveniently building collections of the same plant species in dense clusters. at the same time these organisms have been performing artificial selection and speeding up the evolution of their favorite plants into a wide range of new subspecies and growth forms. you have to get in on this, but what new style of plant will you inflict your blight upon?

some intriguing options: the brassicaceae, leafy plants that the plant-collecting animals make many forms of for food; the tobacco plants, which they cultivate in great numbers despite its toxicity to themselves; the various root vegetables which make for an appealing feast; the cannabaceæ, said to be a particularly sweet leaf; or you could always live the avant-garde pathogen life, being a jack-of-all-trades and infecting a very wide range of hosts.

what sounds appealing to you, peronosporaceæ?

#fedivolve TIE VOTE

You are unable to decide what sort of disease you want to pursue. luckily neither will future biologists be able to agree on how to classify you. for now you join the order of life that may or may not contain both options: Peronosporales, retaining the ability to pursue either path.

domain: eukarya
(unranked): bikonta
(unranked): diaphoretickes
(unranked): TSAR
(unranked): SAR
(unranked): halvaria
(unranked): stramenopiles
phylum: gyrista
subphylum: pseudofungi
class: oomycetes
subclass: peronosporomycetes
order: peronosporales

this is the kind of confusion that happens when you have just survived the cretacious-paleogene extinction event. suddenly Earth is a different place–many animals and plants have vanishes, but your kind endures admirably.

your mycelial hive-mind of conjoined cells considers its options for how to specialize yourself as a pathogen in the new cenozoic era. what will your primary attack vector be? will you focus on surface infections of the leaves? or penetrate deep and rot your hosts away from the inside? or perhaps target narrow weak points like the roots and branches?

what style of disease are you, peronosporale?

#fedivolve alright my oomfycetes, you grow your mycelial web out from the shoreline and into the wet soil. this environment is favorable, with abundant nutrients below and above–so many things constantly dying on it. you set yourself apart from your aquatic cousins, forming the new subclass peronosporomycetes

domain: eukarya
(unranked): bikonta
(unranked): diaphoretickes
(unranked): TSAR
(unranked): SAR
(unranked): halvaria
(unranked): stramenopiles
phylum: gyrista
subphylum: pseudofungi
class: oomycetes
subclass: peronosporomycetes

welcome to the mesozoic era. feeding on decaying matter and parasytizing land plants has allowed you to thrive, spreading your class of life all over pangæa, as ubiquitous as the fungi, blending right in with them despite having been originally assigned algæ at endosymbiosis event.

it’s the year -145 million and you’ve just survived yet another mass extinction with your formidable oospores. you’ve lost count. now in the early cretacious period, a radical new type of plant, the angiosperms, is suddenly everywhere with their magnificent flowers. but an experienced biohacker like you knows that a new type of system must have all kinds of new vulnerabilities. your sisters are taking advantage of this and creating a lot of new plant diseases.

in this modern era, oomycetes in the pathogen fandom have a few prominent scenes–those who appear as a white rust on the surface of plants, and those who take the form of a downy mildew.

which disease style will you dedicate yourself to, peronosporomycete?

#fedivolve If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, you decide. Your two asymmetric flagella are fine the way they are.

with that out of the way you get down to some serious body morphology. you and your sisters around you join together, opening up your membranes to merge your cytoplasm, without even a partial barrier in between. you grow into a mycelial network of hyphæ, a multicellular organism!

you can feed on decaying matter, or infect hosts like the good old days. in times of hardship you can form a chlamydospore to keep a cluster of spores alive, scattering them later as zoospores using your trademark dual flagella. this way you can reproduce asexually. but you also invent sexual reproduction, allowing you to mix up your genes with sister mycelia via contact between specialized cells, then produce thick-walled oospores to scatter into the world and propagate yourselves.

you are an oomycete, also known as a water mold, scourge of the inland waters of pangæa.

domain: eukarya
(unranked): bikonta
(unranked): diaphoretickes
(unranked): TSAR
(unranked): SAR
(unranked): halvaria
(unranked): stramenopiles
phylum: gyrista
subphylum: pseudofungi
class: oomycetes

but there is more to Earth than water. the strange unwatered rocks are now covered in soil, holding water you can comfortably move through to travel outside your pond. there are also all kinds of strange fungi and plants on the dry land–plants you might be able to make your hosts.

where do you want to live now, oomycete?

#fedivolve You sneak into your host fungi’s mycelium and root yourself in a good spot, creeping down through its membrane to take what you came for.

⚠ Endosymbiosis Request ⚠

you’re not asking. you’re here to take what you want, and nothing can stop you. one successful raid after another, you prosper in this new role. you no longer have any use for your chloroplasts after all, and eventually lose track of them.

so successful is your fungal piracy, you even plunder its DNA! your pillage includes genes you can integrate with your own through horizontal gene transfer, gaining abilities like creating chitin, the versatile fungal cell wall material (but you can still make cellulose like your algæ kin). you also learn from their genes the secret of multicellularity and hyphæ formation. you can become mycelium, just like them, but different!

there’s no organism on Earth quite like you. you are a pseudofungus, easy to mistake for a true fungus, but truly a descendant of the algæ.

domain: eukarya
(unranked): bikonta
(unranked): diaphoretickes
(unranked): TSAR
(unranked): SAR
(unranked): halvaria
(unranked): stramenopiles
phylum: gyrista
subphylum:pseudofungi

welcome to the Cambrian period of the Paleozoic era of the Phanerozoic eon. finally you understand why the first four billion years were called the “pre-cambrian”. life is thriving on Earth. animals, plants, fungi, and now you, taking your place in a complex world.

before you proliferate and try out a new body style with your fairly acquired genes, you consider one more slight alteration to your cell. currently you have two flagella, one long and covered in little hairs, excellent for swimming, and one short, tapered, and without hairs, helpful for maneuvering. but the fungi cells you encountered only had one flagellum–what if there’s some advantage in that for the fungus lifestyle? on the other hand, it would be like giving up part of your unique identity.

what will you do, pseudofungus?