Garum Bug Fix, or "How I Made Electrical Frogs"

Meh.

Enough with the Megalomaniac-In-Chief. Let’s get back to the froggies.

Last we left our Garum, we were trying to decide how they made electricity in an underwater environment. Perhaps we can have some type of an electric producing algae and have them improve its output through selective breeding?

There are already algae that produce bioluminescence. Bioelectrogenesis from a plant is possible in an alien ecology. The Terran electric eels is capable of 500 volts at 1 amp. Our algae should be more than capable of topping that in the voltage and amperage needed to run the Garum’s industry. So we put it in a box-like container made out of the non-conductive mucus plates from that mollusk we brought up last month. And the wiring we solved with the seaweed that conducted the electricity from the alien equivalent of an electric eel (which on Earth is not an eel, but a member of the knifefish family).

We take the super electrical slime and stuff it in a mucus box and hook seaweed up to it. Do we let it last for a long time? Or does it have a short life like a battery? Perhaps we have to swap them out from time to time? But the tired ones can be “recharged” with a fructose solution? An algae’s gotta eat, natch! Or better yet, old technology had to be swapped out, box after box. But new tech has a fructose IV that drips (feeds?) the box of algae. Yeah, baby! Slime Power!

On to the problem of our handicapped froggies. So they looked at the star’s corona during an eclipse and went blind. For us, that would not be totally crippling in communication. We could still talk and hear. But the Garum communicate with sight and scent. They use their skin to flash various colors and augment it with scents released into the water. So how would we work around this handicap?

Perhaps we can have a mutualism pairing with some type of remora? You know—those weird, upside down seeming fish that you usually see swimming under sharks? But these remora have a side benefit for the Garums. First, the remora get the benefit of the safety of swimming with the Garum, plus they eat bacteria off of the Garum’s skin. In return, they vibrate a certain way when a nearby Garum turns a certain shade of color. So through selective breeding and extensive training (for both the remora and for the Garum) they turn into effective “hearing” aids.

Oh, bother. I just thought of another problem. During the expedition to the surface (or in this case, the “Shallows” and they stood up enough to look into the sky—actual words and concepts for these items to be selected later) we had decided that they look directly at the star during the eclipse and were struck blind by the corona’s intense light.

So we have an expedition of now blind froggies.

How’d they get back?

Oh, bother!