Creating a new domain of organisms
Anyone who has taken high school biology know that all life on earth are divided into three different domains: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryota. On a planet in the outer habitable zone of a K-type star with approximately 1.5 Earth oceans of water, there is another domain: Duotorusa.
This is an image (shamelessly borrowed from TeX Stack Exchange) that I believe would show how a Duotorusa unit would look like in principle. The Duotorusa unit would be anaerobic, changing polysaccharides into waste products that it expels. They have two units that each perform different functions.
However, there are some technicalities I need to smooth over before I can make this infect humans coming to the planet. The most important thing is that this domain would be between Eukaryota (with many, unlimited cells), and Prokaryota (with one cell only), being a multi-cellular organism that is limited to having two cells. What is the division between this being an organism (Domain Duotorusa) and this being a mutualistic relationship (two organisms, Domain Bacteria)?
*To all those asking what evolutionary advantages having two units would carry, that will be asked in a separate question.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/104961. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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