Within a matter of days there was a considerable crowd of the homaroids pressed hard against the unyielding surface of the dome. They appeared to be observing us as we moved around the dome, hard at work at our tasks, ululating the whole while in their gurgling, fluid voices. We set Ajita, the closest thing we had to a psychologist, to studying their actions.
On my second trip outside, one of the homaroids proceeded ahead of me, snipping samples exactly as I had done the previous day. To my wondering eyes it began laying them on the ground: root, leaf, stem, fruit, pod, or flower intact—the perfect specimen presentation each time. Just as I had done.
Curious at its seeming ability to so faithfully mimic my actions, I made sure that it watched me carefully uproot an entire plant. I wanted to see what parasites or symbiotes might be attached and was curious as to what my companion would make of this. The homaroid watched me carefully.
After I dug up two more plants, taking care not to vary my actions, the homaroid began to do likewise with another plant nearby, carefully trimming the loose soil away with that huge claw, much as I had done with my spade.
Ajita became very excited when I told her what had happened and immediately set up a testing program. She started running a few specimens through mazes and quickly graduated them to more complex tests when they showed increasing levels of sophistication with the test protocols. Her small collection of homaroids were seemingly able to learn in instants and retain it long term—or so she believed. The difficulty she faced was that her subjects tended to die just as she thought they were making headway.
“Their bodies decay rapidly in this heat,” she told me. “They start to smell, the shells fall off, and the bugs start eating them right away. I watched a swarm clean out the entire shell in a matter of hours after the subject died. It was horrible to watch.”
Death was only one of the problems with the homaroids. Many of the other lobsters tended to suddenly disappear. We suspected that the larger homaroids that had started arriving were responsible for these disappearances since, by that time we had become aware of their cannibalistic practices—preying upon their own kind.
These late arrivals were much the same in appearance as the earlier ones, but had different shell markings and were a quarter size larger. Ed playfully and provisionally named these X-Homarus evenlarger, asserting them to be another variant.
None of the smaller homaroids ventured close to the larger ones, apparently anxious to avoid coming in reach of their claws. As a result, each evenlarger was surrounded by an open area. When they moved, the smaller ones parted to each side as waves in a chitinous sea.
Ajita reported that the larger ones tested as more intelligent than the others. Ed borrowed a few for closer examination, ruining Ajita’s carefully planned testing regime.
Ed dissected his captives with great care and confirmed his earlier suppositions—the organ that the homaroids used as a brain was not localized, like ours, but was an evenly distributed extension of their central notochord. This latter structure, what we would term a spine, lacked our familiar surrounding bony structure. A little reflection revealed that they had little need for such protection since their entire body was encased within a hard exoskeleton and needed no extra protection.
The notochord ran the length their body, with sites of the higher functions located more toward the center, close to the cluster of sensory organs that projected from the top, while the motor functions lay nearest the extremities. It was a most efficient design.
What was significant was that the “brains” of the larger species were significantly more complex than their smaller cousins.
Ed’s heated arguments with Ajita about the impact of this discovery on the possible intelligence of the homaroids led to an amazing discovery: that the homaroids were able to grow additional brain mass, which provided growing room for additional dendritic nerves, the connectors between active sites.
Both the homaroids’ increase in mass and accompanying dendritic growth appeared to occur in response to learning pressures, as Ed and Ajita learned through ruthless experimentation and dissection.
Ed explained the meaning of this to the rest of us during one of our periodic review sessions. “The same sort of growth of dendritic nerves occurs in humans of all ages whenever they learn new tasks, but not at the rate of growth we’ve found here.”
“But humans just expand the number of dendrites in their brains, not expand the brain itself,” Ajita corrected.
Ed considered, “Well, yes. But we have a lot of excess room in our brains. I also think our dendritic density is higher because of the differences in cell size. I found that the cells of most of the homaroids are on a grosser level than ours—ten to twenty times larger. You can even see some of the larger cells with your naked eye. This means that they have to increase volume to compensate for the lower density.”
Al waved his hands, as if trying to diagram the problem he saw in the air. “It scares me when you contend that they can grow the equivalent of a second brain. Where will it stop? If their environment puts enough pressure on them won’t they eventually become intelligent? Maybe even to the point of sapience!”
The remark sent a challenging and exciting thought through me. I wondered if they would develop a soul along with their intelligence, since they would necessarily understand guilt and consequences.
“I doubt that could happen,” Ed said, dismissing Al’s idea with a wave of his hand. “Unless they are more like Earth’s crustaceans than evidence seems to indicate, the inflexible exoskeleton that protects them prevents any great amount of expansion. Once a homaroid grows enough to fill its body cavity it can’t expand any more. That’s a natural limit.”
“And if it can’t grow then it can’t learn beyond a certain point,” Ajita responded on cue. So much for my dreams of an alien dialogue.
Or the existence of their souls.
As time went on even bigger members of the homaroids began gathering around the dome. Ed assured everyone that these were simply variants of the originals whose difference in size was the result of environmental conditions. He further stated that the bigger ones probably lived farther away, where a more plentiful supply of food was readily available. We all debated continually about the evolutionary mechanisms that would allow such variations in dimensions.
Perhaps, some of our crew concluded, it had taken these later arrivals longer to reach us from their distant feeding grounds.
So it seemed to me as well.
Eventually we had a broad range of homaroid sizes outside the dome. The crowd ranged from the original one-meter X-Homarus corsonni to the X-Homarus evenlarger, some of whom equaled the mass of a small human.
Not a few of the largest ones had imprinted on specific members of our crew. Even Ed, the chief homaroid dissector had his claque of devoted followers as he went about his grisly business. Often he had to shove them away to prevent them from reaching out to grab a snack from the exposed meat.
“Damn homaroids are omnivores,” he remarked proudly. “True survivors. Just as soon eat their own flesh as anything else.”
I despaired for the existence of any semblance of a soul in such animals.
The homaroids followed us every time we ventured from the dome. Since each had striations on its carapace, with unique variations in color and form, we found that we could easily identify individuals. A few of us even gave certain ones endearing names, much as you would a pet.
My own followers were headed by Julius, a medium-sized evenlarger with worn green and brown markings, and a dozen or so smaller corsonni of assorted sizes. I myself noted further correlations between intelligence and size as they mimicked my actions. Ajita had been right, the bigger ones were definitely quicker to learn new things and could handle complex tasks with ease.