Carnivorous Water

Name: Carnivorous Water

Description: A fluid-like entity that takes on the appearance of water, though this is mostly due to this fact that the bacteria that causes this to happen actually makes its home in water. Specifically pure, mostly clean water as the bacteria cannot survive in saltwater, water with a pH outside of a range of 6 to 8, boiling water, or water with an abundance of competing bacteria.

Several unfortunate victims of a Carnivorous Water infested pool.​

Tamability: Cannot be tamed, but is able to be gathered and used.

Where Is It Found?: Carnivorous water is typically found in very cold, freshwater ocean planets with little chemical impurities, in pockets of water that have yet to freeze or have recently thawed from glaciers or massive chunks of ice that are relatively clean. They can however lie dormant in the cores of extremely cold chunks of ice, including glaciers and even on rare occasions, comets. Due to how picky they are with habitat selection, moving water below 10 degrees Fahrenheit is optimal for the bacteria, allowing them to last 20+ years without any sort of sustenance. 32 degrees Fahrenheit is a struggle, bringing their lifespan down to 2 hours and making feeding and reproduction inefficient beside the loss of life in the process of doing so. When frozen solid so that their chemical reactions are brought to a physical standstill, they can remain dormant for thousands of years. Boiling water will kill the bacteria in a matter of seconds.

Rarity: Relatively uncommon. While there are plenty of ocean planets, not all of them are extremely cold, and not all of them are pure. With that in mind, the bacteria has a tendency to kill large amounts of life in otherwise habitable ocean when perfect conditions are met for them to reproduce rapidly. For this reason the bacteria is typically seen as a major annoyance.

Diet: Flesh. Living things. The bacteria gains energy through the consumption of living matter and can store it for quite a long time, and is capable of lasting even longer as an extremophile when frozen in ice and left to sit dormant.

Products: Death. More carnivorous water. Potential uses in medicine in minor amounts for stopping very specific infections that cannot defend against it.

Reproduction: Asexual. The bacteria's genetic material is split and copied during cell division which creates more bacteria. Reproductive success has been linked both to the abundance of life that isn't immune to it or otherwise simply can't stop it, and equally importantly, when other conditions are met for the water to be habitable for them, the temperature of the water, colder meaning faster reproduction.

Size: Microscopic.

Weight: Negligible.

Lifespan: A single cell on average may last only a little over 20 years without any source of energy in perfect conditions that allow for efficient storage of it. The prolonging of an area of water's continued habitability for the bacteria relies on the fact that they kill everything living in already minimally habitable ocean planets, which eventually means they exhaust their energy source and either die off or go dormant in ice for potentially thousands of years.

Abilities: Killing things. Uses an enzyme that binds to whatever it can and breaks it down into chemicals it can absorb.

Flaws: Very picky regarding habitat, and even then, success within that habitat due to other conditions such as strong immune systems of prey, as it is a very simple organism. Counterproductive way of continued existence, often leading to the mass death and dormancy of the bacteria when food supply is low. Cannot survive out of water for long. Many feeding bacteria die in the process due to the fact that living things are a 'biome' of their own and the bacteria is incapable of competing in any way but sheer numbers and reproducing at a higher rate than they are killed, which is fast in both cases. Stepping out of an infected body of water will typically kill the bacteria after a while, even if not instantly as one's immune system fights back and kills the simple bacteria easily, on top of non-ideal temperature; for this reason it doesn't often kill sapient species, though the success of this trick relies on not having absorbed a lot, and not in a vital area. Medical attention however is almost always promptly required.

 

Lifespan: I was using bacteria that had been found still living in permafrost for half a million years as a sort of example to fall back on that bacteria under perfect/extreme conditions can last quite a long time. This being said though, 'perfect conditions' constitutes extreme cold in this case, and that's where they'd last upwards of 20 years without sustenance without being trapped in ice, since flowing water can go below freezing without turning to ice, as the chemical reactions going on inside of them would be slowed. In ice is when they'd begin to last far longer and actually enter a sort of hibernation. I'd go out on a limb to clarify this and say that in water above 10 degrees Fahrenheit that their lifespan would decrease exponentially as more energy is consumed quicker until they run out, to as little as 2 hours at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

Abilities: It releases an enzyme, yes, due to the fact that using an acid or something is off the table seeing as changing the pH of the water around them is off the table. Hence the ability to be immune to it also, as enzymes can't just bind to everything necessarily. Prey is detected by body heat, as that would likely stand out most in vast, barren, ice-cold oceans.

Temperature: Anything above the freezing point of water is far below optimal, 32 degrees Fahrenheit alone already being a struggle for them due to inefficient reproduction rate and a rapid consumption of energy to boot. In boiling water, the bacteria won't last more than a few seconds. Freezing them solid won't kill them but what it would do is bring the chemical reactions that allow them to 'eat' and reproduce to a physical standstill until they are thawed and put back into liquid water.