9. Biodiversity and evolution

Partial Solar System §20; Niches – Specification; Evolution to Sapience – Outline (v0.2) and Build Notes.

• Traits: 164 (was 109), now including the life-history, cognitive, plant, pollination, fruit, grass, parasitic, eusocial and manipulator traits of the Outline.
• Niches: 59 templates (was 42).
• Coevolution: 9 pairs in data/coevolution.json (arms races and mutualisms; Outline §3.2). (Earlier versions of this document said 28: the file has 9.)
• Niche construction: engineer niches generalised.
• Life history: the axes lifespan, juvenile period, diet quality, vocal, insulation, crypsis and detox. Fecundity falls as lifespan rises, and generation time and recovery follow.
• Feedback: wood burial and lignin decay on oxygen; the fire regime.
• Disturbance: impacts, large igneous provinces, glaciations. During tuning, survival rules were added (a mass event spares numerous, widespread lineages more often, and one refuge lineage survives for each great group).
• Running time: followed to a mind, steps of 4 Myr with 140 lineages kept, falling to 1 Myr near a mind and 200 kyr after tool use.
• Relations (relations.ts), built: pollination, seed dispersal, parasitism, symbiosis and disease, derived from the living lineages.
• Bestiary (bestiary.ts), built: "the creatures of this forest", the living creatures by the cover of their places, read by the RPG conversion and by anyone presenting a biome.

Classification is as in version 1: no fixed categories, rank earned by divergence, groups recorded by designation.

Still to build Run-based checks of the feedbacks

The Outline’s §10.2 tests that need whole runs are not written: oxygen rising with forests and falling after lignin decay, the fire gate in a run, forbid honoured, and the order of events against Earth’s.