Found this in my sandbox today, polished it up and posted it. Don't remember when I originally wrote it, but it was fun finding and fixing it!
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!
SCP-2199 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-2199.
Yeah, this is pretty cool. Real traditional feel going on with this one. Lot of interesting things to think about. Plus it's a camel, and camels are pretty goddamn cool. Real bros, those guys.
+1 from me. But you already knew that. Sweet name, too.
I like it. It feels old school, which is a good thing.
One suggestion. Change this:
Living creatures, including plants and a large amount of small organisms inhabit this hump, known as SCP-2199-1.
To something like this:
Living creatures including plants and a large amount of small organisms, henceforth SCP-2199-1, inhabit this hump.
On my first read through I thought SCP-2199-1 was the hump, not the creatures, so it broke the flow of the article having to go back and clarify what you meant. Also the original doesn't really make sense grammatically if you take everything outside of the commas as its own independent clause.
I kinda like the overall idea, but the actual biology — specifically, the descriptions of the creatures — makes me twitch. That is so not how a biologist would describe any of this. >_< No-voting because of that.
SCP Wiki Administrator | Earth: We're all in this together.
How would a biologist describe it? (Just for my own curiosity.)
Well, part of the problem is that I honestly don't understand what big parts of this are saying. "[K]eeps its posture in a manner similar to a seahorse", for example, kinda contradicts the claim that it looks almost identical to a normal scorpion, since seahorses rely on their tails and their dorsal fins to maintain posture.
And I'm really not sure what those ostriches are doing. Do they, like, build up momentum by spinning, then latch onto something so that the accumulated momentum instead flings them in their desired direction? If so, how does that actually work? And why would anything use such a weirdly situational, inefficient mode of propulsion in the first place?
If I were to rewrite that whole passage, which I'd need to do to make it make sense, I might start with something like the following:
A large number of small organisms, classed collectively as SCP-2199-1, inhabit this hump. Each subgroup of SCP-2199-1 resembles a particular species of plant or animal native to an arid region, but has adapted or been heavily modified for small size and aquatic environments; many display extremely unusual body plans. While still superficially resembling their desert counterparts, all instances of SCP-2199-1 are between 2 and 10 cm long, and the relative sizes of SCP-2199-1 subgroups do not correspond to the relative sizes of their unmodified relatives. Since direct examination of this ecosystem requires that SCP-2199 be anesthetized and its hump surgically opened, visual observation has been quite limited.
It is, however, possible to observe SCP-2199-1 from outside the hump by listening to their vocalizations and other audio traces. Regular monitoring of SCP-2199-1 is carried out almost entirely via audio, in order to minimize damage to SCP-2199 due to invasive testing.
Observed organism types within SCP-2199-1 Closest apparent ancestor Description Bark scorpion (Centruroides sp.) Closely resembles a legless but otherwise normal bark scorpion. Rapid flicking movements of the tail are used for locomotion (propulsion, orientation control, and posture maintenance). Ostrich (Struthio camelus) Individuals are 3-4 cm long, with a small spheroid body, webbed feet, shortened limbs, and two short muscular tails with long feathers. The tails are used similarly to bacterial flagella, generating propulsion by spinning counter to each other. Primarily herbivorous; an active hunter of algae and free-floating microflora. Meerkat (Suricata suricatta) Observed only once visually, these rare organisms are benthic detritivores, subsisting entirely on and within the layer of excreta and other detritus that accumulates gradually on the bottom of SCP-2199. Texas horned lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum) Resembles the detached head of the lizard, with supernumerary spines and no external locomotor appendages. Moves by launching its 10-cm-long tongue towards a prey animal, then retracting the tongue to pull itself and the prey together for consumption. Western black widow (Latrodectus hesperus) Has a single cephalothorax bearing several hundred long legs. The exoskeleton is entirely soft, permitting the body to undulate for jellyfish-like propulsion. The red "hourglass" marking on the abdomen is a bioluminescent lure, used to attract smaller organisms within reach of the legs, which capture them and carry them into the large central mouth for envenomation and consumption. Preys primarily on other black-widow- and scorpion-type SCP-2199-1 instances.
This is, unfortunately, still a bit too wordy and technical, but I have to scoot right now; I'll be back in a while to revise and rephrase again.
SCP Wiki Administrator | Earth: We're all in this together.
It's a camel that literally stores water in its hump.
+1
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
Living creatures, including plants and a large amount of small organisms classified as SCP-2199, inhabit this hump. Instances of SCP-2199-1…
They should be classified as SCP-2199-1, right?
I like the idea but the descriptions need fixing, particularly this one:
"Usually 3-4cm long, with two long tails and a small, rotund body. Propels itself forward by spinning around quickly and flinging themselves to where they want to be. Appears to feed primarily on small vegetation it can intercept while in motion."
You shift from single to plural ("itself" to "themselves"), the phrase "where they want to be" is awkward, and words like "flinging", "rotund" and "quickly" seem out of place in a zoological description.
This article has an old-school feel… in the sense that it does all the terribad things which I'm willing to overlook in genuine old-school articles for the same reason I don't criticize egyptian tomb paintings for improper use of perspective, but are damning for anything new.
So, let's see.
It is fed a normal diet of vegetation
Depending on how detailed you want the containment procedures, this sentence either has no business being here, or needs to actually specify something useful.
Listening devices
You know, depending on what devices you use, these have a proper name. I'm thinking ultrasound transducers, because ultrasonography seems like a way of accomplishing the purposes described.
The hump is hairless, and has the appearance of being covered in scar tissue. However, this tissue is biologically identical to the rest of SCP-2199.
No shit, sherlock. I would be more surprised if the scar tissue wasn't "biologically identical" to the rest of the camel. Though, hold up. I have fuck-all idea of what "biologically identical" means - for various possible definitions this might even imply the whole camel is made of scar tissue.
Instead of being completely composed out of tissue fibers, the hump on SCP-2199's back is filled with water underneath a 10cm layer of hairless fibrous tissue. This water is brackish, self-replenishing, and inhabits a volume roughly equivalent to the total biomass of SCP-2199. Despite the absence of any corresponding light sources, it contains ambient light.
This particular passage is perhaps the most jarring example, poor tone being coupled with making no bloody sense. (If the water is self-replenishing, how can you say it has the same volume as the body? Sure, you could do it by ultrasound imaging of it, but then, it wouldn't have internal organs, it'd just be full of water, which you contradict in the footnote. I do get an understanding of what might be happening - entering through the hump leads to a water-filled cavity the volume of the entire camel, but entering through its gut, say, reveals internal organs, making it a spatial anomaly. This, however, should have been said properly. Also, that use of the word "biomass" is not kosher; in fact it hardly meets the standard of excellence for industrial plumbing.)
Other than poor tone, the article is thoroughly uninteresting. A camel with a hump filled with self-replenishing water in which bizarre water-living miniature versions of a completely arbitrary choice of animals live, ended with a cliche cryptic note whose main point seems to be that it's cryptic.
Enthusiastic downvote.
Thank you for posting this - back when I first read this (and downvoted) I was vaguely aware that there was a bunch of things wrong with this, but I couldn't articulate any of it at the time. So yeah, I second all this.
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page revision: 1, last edited: 25 Feb 2021 03:57
