Straight cross post from Nascent here, I’m afraid, mainly because I’m too lazy to re-write the whole thing again just to make it different, but I thought I should post here for anyone too lazy to read there! So apologies to anyone reading both.

The biggest event this summer has been the acquisition of our third island, which has been entirely given over to setting up an SLEcosystem, created by the Ecosystem Working Group. In their own words, the EWG is “a small group of dedicated scripters and builders committed to the notion of developing a simple, but functioning, ecosystem within the confines of the Second Life platform. We are attempting to develop common protocols for animal-animal interaction and believe our experiments here can enrich Second Life and the scientific understanding of complex systems themselves”

The SL Ecosystem has been living at its original home, Terminus, since its inception, and has already attracted a lot of interest in Second Life and beyond. Terminus lives on: the version living on Second Nature is independent, and features high prim organisms which (in some cases!) look not dissimilar to real-world creatures. The whole project is ongoing and fully open sourced, so anyone is welcome to contribute to it: our ecosystem is being continually being updated as members of the group create new organisms or update the existing ones. Species on Second Nature currently include the basic plantform, the Cannon Plant, the herbivorous gridlice and gridbirds and the predator, a flourescent blue Flying Fox. The chief guardian of our ecosystem is Luciftias Neurocam in SL, a neuroscientist from Drexel, and he will be coming to Second Nature to give a talk and demo of the sim in the next few weeks: details to follow. In the meantime, to see the ecosystem and get more information, come and see it. Tip: watch the large green blobs – if you’re lucky, you might see a gridlouse hatch!