Leucapil ferrum

Leucapil ferrum
Creator	Sneal
Information
Status	Extant
Zones	J1
Roles	Producer
Classification
Genus	Leucapil
Species	Leucapil ferrum
Evolution
Date	March 1st, 2019
Ancestor	Unknown
Descendants	No results

While most zones have some amount of cavernous locations, Zone 30 is absolutely riddled with them. This is for a variety of reasons, but one is due a lithotrophic protist of Leucapil ferrum. They live most of there lives floating in the water, waiting for them to hit some iron-rich part of the rock. They specialize in oxidizing iron compounds, and Zone 30 is abnormally rich in them. They use simple oxidation methods of turning ferric hydroxide and oxygen into water and ferric oxide (which they expell), which turns the water, tinted with ferric oxide, into a brown sludge and requires organisms to adapt to this far more viscous liquid mixture.

They have a cell membrane, nucleus, mitochondria, ribosomes, vacuole, endoplasmic reticulum, golgi apparatus, and cilia.

Due to the current absence of iron-reducing microbes, the ferric oxide is unable to turn back into iron hydroxide, and thus the population is slowly deteriorating as less and less iron hydroxide is in the area, and thus less and less food for L. ferrum. They reproduce via mitosis. When the iron from the cell's current locations is used up, they will let go of the rocks and float away for somewhere else.

When L. ferrum first formed, they reproduced rapidly- every 5 to 10 minutes they'd double. The slow decrease in Ferric Hydroxide over time has cause the species to require slower and slower reproduction rates, currently 25-30 minutes. They are 10μm.