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Q&A

What would the biosphere look like with a constant twilight/midnight sun?

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In this fantasy world there is no day/night but a constant mild light. There are also no seasons and the mild light is akin to the light at dawn or dusk. The sun doesn't really exist.

How would the plants and animals differ?

I assume sleep would look pretty different as well as photosynthesis.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/12453. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Since in your world, there are no natural time cycles, life will not have an external synchronization. Therefore the main changes in your world will be to changing weather (unless your world doesn't have that either). Instead of day-active and night-active animals, you might have dry-active and rain-active animals.

Some processes will still be cyclical because the cycles are not imposed but inherent in the process. For example, the predator-prey relation can lead to periodic cycles. Also biological processes often come in cycles not synchronized to external triggers (the most obvious one being menstruation). However, the complexity of ecosystems and biological systems probably means that the whole timing relations would be more chaotic, with several different cycles overlaying with more complex time behaviour.

I could imagine that animals would not have fixed, synchronized sleep cycles. While the brain needs sleep, some animals like dolphins can put parts of their brain to sleep. I imagine in a constant light world, such mechanisms would be more common also to land animals. In herd animals, it might also be that different animals sleep at different times, so that at any time some animals are awake and can react if predators arrive (which also can happen at any time). To minimize the risk that all members of the herd sleep at the same time, those animals would likely have different sleep cycles, so that a synchronization is excluded.

If the average light intensity is the same as in our world (just without the variations), photosynthesis would not be much affected; the plants would simply do it all the time, instead of only half of the time. However, neither plants nor animals would need to protect against intense sunlight.

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