Supox

The Supox Utricularia are an intelligent spacefaring race resembling some carnivorous plants. When they were first met by the New Alliance of Free Stars the Supox had already forged a cooperative relationship with the nearby Utwig.

Physiology and origin
The name by which they chose to introduce themselves to The Captain of the Flagship, the first Human to ever make contact with them, appears to be a conscious mimicking of human genus-species names for organisms. It combines their native term for themselves, "Supox", as the name of their genus, with the human term "utricularia" from Latin (literally "small pouches") as a way of comparing their physiology to that of a genus of terrestrial carnivorous plants, commonly known as bladderworts.

Like bladderworts, the Supox are life forms best classified as being in Earth's Kingdom Plantae. They are multicellular organisms with a body structure defined by rigid cell walls held in shape by internal turgor pressure, dependent primarily on photosynthesis for energy, with body structures like roots, leaves and stems very similar to those of terrestrial plants. They appear to have a basic structure of large green leaves surrounding a central stem, similar to that of an enlarged Earth bladderwort (complete with a stomach-like cavity for digesting animal food), with the addition of vinelike appendages acting as arms, rootlike appendages that detach from the ground and act as motile legs, and a blossom-like appendage containing sensory and vocal apparatus that acts as the analogue of a head.

The Supox's home planet, which they call "Earth" in human language — both as a direct translation of the native term "Vlik" (which they only use when it is necessary to distinguish Vlik from the human homeworld) and in conscious imitation of humans' naming of their homeworld — is the first planet around the star the Alliance calls Beta Librae and Supox call Root. Root is brighter and hotter than Sol and glows in the green portion of the visible spectrum. The proportionally higher energy available to photosynthetic organisms on Vlik may explain why the Supox were able to attain levels of motility, adaptability and complexity — all the way to the level of sentience — that no plant on the humans' Earth ever achieved.