Add a Mutualistic SCANDAL

A “SCANDAL” is a tongue-in-cheek acronym for Speciated by CANcer Development animALs. The term comes from a 2019 paper (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30674330/) that proposed the idea of organisms evolving from clonally transmissible cancers and made a highly speculative hypothesis (which is probably false) that myxosporeans, a bizarre class of mostly aquatic microscopic parasites that belong to the phylum cnidaria, are examples of this.

A clonally transmissible cancer is a line of cancerous cells that spreads between different individuals. Real examples are canine transmissible venereal tumor, devil facial tumor disease, and clonally transmissible cancers among bivalve mollusks.

It’s a weird bit of speculative biology that I think would be cool to see represented on Proteus.

My idea is that, at some point in the past, some fish on Proteus developed a cancer that was able to spread to other members of that lineage of fish

At some point, (perhaps aided by horizontal gene transfer) this line of cells started spreading among some different lineage of fish.

It also had the ability to produce light using a specialized enzyme. Perhaps this line of cells already had this ability (it could’ve emerged from light-producing cells), or perhaps it acquired it (maybe through horizontal gene transfer…?)

This new lineage of fish evolved to utilize these cells, now arguably an organism, to perform bioluminescent displays, similar to how organisms like Hawaiian Bobtail Squid use vibrio bacteria.

In exchange, the fish provides conditions that allow these organisms to proliferate.

At some point, the lineage of fish this organisms arose from went extinct (perhaps because of something the Axum or the pioneers did?). This organisms is their only descendant.

The organism could transfer its genes, which may have evolved in the fish it arose from, to other fish via horizontal gene transfer. The fish the cultivate this organism could take on phenotypic traits of the fish the organism arose from.

This could just be added via a PDA entry and some sort of texture on a fish.

The name of this organism could be inspired by something related to ghosts.