The first intraterrestial I’m designing is based on the mimic octopus.
Possible Names
The working name for the creature in the story is “Thousand Fold” or “Thousand Mask” or “Deepkin” or “Deep Mimic” or “The Mimarch”
It’s a complex, ancient organism that co-operates and works in symbiotically with other creatures.
Let’s look at real mimic octopuses:
Mimic Octopus Camouflage Ability
The mimic octopus can do the following while mimicking:
- It can change color and pattern in realtime, using chromatphores
- It can change its body texture
- It can reconfigure its arm positions
- It can alter its movement style
It’s known to mimic these animals:
- Anemone
- Jellyfish
- Crab / Large Crab
- Mantis Shrimp
- Stingray
- Starfish / Feather Star
- Seahorse-like postures
According to various reports from divers, it can mimic 10-15 animals total.
It can also modify and hybridize these shapes to create even more shapes. Scientist expect this list to grow, as mimic octopus are further observed.
Design For The Intraterrestial Evolved From Mimic Octopus
30 million years.
The Intraterrestial Mimic Octopus has been in a underground ocean that has been sealed off from the rest of the Earth for about a million years.
Due to the depths and the stillness of the underground ocean, the intraterrestial has become hyper-giant (measuring up to 1000 feet in width. These octopuses have also become intelligent. The cephalopod brain It also co-ordinates with other intraterrestial creatures that were evolved from deep sea creatures too, to create a cooperative multi-individual animal, even perhaps “stacked octopuses” as a separate creature. To put it simply it partners with siphonophores and comb jellies).
The interspecies partnerships evolved because the isolated ecosystem required cooperation for survival—the intelligent siphonophores serving as communication networks, nautiluses as memory keepers, brittle stars as sensors
This intraterrestial mimic octopus is much more adept and multifaceted at camoflague. This creature can mimic other animals, including humans. It can also mimic entire environments.
Lichens demonstrate that symbiotic partnerships can persist and evolve over 250 million years. For intelligent octopus to develop deep partnerships with nautiluses, siphonophores, and other creatures it would take 10-20 million years for the relationships to become genuinely co-evolved rather than merely cooperative.
The most compelling real-world analog is Movile Cave in Romania, which has been sealed off from the outside world for approximately 5.5 million years.
The octopus evolved from ancestors that entered the underground system during a period of tectonic activity that sealed the chambers. The constant environment—stable temperature, chemosynthetic food sources, no day/night cycles—removed the evolutionary pressure for short lifespans that normally limits octopus cognition. Over 25+ million years, they developed:
- Extended lifespans (the 100,000-year-old individuals) through mechanisms similar to the immortal jellyfish’s transdifferentiation
- Enhanced mimicry evolving beyond predator avoidance into sophisticated communication
- Distributed intelligence with their arm-based neural networks expanding into networked consciousness across multiple individuals
- Deep-time cognition thinking at geological timescales due to the unchanging environment
The Different Intelligence
Octopus intelligence evolved through a completely different pathway than vertebrates. They developed complex brains despite having fast life histories rather than the slow life histories that drove mammalian intelligence.
Cephalopods already possess about 500 million neurons.
The major cognitive leap in cephalopods occurred when they lost their external shells, which created intense predatory pressure while allowing exploitation of challenging new niches.