The third planet out from its sun, Yeowe has a warm-moderate climate with little seasonal variation.
Bacterial life is ancient and of normally vast complexity and adaptive variety. A number of microscopic marine Yeowan species are defined as animals; otherwise, the native biota of the planet were plants.
On land there was a great variety of complex species, photosynthetic or saprophytic. Most were sessile, with some “creepers,” colonial or individual plants capable of slow movement. Trees were the principal large lifeform. South Continent was almost entirely tropical jungle/temperate rain forest from the coastlines up to timberline in the Polar Range and to the taiga of the Antarctic Circle. Great Continent, forested in the extreme north and south, was a steppe and savannah landscape at the higher central altitudes, with immense areas of bog, marsh, and sea marsh on the coastal plains. In the absence of pollinating animals, the plants had many devices to use wind and rain to crossfertilize and propagate: explosive seeds, winged seeds, seednets that catch the wind and float for hundreds of miles, waterproof spores, “burrowing” seeds, “swimming” seeds, and plants with mobile vanes, cilia, etc.
The seas, which are warm and relatively shallow, and the vast sea marshes nourish a huge variety of sessile and floating plants, on the order of plankton, algaes, seaweeds, coraltype and spongetype plants forming permanent constructions (mostly of silicon), and unique plants such as the “sailers” and the “mirrorweed.” Vast connected “lily mats” were harvested by the Corporations so efficiently as to render the species extinct within thirty years.
Heedless introduction of Werelian plant and animal species killed off or crowded out about 3/5 of the native species, aided by industrial pollution and war. The owners brought in deer, hunting dogs, hunting cats, and greathorses for their hunts. The deer thrived and destroyed a great deal of native habitat. Most introduced animal species failed in the long run. Werelian animal survivors other than humankind on Yeowe include: birds (domestic fowl brought in as game or as poultry; songbirds were released, and a few species adapted and survived) foxdogs and spotted cats (pets) cattle (domestic; many wild in abandoned districts) deer (wild, called fendeer, adapted to the marsh regions) hunting cats (feral, rare, in marshlands)
The introduction of some fish species in the rivers was disastrous to the native plant life, and what fish survived were destroyed by poison. All attempts to introduce ocean fish failed.
Horses were slaughtered during the War of Liberation, as symbolic possessions of the owners; none remain.