To me a bug is a bug, but the biologists say the “insects” here bear no relation to terran insects except for size and orneriness—and usefulness, being scavengers and pollinators. Most of them have twelve legs, but there’s one phylum that has seven! I wonder what they do with the extra one.

The closest thing to a mammal is a furry coldblooded thing, the jumper, that actually behaves more like a lizard. It will lie motionless in the sun for hours until something comes by that is smaller than it but big enough to be worth eating. It leaps on the thing and bites it with fangs that inject a paralyzing venom, then eats it alive, slowly. Eleven different kinds of jumpers have been identified. The airbags leave them alone, evidently because their flesh is noxious or toxic. Jumpers have never attacked a human, even though one alert individual managed to sit down on one.

The division between plant and animal is not sharp. Things like the gasbags are mobile but have a “metabolism” that includes photosynthesis as well as carnivorism. There are fixed, sessile, organisms on land and in the water that don’t use photosynthesis. They often look like plants—one type has nonfunctional green “leaves”—but they make a living by luring small animals and eating them. Some affix themselves to a larger animal or plant and live as parasites or symbiotes. An extraordinary example grows with a particular kind of tree, mimicking its blossom in both appearance and smell. When a pollinator bug flies into the blossom, it snaps shut and chews it up, and then a complex digestive system separates out certain nutrients and passes them on to the tree, through a shared circulatory system.

No other land animals have yet been found that are as dangerous as the floating spiders. There is a frightening-looking carnivore that resembles a twice-man-sized praying mantis, but so far it has never attacked a human. Neither does it run away.

The oceans and the lake have a variety of large predators, which might be dangerous if one were overcome with the urge to go swimming. A drone flying three meters over the waves, about twenty kilometers from the western shore, was attacked by a thing that looked like a whale with grinning teeth. The lake has strong eellike constrictors up to eight meters long.

All these adorable animals, and we haven’t yet explored even one tenth of one percent of the land area. I’m sure there are pleasant surprises aplenty waiting for us.

There is eelless swimming, finally, at Lakeside. The solar tide makes almost a meter difference in the lake’s water level, so twice a day it fills and empties a large pool they yesterday blasted out of rock in the middle of town. A grate keeps out anything larger than a minnow.