Related:

• Although Planet's native life is based, like Earth'
  on right-handed DNA, and codes for all the same amino acids, the inevitable chemical and structural differences from a billion years of evolution in an alien environment render the native plant life highly poisonous to humans....
• The prevalence of anoxic environments rich in organic material
  combined with the presence of nitrated compounds has led to an astonishing variety of underground organisms which live in the absence of oxygen and "breathe" nitrate....
• The fungus has been Planet's dominant lifeform since about the time of the Lower Paleozoic on Earth.
  But when, once every hundred million years or so, the neural net at last achieves the critical mass necessary to become sentient, the final metamorphosis kills off most of the other life on the planet....
• The Isle of the Deep is really not a single creature but a colony of thousands of individual tubules, an aquatic vector of the Mind Worm which terrorizes Planet's continents.
  Over its lifetime certain tubules secrete a tough, gluelike substance which hardens to form the characteristic shell that floats the colony and creates the appearance of a rogue island....
• You are the children of a dead planet, earthdeirdre, and this death we do not comprehend.
  We shall take you in, but may we ask this question--will we too catch the planetdeath disease?...
• You see in this dome the intermingling of native and earth plants.
  Outside, they are competitors, struggling over the trace elements required for life....
• Eternity lies ahead of us, and behind. Have you drunk your fill?
  -- Lady Deirdre Skye, "Conversations with Planet", Epilogue...
• Observe the Razorbeak as it tends so carefully to the fungal bloom
  just the right bit from the yellow, then a swatch from the pink....
• In the great commons at Gaia's Landing we have a tall and particularly beautiful stand of white pine, planted at the time of the first colonies.
  It represents our promise to the people, and to Planet itself, never to repeat the tragedy of Earth....