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Description
Sorry for the long silence. Been working on a real big project as of late (spoiler: it's a sequel to the 1999!Asia post), lots of research and typing, editing, yada yada yada. Being me, I decided to start a new project, in the middle of an existing project, and in the midst of working on that, I made this. This is not a completed work, but a small element from a much larger piece that's still in development.

This critter is called a silkfox, it's a genetically-modified critter native to Mars, post-terraforming, descended from the humble silkworm.

I've mentioned before in previous posts that insects form a major cornerstone of Martian agriculture, as a practical source of protein. In addition to the unspeakable numbers of crickets and mealworms bred as livestock on Mars, silkworms were imported to the Red Planet early on as soon as someone was able to grow enough mulberry on-site for them to eat. In addition to producing in-demand textiles, boiled silkworm pupae became a popular delicacy on Mars.

Around the mid-21st century, genetic engineers tinkering with their bugs figured out a way to bypass the cap on insect size; giving them lungs and closed circulatory systems. Within a decade of the first experiments, the first "haikonchu" ("lung-insects") were born, and as Mars was transformed into a much more welcoming place for living things, via decades of terraforming operations, haikonchu/"megabugs" proliferated into all of the major animal niches, becoming the Martian answer to terrestrial fauna such as rabbits, elephants, giraffes, deer, wolves, etc. The normal insects became...normal insects.

Elephant-sized beetles (Mammoth Kabuto), theropod-sized centipedes (Imperial Omukade), pterodactyl-sized dragonflies (Roterbaron) and their crocodile-like aquatic larvae (Nixe), deer-sized katydids (Katimanga), giraffe-sized stick insects (Kirin) and more. Moths the size of sparrows and pigeons fill the role of birds when it comes to perching on power lines and pooping on cars. These fluttering little things have to avoid the dog-sized spiders and hawk-sized scorpion flies, and at night, bat-sized fireflies light up the sky in impressive formations. And while the overwhelming majority of the crawlies raised for food on Mars are still just regular insects, megabug livestock in the form of armadillo-sized beetles and pig-sized cockroaches (both slaughtered for meat, but the latter also slaughtered for milk), is very much a thing.

And then there's designer pets, like the silkfox.

The silkfox is a wingless descendant of the silkmoth (Bombyx mori). It's about the size of a house cat, with six limbs, a fluffy coat (typically white, but there are silkfoxes with coats in every color of the rainbow these days), ear-like antennae, compound eyes and very small mouthparts. Like other arthropods, the silkfox's body has a segmented exoskeleton, but you can't see it under their hair. Renowned for their cuteness and affectionate, gentle manners, these over-engineered insects are very quiet, making only very small chirps and hums, and have a herbivorous diet of mulberry, flowers, leaves and berries; they are playful, but not aggressive, and by their nature avoid confrontation.

What you see here is actually an adult silkfox. After hatching from its egg, a silkfox begins life as a plump larva known as a kitworm. Kitworms like to eat and snuggle and eat and sleep and eat and roll around and eat, and because they have nothing covering their fat little bodies, kitworm owners will usually dress them up in warm little sweaters. The kitworm stage lasts about five to six years, after which, they encase themselves in a silky cocoon, liquefy their bodies and emerge as adult silkfoxes. Despite the kitworm's brain being completely destroyed and remade by this process, they always remember their masters.

Silkfoxes are on average slightly less intelligent than dogs, and the combined kitworm-silkfox lifespan is about 20 years on average. Because of its gentle nature and lack of ability to really defend itself, silkfoxes don't exist in the wild on Mars. They're vulnerable to almost every predator on the planet.

Also, let me break down the taxonomic classifications here.

Kingdom: speaks for itself, the silkfox is an animal.

Phylum: likewise, the silkfox is an Arthropod - exoskeleton, segmented body, paired jointed limbs.

Class: "Haikonchu" should translate to "lung-insect" in Japanese; the megabugs that proliferate across Mars have key differences from their insect cousins, in that they have lungs and circulatory systems similar to those found in vertebrates; the use of Japanese here may sound strange, but a number of dinosaurs unearthed in China have Mandarin names, so I think using Japanese, or mixing Japanese, Greek and Latin, could be an interesting convention for Martian taxonomists, given Japan's huge role in colonizing the planet. Colloquially, this class of organisms is referred to as "megabugs".

Order: "Neolepidoptera" combines the Latin word for "new" with the order classification for butterflies and moths, Lepidoptera ("scale wing"); this is a perhaps-ill-advised term, used to describe all megabugs descended from terrestrial butterflies and moths.

Family: "Tinea" is Latin for "moth", and "vulpidae" is derived from the Latin word for "fox".

Genus: "Hankavulpes" = "Hanka fox", referring to Hanka Genomics, the company which first engineered silkfoxes, before eventually losing their patent on the genome; now several firms and individual breeders raise them, but Hanka's legacy lives on in the form of the genus' name.

Species: "Hankavulpes dulcis" means "cute Hanka fox".

Description
Sorry for the long silence. Been working on a real big project as of late (spoiler: it's a sequel to the 1999!Asia post), lots of research and typing, editing, yada yada yada. Being me, I decided to start a new project, in the middle of an existing project, and in the midst of working on that, I made this. This is not a completed work, but a small element from a much larger piece that's still in development.

This critter is called a silkfox, it's a genetically-modified critter native to Mars, post-terraforming, descended from the humble silkworm.

I've mentioned before in previous posts that insects form a major cornerstone of Martian agriculture, as a practical source of protein. In addition to the unspeakable numbers of crickets and mealworms bred as livestock on Mars, silkworms were imported to the Red Planet early on as soon as someone was able to grow enough mulberry on-site for them to eat. In addition to producing in-demand textiles, boiled silkworm pupae became a popular delicacy on Mars.

Around the mid-21st century, genetic engineers tinkering with their bugs figured out a way to bypass the cap on insect size; giving them lungs and closed circulatory systems. Within a decade of the first experiments, the first "haikonchu" ("lung-insects") were born, and as Mars was transformed into a much more welcoming place for living things, via decades of terraforming operations, haikonchu/"megabugs" proliferated into all of the major animal niches, becoming the Martian answer to terrestrial fauna such as rabbits, elephants, giraffes, deer, wolves, etc. The normal insects became...normal insects.

Elephant-sized beetles (Mammoth Kabuto), theropod-sized centipedes (Imperial Omukade), pterodactyl-sized dragonflies (Roterbaron) and their crocodile-like aquatic larvae (Nixe), deer-sized katydids (Katimanga), giraffe-sized stick insects (Kirin) and more. Moths the size of sparrows and pigeons fill the role of birds when it comes to perching on power lines and pooping on cars. These fluttering little things have to avoid the dog-sized spiders and hawk-sized scorpion flies, and at night, bat-sized fireflies light up the sky in impressive formations. And while the overwhelming majority of the crawlies raised for food on Mars are still just regular insects, megabug livestock in the form of armadillo-sized beetles and pig-sized cockroaches (both slaughtered for meat, but the latter also slaughtered for milk), is very much a thing.

And then there's designer pets, like the silkfox.

The silkfox is a wingless descendant of the silkmoth (Bombyx mori). It's about the size of a house cat, with six limbs, a fluffy coat (typically white, but there are silkfoxes with coats in every color of the rainbow these days), ear-like antennae, compound eyes and very small mouthparts. Like other arthropods, the silkfox's body has a segmented exoskeleton, but you can't see it under their hair. Renowned for their cuteness and affectionate, gentle manners, these over-engineered insects are very quiet, making only very small chirps and hums, and have a herbivorous diet of mulberry, flowers, leaves and berries; they are playful, but not aggressive, and by their nature avoid confrontation.

What you see here is actually an adult silkfox. After hatching from its egg, a silkfox begins life as a plump larva known as a kitworm. Kitworms like to eat and snuggle and eat and sleep and eat and roll around and eat, and because they have nothing covering their fat little bodies, kitworm owners will usually dress them up in warm little sweaters. The kitworm stage lasts about five to six years, after which, they encase themselves in a silky cocoon, liquefy their bodies and emerge as adult silkfoxes. Despite the kitworm's brain being completely destroyed and remade by this process, they always remember their masters.

Silkfoxes are on average slightly less intelligent than dogs, and the combined kitworm-silkfox lifespan is about 20 years on average. Because of its gentle nature and lack of ability to really defend itself, silkfoxes don't exist in the wild on Mars. They're vulnerable to almost every predator on the planet.

Also, let me break down the taxonomic classifications here.

Kingdom: speaks for itself, the silkfox is an animal.

Phylum: likewise, the silkfox is an Arthropod - exoskeleton, segmented body, paired jointed limbs.

Class: "Haikonchu" should translate to "lung-insect" in Japanese; the megabugs that proliferate across Mars have key differences from their insect cousins, in that they have lungs and circulatory systems similar to those found in vertebrates; the use of Japanese here may sound strange, but a number of dinosaurs unearthed in China have Mandarin names, so I think using Japanese, or mixing Japanese, Greek and Latin, could be an interesting convention for Martian taxonomists, given Japan's huge role in colonizing the planet. Colloquially, this class of organisms is referred to as "megabugs".

Order: "Neolepidoptera" combines the Latin word for "new" with the order classification for butterflies and moths, Lepidoptera ("scale wing"); this is a perhaps-ill-advised term, used to describe all megabugs descended from terrestrial butterflies and moths.

Family: "Tinea" is Latin for "moth", and "vulpidae" is derived from the Latin word for "fox".

Genus: "Hankavulpes" = "Hanka fox", referring to Hanka Genomics, the company which first engineered silkfoxes, before eventually losing their patent on the genome; now several firms and individual breeders raise them, but Hanka's legacy lives on in the form of the genus' name.

Species: "Hankavulpes dulcis" means "cute Hanka fox".