#that's right boiz olua's got midichlorians >:333

[worldbuilding-tomfoolery]

Magiautotrophs

When Olua is deep into star-feeding, magic floods the atmosphere, and the air fills with critters who feed on it. It's so thick with life, certain macrofauna swim the sky throughout summernoon. Many microorganisms have developed ways essentially eat magic. These magisynthetic processes are fundamentally different from photo- or chemosynthetic ones, leading to a new set of trophic categories for Oluan microbes: Magiotrophs. An organism may get their energy, their electrons, or both from magic. An organism who does both and obtains carbon via CO2 fixation would be fully termed a magiomagiautotroph -- magiotroph for short. Though the convention is to shorten a -troph to its first (and sometimes third) prefix, a non-magisynthetic organism who nonetheless oxidizes magic for electrons will often be called a magitroph anyway, due to the novelty and contextual significance of the concept.

Side note

Though plenty of species use magic in myriad ways, including various energy-boosting strategies, no known eukaryote has figured out how to use magic directly as food, the way plants use sunlight. Magic, by definition, is poorly understood, so it is yet unknown why this is a power exclusive to the micros.

One popular hypothesis posits the ability originated in domain Alcana and spread via horizontal gene transfer to some other species; among alcans with fully sequenced genomes, over 90% have genes that code for magisynthetic biomachinery. Same and similar genes have been found in several bacteria and archaea (some of which are relative newcomers to Olua). Trace amounts of these genes have even been found in lichens. Though the magisynthetic section of archaea and bacteria is much smaller, that they possess these sequences at all implies remarkable things for interdominal HGT, and the role magic may play in the process.

Second side note

There is emerging evidence certain alcan lineages have evolved ways to avoid cleaving oxygen during carbon fixation, likely due to the sheer abundance of atmospheric oxygen and magiparticles' resemblance to it. Big if true.

(Is it possible some of these microbes have complexes unrelated to Rubisco at all?)