Zoetica Ebb, 2025
A transcript of the presentation about the paper, Hybrid Futures: Human Adaptation in Symbiotic Ecosystems, delivered on Friday, April 11, 2025 at The Adventures of Matter: Beyond the Boundaries of the Living and the Nonliving as part of International Vectors Conference.
Hybrids
I’ve been studying bio-glitches, xenohybrids and psychogametous life-forms for the last decade at The Institute For Psychogametous Life. The main findings are presented in Chimeric Herbarium, published in 2022. It’s an archive of art and documentation from the lost Novy Mir mission. I’ll give you a brief introduction today.
Here you can see a few examples of the xenohybrids that I’ve been studying:
An aquatic predatory symbiote
A flowering organism with a 2-stage lifecycle
An aquatic metamorphic parasite
And a cave-dwelling temporary symbiote
Xenohybridisation
Xenohybridisation is our future as a species. Some might even say the process is well underway. How do we know if we are looking at a xenohybrid? To determine this, we need to understand least-interaction boundaries.
Least interaction boundaries
To analyze any system we must define what’s inside and outside. The boundary should be the smallest bubble that still contains all the essential parts and their interactions. This means the exchange through the boundary is minimized.
An ecosystem, whether it's a tiny mossy rock or the entire universe, is defined by this boundary of minimal exchange.
Now, imagine two organisms, each a self-contained world defined by its own least-interaction boundary. As they merge, more and more information, matter, and energy flow through the boundary between them.
Least-interaction boundary
Least-interaction boundary: the perimeter around a system where the flux of energy, information, and matter is minimised, i.e. its most contained state
When intertwined to the point of such codependency that separation means death, we can only think of them as a single organism, and the unified least-interaction boundary contains them both. This dissolution of boundaries is at the core of the hybridisation process.
Genetic Engineering
You may be familiar with this famous early xenohybrid: Alba. She was a genetically-modified glowing rabbit created by artist Eduardo Kac and geneticist Louis-Marie Houdebine. Alba caused quite a scandal among the public and was seen as some kind of abomination. It probably didn’t help that Kac described Alba as an animal that did not exist in nature.
So what is a xenohybrid?
Xenohybrid
Xenohybrid: an entity resulting from combining the qualities of two organisms with disjoint evolutionary paths
All the organisms I’m studying intertwine with another entity for a substantial part of their lifecycle tо surpass their innate limits. When the two parts are genetically incompatible, we call them “xenohybrids”.
Desiderium papilionem
Our current research revolves around the study of an ecosystem on Chimera, the 11th moon of the gas giant Eesa-7 in NQ3. This ecosystem has distinct wet and dry seasons, and numerous lakes in perpetual tectonic flux. A few of these lakes are deep and stable, while most are small and only fill with water during the moon’s five rainy seasons. The ecosystems of individual lakes are simply not big enough to support large aquatic predators, making it necessary for them to move from lake to lake to get enough nutrients.
Take the Desiderium papilionem: a large aquatic predator that evolved well before the small lakes formed, during the time when a large central lake dominated the landscape. It had to adapt. To access the diverse nutrition from multiple lakes, it hybridizes with a native dry-land organism. This symbiont seeks out the Desiderium in a mutual instinctual process which appears to have co-evolved.
The Desiderium uses a retrovirus vector to introduce a DNA-modification sequence. This alters the partner for better aquatic performance by adding hydrodynamic features.
The adaptation allows the composite organism to hunt deep-water species and to thrive across a wide selection of lakes. This composite organism is the apex predator of the lakeland ecosystem.
Desiderium papilionem xenohybrid
This is a fascinating and efficient process, particularly when we consider its versatility. We’ve learned that it’s not exclusive to the co-evolved local quadruped.
One example is the ordeal of Julie Tsaselski, Chief Science Monitor from the Novy Mir expedition. After total equipment failure, there was no going home. To survive in this harsh alien environment, and perhaps to sate her scientific fascination, Tsaselski personally underwent the Desiderium symbiosis. Sacrificing some of her humanity, she took the place of the local land organism, gaining aquatic breathing and jet-propulsion.
Desiderium papilionem + Desiderium papilionem xenohybrid
Usually, the Desiderium papilionem procreates by exposing its gametes to the water-borne pollen of other Desideria. Fertilised gametes develop into seeds and shed when the wet season ends, completing the cycle.
CSM Tsaselski’s new gills aid this process, undulating to draw the genetic material into her repurposed lungs to maximize pollen capture.
The mission log reads:
In the downpour, Tsaselski’s new gills unfurled and throbbed subtly. Their sticky filaments ensnared drifting pollen, inviting it into the moist interior of her transformed lungs. Her breath, a deliberate invitation as it drew the pollen towards her, guiding the precious genetic dust into the receptive spaces inside.
Although Tsaselski's transition was a drastic, and perhaps partially forced adaptation, the resulting composite organism presents a perfect example of the surprising possibilities of xenohybridisation.
Sometimes, profound restructuring is imperative.
Mutual Assimilation
Let’s look at another one of our case studies: the entwined organism resulting from lab assistant Kira Sirotkina and a Lenticus somnium.
The Lenticus keeps its prey alive while detached gastropods digest the prey’s soft tissue. Then, the Lenticus uses the prey as an incubator.
Sirotkina engineered a retrovirus to make her DNA hack the Lenticus, but the experiment did not go according to plan. Her soft tissue hybridized with the Lenticus, replacing her muscles and ligaments with functional alien-botanical equivalents.
The log reads:
The lake. It replays in my mind, that revolting tableau. Entry was textbook, the embedding, a brutal surprise. But it’s the feeding that haunts. The gastropods erupting from her skin. The initial screams, then this peace. Sighs mingled with wet tearing. Kira’s face – a flicker of something akin to contentment, even as those things dissolved her arm. Pleasure blooming in the abyss of pain. Muscles spasming, tissue being consumed, yet a soft exhale. Her prognosis was always grim, but this euphoric decay? None of us were prepared. All we can do is observe, but the lake… It’s stained with something beyond blood now.
Records indicate that the resulting hybrid took residence in the shallow part of a nearby lake. It was observed coming back to Sirotkina’s duties on multiple occasions.
Note that in the schema from the archive, there is no sensible boundary to draw between the two organisms that formed the new entity, showing the hybridization process is complete.
It's human nature to become less human
As Sirotkina and Tsaselski cases demonstrate, it's human nature to become less human. We seek out change for the sake of change, and hybridisation, once possible, becomes inevitable. It’s a necessary adaptation to a rapidly changing world, reflecting the fundamental principle that ecosystems thrive through interaction and recombination.
Mergence with other life forms demonstrates a deep integration that fundamentally alters what it means to be human - yet nothing is more human than to seek it.
Bio-glitch
Bio-glitch: unpredictable and often disruptive biological event such as recombination, mutation, and hybridisation
Alien matter becomes integral and inseparable within the biological makeup of these new life forms, urging us to confront human identity in a world where the boundaries of "human" are increasingly porous.
Technological and medical advancements, bio-glitches, and the potential for multi-organism merging, beckon a new era of directed evolution, where hybridisation transcends our “natural” limitations.
Behavioural hybrid
Behavioural hybrid: A complex of two or more physically separate bodies which cannot thrive and propagate without all its parts.
Aberrant Plexus
Here at The Institute For Psychogametous Life we have an entity that survived by using something that was already here - humans.
The Aberrant Plexus is an alien mycelium and a colony-organizer-manipulator. It’s theorised to have arrived with the capsule carrying the Chimeric herbarium archive.
Without its expected symbiotic partners, this xenomycelium has done something unexpected: it's keyed in on the fact that we're a social species. Our ingrained tendencies to connect, communicate, and cooperate? The Plexus seems to be leveraging that.
It exhibits a sensitivity to and influence upon the social dynamics of human subjects within its containment perimeter. Its exploitation of pre-existing social structures suggests a sophisticated strategy for environmental adaptation.
Humans start to operate in unison
It’s clear that social interaction with the Aberrant Plexus drives its whole life cycle. How it grows, fruits, spores, and even seems to evolve.
And the researchers here are figuring out how to make it respond just by trying things out. It's a feedback loop: what we do changes the Plexus, and then how the Plexus reacts changes how we interact with it - and with each other.
We've seen the Plexus influence personnel to form incredibly tight-knit, almost collective groups. Over time, these individuals start acting more and more in sync, to where they seem less like separate people and more like parts of a single organism.
The least-interaction boundaries between the humans are obviously diminishing. The pronounced cooperation necessitated by the Plexus’ "interventions" is fostering an unusual degree of interdependence and synchronized action amongst the research team.
This looks like a real case of behavioral xenohybridisation, where the mycelium is making deep social connections happen without any physical merging.
Early data suggest that the Aberrant Plexus might be aiming for something bigger: a radical way to integrate our social structures into its own operating system. If this behavioral manipulation precedes a deeper, non-invasive hybridisation, we must figure out what it's ultimately trying to achieve.
Humans are Hybrids
Our cells house the remnants of ancient viral infections and the DNA of once-free bacteria, the mitochondria – a primal form of biological merging.
Most of us carry Neanderthal DNA, an echo of interbreeding with another human lineage.
This inherent capacity for internalizing the "other" – a biological imperative for adaptation – now extends beyond our history. As our interconnected world accelerates, the lines fade.
Just as early life bio-glitched its way to complexity through symbiosis, we too are driven towards hybrid futures, a consequence of our inherent adaptability and the planet's interconnected signal-processing network.
Gaia Hypothesis
The Gaia hypothesis posits the entire planet as a self-regulating interconnected system, a vast network where all living and nonliving components are interdependent. Through the lens of xenohybridisation, this planetary ecosystem could be argued to fit the definition of a global-scale hybrid.
Hybrids with open reproduction cycles
To understand the scope necessary to study our further evolution, we must also look at lifeforms with open reproduction cycles.
A life-form has an open reproduction cycle if it requires another life-form or hybrid-partner to reproduce successfully.
Lifeforms with open reproduction cycles
Cavendish bananas are extinct without humans - they’re seedless and humans clone them.
We are used by viruses that are inert on their own, but their RNA reprograms our cells to replicate them.
And in obligatory mutualism, the yucca moth and the yucca plant are reproductively codependent: the moth pollinates the flower and lays eggs inside, where the larvae are fed and protected by the plant.
Psychogametous lifeforms
Psychogametous lifeforms also have open reproduction cycles. They replicate and evolve by leveraging other entities to transmit and reinterpret symbolic information.
First articulated in the Chimeric Herbarium, the term describes extraterrestrial organisms exhibiting this model, suggesting biological systems can utilize cognitive and cultural pathways for reproduction.
Unlike memes or word viruses, these lifeforms physically manifest after informational transmission, encoding their reproductive information into symbols for human cognitive propagation and adaptation.
Desire drives adaptation
Study: dissemination of psychogametous life forms
The Desiderium papilionem shows an impressive ability to adapt. A successful xenohybrid in its native environment, it’s also prolifically psychogametous. Its first non-biological manifestation was a drawing, reproduced by the hundreds in the Chimeric Herbarium. The manuscript then replicated in readers’ minds, coaxing them to find collaborators to propagate some of the drawings as graphic designs, and later, clothing.
As an exosymbiote, the clothing physically transformed their temporary hybrid partners, altered their self-perception, and raised their confidence. Consequently, the Desiderium spread further by fueling desire, and thus reproduction through made-to-order objects.
This spread eventually resulted in its next form: the digital model. The model then became a physical, infinitely reproducible sculpture made by the artist Peachthief who grew a digital Desiderium from cyber-seed, and used a 3D printer to make a physical specimen.
Each cycle occurred through a distinct human or group, and evolved into a different form, better adapted to its new habitat every time.
This evolution continues.
Hybridisation: an inevitable consequence of human nature
Humans are especially susceptible hybrid partners for life-forms with open reproductive cycles. In this, we find convergence with posthumanism, where the human is “permeable to other natures, other matters, and other cultural agents,”. Being human already involves surpassing the boundaries of human “nature”.
As we navigate a future where the very definition of "human" is in flux, I propose the ability to adapt to rapid and extreme levels of change as a defining aspect of humanity.
Matter with Agency
Our current definition of 'life' is inadequate. It doesn't account for entities like viruses, which exhibit a clear drive for self-perpetuation. The nature of psychogametous life-forms, AI, and 'uploaded' cyborgs challenges traditional biological definitions. “Matter with Agency” is a more encompassing term for entities with inherent directives.
These are matter possessed of agenda, driven by an intrinsic will to perpetuate. This raw self-directed imperative is the core of a useful definition of life. Beyond metabolism and reproduction, life is the hunger, the relentless push to be and become more. And in that primal drive lies a power that eclipses old notions of biology, a power that whispers of futures where the boundaries of flesh and code, organic and artificial, living and something more, dissolve into a new reality.
In striving to transcend humanity, we only redefine it
We reshape ourselves and our environment. Our drive to adapt and connect, already evident in our biology, is now amplified by technology.
Hybrids are an inevitable consequence of human nature.
We crave the beyond
We're accelerating this process, seizing control of evolution. We're directly manipulating matter with agency into new biological forms and fusing technology with our minds and bodies. We're merging with bacteria, viruses, and sometimes even with each other. This reflects the essential human drive to transcend limitations and push beyond the boundaries of our nature.
We are matter with agency. It’s human nature to become less human.
Aemulor fictus
I’d like to touch on a type of hybrid we haven’t talked about yet: a hybrid mimic.
The Aemulor fictus is a parasitic predator whose reproductive strategy exemplifies a sophisticated form of parasitism. This flowering organism, with its striking morphology, actively seeks out and infiltrates the bodies of organisms from other species. Through a rapid cellular replacement process employing Pouyannian mimicry, the Aemulor fictus commandeers the host's form and sensory outputs.
Aemulor fictus hybrid mimic
The resulting short-lived hybrid mimic attracts pollinators through tactile, olfactory, chemical, and even audiovisual signals mimicking the host. It operates with limited functionality and ultimately decays.
This parasitic takeover achieves pollination, pseudocopulation, and genetic dispersal within hours, not generations. It’s a direct exploitation of the host's biological systems and even its cognitive functions for the sole benefit of the Aemulor fictus.
The mimic's eventual decay further underscores the parasitic nature of this interaction, utilizing even the host's decomposition to attract secondary pollinators.
Aemulor fictus and Aemulor fictus hybrid mimic
One final log entry for today from the Novy Mir mission, documenting the fate of Second Pilot Polina Kaihua:
The crimson bloom erupted on Polina’s chest, its bearded flower twitching obscenely. Her eyes shimmered sugar-cataract pink. Viscous tendrils snaked out, anchoring themselves in flesh - a blooming corruption. A flicker in the gaze, a wrongness in the posture, a low murmur in the voice, broadcasting some kind of demented siren call. A puppet learning new strings as the flower pulsed, its stigma glistening with threat. Flesh rewritten cell by cell, to lure unseen pollinators to her: beautiful, terrible, and irrevocably lost.
Adapt or Vanish
Although Kaihua’s fate is a cautionary tale, it doesn’t change our future.
Our fundamental drive to adapt and thrive in an ever-changing universe compels hybridization. "Life is artifact-making," and this extends to the molecular level, where organisms engage in codemaking processes that shape their evolutionary trajectory.
While the outcomes of such hybridisation may be unpredictable, they are inevitable. Embracing this fact, understanding the principles of ecosystem interaction, and acknowledging the semiotic agency of all components within the network will be crucial for navigating the new phase of human evolution.
Mergence with other life forms isn't a hypothetical scenario; it's an unfolding reality driven by our inherent desire to redefine what it means to be alive.
Least-interaction boundary: the perimeter around a system where the flux of energy, information, and matter is minimised, i.e. its most contained state
Bio-glitch: unpredictable and often disruptive biological event such as recombination, mutation, and hybridisation
Xenohybrid: an entity resulting from combining the qualities of two organisms with disjoint evolutionary paths
Behavioural hybrid: A complex of two or more physically separate bodies which cannot thrive and propagate without all its parts
Hybrids with an open reproduction cycle: lifeforms requiring a hybrid-partner for successful reproduction
Psychogametous lifeform: an entity that encodes its reproductive information into symbolic forms, using cognitive systems to transmit and reinterpret that information, thereby triggering propagation