Since Eryobis is less than habitable for humans and has been decreed a sanctuary world by the imperium, Kalpea functions as the main base of operations in the AnVela Koeliv system and since this system is in such a remote corner of the galaxy, Kalpea has become one of the most important worlds in its sector of the Peirnovian Galactic Empire, both economically and strategically.
Kalpea is mostly a farm world and the planet has been kept half frozen to, for one prevent it from flooding and becoming an ocean world and two, to make it more suitable to grow crops without extreme heat and has a highly regulated temperate climate in most regions of the world. Though there are also mining operations on the moon and it has a vibrant civilian industry within its numerous cities that can cover the surface area of entire countries.
Despite this, Kalpea also has a decent amount of space dedicated to nature. As with any planet, it is essential for Kalpea to leave a lot of space for non urbanised regions to give life to the world so that the great terraforming machines called world engines don't have to do all the work anymore.
For some reason however, Kalpea has been riddled with "unsanctioned life" more so than most colonies. Seemingly from the moment the world became habitable and people began to settle it, enigmatic creatures that cannot be traced back to Earth, collectively dubbed as "rhynians" began appearing all over the world. While this is not unique and happens pretty much universally on all of our colonies because of the illegal pet trade inevitably resulting in such pets establishing feral populations on planets, it seemed as if Kalpea already had them before cities were even properly inhabited.
The leading theory is that an organisation of smugglers had tried setting up on Kalpea, but faced a calamity that saw all the animals they had escaping into the wild. While many people in the imperium don't bat much of an eye when seeing a "rhynian" because they've become just as normal as a sheep, cow or cat on many worlds, they can cause a lot of damage to the carefully engineered ecosystems that we wish to install and maintain on our terraformed worlds.
Since Kalpea had a particularly bad case of "rhynian invasion", the goverment decided to take a desperate measure. Many of the flora and fauna once planned to come to Kalpea were scrapped from the list to prevent large scale die-offs and instead the various "rhynians" were accepted as the new norm. That said, they brought over a number of creatures that were not originally planned to live on Kalpea.
Most notable of these, and the most iconic animal of Kalpea is the Kalpean devil (Sarcophilus "harrisii" kalpeaensis). These marsupials descent from a population of S. "harrisii" that came from another sanctuary world and were already somewhat different from the orginal Tasmanian devils from Earth. The Kalpean devils however, were further modified to survive on Kalpea, being given greater radiation resistance and ability to cope with the lower gravity of the world.
They were brought over for one purpose: to control the population of the heavily armoured "bipod rhynians" that can be so destructive to our nature and farmlands. Because of the incredible biteforce of the devils that allows them to make short work of the bony armour of the bipods and their oportunistic scavenging behaviour, it was thought that the devils would act as cleaners of carcasses and that they would prey on pups to keep the populations down.
What was not expected however was the degree to which the devils would evolve over the several centuries since their introduction. They grew exponentially larger with each generation and became the apex predators of their environments, hunting their own prey more often that scavenging in many cases. The modern Kalpean devils reach sizes comparable to male jaguars from Earth, often standing over 70 cm tall at the shoulder.
The spread of unsactioned organisms on Kalpea is not just limited to the land. The oceans of Kalpea are also home to a number of "rhynian" creatures, such as the strange, seemingly three jawed animals called (whitefin) dufa's (Dufa leucoptera) that can often be seen frolicking near harbours. At between 1- and 1.5 meters long, dufa's have become iconic animals on Kalpea and are typically quite friendly to humans. This, unfortunately also results in many dufa's getting hit by boat propellors as they might follow boats to get food.
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