I am going to reset my logs to something like 1A or T1, or something like that. Haven't decided yet, but now that I have survived my first tide, it seems proper to provide some kind of differentiation. Of course, this also assumes that I make it to the next tide. At least I will have some marker of how long I have been here, beyond the tagged log points that I do for each dawn and dusk, and other events.
I continue to watch the resurgence of life on this world. Life at all sizes. The microscopic to the truly massive. Trees and plants, like a desert right after a monsoon. The life almost desperate to get on with the things of being alive, before things dry out. There is even avian life of various types, and another reason for us to be hold up in the cove here. We're protected from that as well. The big predators don't bother us here, nor do the birds and other airborne life. Yes, more than just birds. Living blimps a kilometer or more long. It's amazing really. I'm studying the plants and additional animal life that has appeared. Much of it could be useful to my friends and I.
In that vein, my friends have assigned a small council who have undergone the full schooling regiment and like Frydai, understand most of what I get on about sometimes. They're job is to take my observations and suggestions and evaluate them, making sure that they will work from my friends. Frydai is on that council. It makes me happy to see that he is doing so well.
The waters here are just barely salty. Really I'd call them just short of fresh. I could drink it straight, without filtering, but I still filter it for safety, as do my friends. They have a simple, but effective charcoal filter set that they build, and the council has taken some of my suggestions for that as improvements, such as a simple wind driven pump into a reservoir. There are a number of natural pools, which were dry when I landed... crashed, here. With the pump, they're going to be able to keep them full with clean water.
One of the larger and deeper ones is where I hold my swimming lessons. Frydai first, and as with everything else I teach him, once he gets it... They really are a very intelligent species, which leaves me with yet deeper guilt for what I did early on. Several of the females that Frydai has been spending his down time with saw him swimming and nearly freaked out, thinking he was drowning. When they realized that he wasn't, and was able to swim, the begged him to teach them. I oversaw, but let him do the actual teaching. Much like the creatures I though they were, their legs are normally coiled up more than mine unless I'm deliberately squatting down. To swim, they have to consciously extend their legs out so that they are usable for that purpose. Once they do that, they're fast. A lot of power in those legs.
I brought the boat back with us, and fishing has been very successful in the protected parts of the cove. Still not sure I want to venture out beyond the barrier rocks, although my underwater drones are out there. I've signal repeaters mounted well below the surface so they can range farther. I also set up a more sensors now that we are back. The automated observatory I left on the secondary peak is proving to be a gold mine. With the data coming in from it, my simulations keep getting better and better.
I've confirmed that the fish we ate are what I thought, essentially the very young version of monstrous creatures, if they live long enough to make it that big. I'm guessing few do. Though there are some strange markers in their genetics, and given that they don't use DNA, but a triple helix, just like the majority of life here. I kind of wish i I was a geneticist. I might understand better how much of a discovery it is. It sure strikes me as something. Mapping the genetics of the various creatures, plants, etc... that I have gotten samples of, I can easily tell what is native and what isn't.
Although there is not a lot of non-native life, there is some. There is a patch of what I'd call lichen. It produces a gold mine of useful substances, including antibiotics, a few really unique solvents, some drugs including a powerful painkiller, and many other things. It is very clearly, not of this world. It uses some kind of five sided molecule for its genetic information. I have samples that generate different things, depending on what I feed it. Put it in a different atmosphere and I get even more compounds. I'm as much mapping what I can get it to produce as actually using what it produces.
My friends are not native, nor are the animals they herd. As a matter of fact, the genetics are similar enough, I'd be willing to say that they are from the same world. Not closely related in any way, but clearly related by a very ancient common ancestor. While both my friends and the squirrels use a double helix like I do, we use a different set of base pairs. I use eight different nucleotide's, they use six. I've found life that use use only two and others that use ten. Oddly, both my friends and I seem to have started out using four and somewhere in our history, an extra base pair got added. I know my species did it millennia before I was born as part of an early colonization efforts. I assume this is the same for my friends. It gives both of us more flexibility in the things our bodies can deal with.
I do remember that of all the life we found, across more than ten thousand worlds, everything but the Gooalaxsis used a DNA analog, and the Gooalaxsis are essentially living rocks containing a crystalline neural-network. No thoughts beyond those we give them to process data. All other life we have found use a form of DNA. Different base pairs, different amino-acids, but the same basic plan. That was until I got lost. Now I have cataloged life across so many different worlds, from the void worlds, to entirely different universes, and now this place. It's funny, but so much of the life here is edible in some form, despite the different genetics. A good number of the proteins and other nutrients are usable by our bodies, even if it is only a fraction of the total. Still, have to test everything first. Found one creature that would make for great eating, were it not for one compound that permeates its body. Essentially making it instantly poisonous. A different creature I've tested could be eaten all day long, but do us no good nutritionally.
My examinations are however revealing some additional plants we're going to start farming, and some animals we're building pens for, for various purposes. I am being so much more careful though, to make sure what creatures we're picking are just animals, and not like my friends, mistaken by my own arrogance as such when they are not.