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The answer to this question depends upon a number of factors:
The population of the species.
With a small population, the immortal individual makes up a larger fraction of the gene pool than if the population is large, and therefore it has a greater influence upon the genetic makeup of future generations.
Whether the immortal individual can die from ...
11
It's a well known phenomenon called chromatophorism. Rudolph's nose is externally the normal color, but when sensing danger or otherwise aroused, the nose is flared to increase airflow and sensitivity; engorged with blood, the nose swells in time with the heartbeat, and the internal layers get exposed.
They do not actually emit light, but they do contain a ...
8
Not predatory, parasitic.
The picture above is from a plant called Cuscuta racemosa. The thing that makes this plant interesting is that, despite being a plant, this thing is an obligatory parasite, aka it can't survive on its own, and must feed on the sap of other plants in order to survive.
Truth is that when it comes to plants, predator prey ...
7
Try playing with a population genetics simulation
This simulation is pretty and very intuitive, working with red and white fish. Your immortal counts as a "migration rate" (except in his case, all the migrants are the same fish). If you set the simulation to a minimum migration rate (0.1) of fish of a different color, in a few hundred generations ...
6
An immortal could certainly have an impact on the gene pool if they lived long enough and had enough descendants.
Genghis Khan, who lived between the 1100s and 1200s, is believed to be the ancestor of roughly about 16 million men in the modern-day, and he only lived to be about 60 or 70. I'm certain that, with enough partners, a person could easily share ...
5
No vertebrate had evolved a new limb for the entirety of 400 million years of their (limbs) existence. They have only changed their function or were lost. A limb is too complex of an organ, requires a lot of pre-existing stuff (bones, muscles, etc) to evolve this late in the evolutionary timeline. So your creature really has only three options here:
Just ...
5
Your elves look a lot like bears, with the only difference that they are not plantigrade (which explains also their agility and endurance).
I therefore guess that similar evolutionary pressures and circumstances which lead to the evolution of bears could, if applied to an early ancestor from the hominid branch, lead to the development of your elves. In ...
5
Lack of vegetable/fruit matter foods for long enough would do the trick when it comes to making them more carnivorous, probably due to desertification or something along that line making their native habitat worse to live in for herbivores or omnivores. They'll likely be scavengers for a while before moving on to more aggressive predatory behaviour and ...
4
Pure carnivory is uncommon, and its rapid evolution needs a special reason
Six percent of a wolf's diet is plant matter and berries. Here's a cute video of a crocodile eating a pumpkin. Here's a (self-described) review of the top seven vegan dog foods. Also, at least thinking of land mammals, to be a "carnivore" means to tear indiscriminately at ...
4
No.
The evolutionary process -- offspring adapting randomly and the ones with beneficial mutations surviving more often to pass on those mutations -- is not damaged by the existence of one immortal member.
What happens is the rest of the species breeds and evolves as normal, and the immortal stays the same through the generations. If the species evolves too ...
4
What this creature needs is a path where the future hands are always useful.
Probably start with the studs. You don't have any on its front, you should put some there.
Once they are there, the creature can start using them. First off, it could use them to bump into things. Knock down fruit from trees and the like. Once it's in the habit, having groves ...
3
Plants and fungi are more closely intertwined than most people realize. Most plants have strands of fungi, called mycorrhizae, growing on their roots in a mutualistic relationship. The fungi increase the plant's access to water & minerals, and in turn take nutrition from the plants. (The associations can be much more complex than this, too: the ...
3
Vegetarian sundew.
https://www.cpukforum.com/forum/index.php?/topic/61472-vegetarian-sundew/
Vegetarian sundews: Few people know, that carnivorous plants like also
vegetarian diet, as long as it is rich in protein like flower pollen.
To show this, we fed fresh stamens of a Sarracenia leucophylla with
adhering pollen to four different Drosera species (photos)...
3
Selective breeding
Without using future technologies we can already do a lot. Our breeding programs are a great example. Look at things like pumpkins and corn. The wild versions in most cases don't have their edible parts as big as the cultivated ones. Or look at animals. Horses, cows and dogs. We have created a large variety of impressive specimens. There's ...
3
Savannah Elves
The elves are descended from an arboreal omnivorous species of forest-dwelling elf-monkeys.
Being omnivorous the monkeys could eat fruits and seeds but not leaves, twigs or grass. They also ate small mammals, eggs, insects and such.
Their sharp teeth were good for eating meat and sufficient for eating everything else. They did not for example ...
3
Snail style
Let us think of body plans. The main issue with living on land is not drying out. Did any relatives of the octopi manage that?
https://kaiserscience.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/mollusk-family-tree/
Depicted: snail, nautilus (both from Wikipedia)
Snails are second cousins to the cephalopods. They have a mollusc body plan and protect themselves ...
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You work with what you have got.
Thanks to my associate Mushi for illustrating the concept. Your creature has perfectly good appendages. It evolves hands from its feet. Where do you think our hands came from?
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To understand why something would become eusocial, you first need to understand what is eusociality (reference enter link description here) and why lepidopterans are not presently.
Cooperative brood care- in many species, such as ants and bees, the young require special care to ensure their survival that takes dedicated effort over long periods of time. ...
2
They are Humans
It seems like your various species are supposed to be human-like. If that is so, then the only possibility is that these species share a similar ancestry to humans. Specifically, they would have to come from the Homo genus, or at least the hominid family
2
Humans tend to eliminate, or at least marginalise, predators in territory they control as a matter of calorie competition removal. This leaves a number of potential carnivore niches that aren't filled in our modern world because we maintain pressure to keep them closed. However if the dominant hominids were as evolutionarily advanced, and shared our aversion ...
2
It wouldn't want to live on land.
Not because Octopuses couldn't evolve to live on land. They totally could.
But, because your surface temperature is as high as the maximum average temperature ever on earth. and your gravity is enough to crush people.
They'll be much happier in the oceans, where they don't need to support their bodies, and they're out line ...
2
Ambergris is an oily substance created in the digestive system of sperm whales, possibly to aid in passing hard objects in their food. It is apparently flammable though more in the way candle wax is flammable as opposed to being explosive.
It is not uncommon for naturally evolving creatures to produce useful substances. Formic acid gets it's name from ants ...
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Very little
One immortal, permanently fertile individual is genetically equivalent to a long line of heavily inbred relatives, without personally experiencing signs of inbreeding. Families that breed repeatedly with the immortal across generations may experience decreased genetic variability which in turn would probably be selected against due to recessive ...
2
The tentacles that release enzymes will probably grow larger and more muscular, to allow it to pin down prey. Over time, they would evolve into arms on it's face.
Things don't normally just evolve. They need precursors. The only easy to evolve into arms are those tentacles, so they will have to do.
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the only multicellular lifeforms on this world are plants and fungi
neither of them is mobile, and carnivorous plants on Earth evolved to integrate their element supply by feeding on mobile targets.
The only "predatory" style that plants might evolve in your case is to prey on other plants, in the sense that their seeds, carried by wind or water, ...
1
TL;DR: Evolution would eventually solve any potential problem by your population evolving not to reproduce with the immortal.
Let’s assume for the sake of the argument that the answer to your question is yes, i.e., the immortal would stagnate its species population.
Then, on the long run, the tendency to mate and reproduce with the immortal (and possibly its ...
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TL;DR: There will be some, but it will depend a lot on the initial situation.
MWoT Answer:
Your ageless immortal is merely ageless. While that might eliminate some diseases that are caused by old age, it may not eliminate diseases by outside factors, nor will it prevent accidents, illness, and predation from taking their life. And make no mistake, ...
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First of all, the phrasing "evolutionary march" implies that evolution is a goal-oriented process, which it is not. Evolution does involve random drift, and removing old individuals does reduce that. But to the extent that there is a consistent "fitness", removing an individual just because it's old doesn't help that. Why would it? Why ...
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A different kind of lactation.
Fat can be rendered into an oil, which can be rather flammable, and mammals have a rather handy form of fat storage and processing and fluid dispensation already. I'm not entirely sure what exact conditions would lead to a mammal evolving to lactate a highly calorie-dense oil-like form of liquid fat instead of milk, like ...
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