Today as abundant and diverse as they were back on their home planet, the ants were among one of the most successful terrestrial invertebrates that had been introduced to HP-02017. Descended from a select few species, introduced as detritivores, pollinators and seed dispersers, these remarkable hymenopterans have since spread across the globe and occupied the niches similar to Earthly ants, such as seed-eaters, leaf-cutters, scavengers, predators, fungus farmers and even honeydew-ranchers: though the livestock of those ranchers are somewhat different, with the niches of sap-sucking true bugs instead filled by beetles and lepidopterans.
Some species, however, have begun taking on niches unlike any of their Terran forebearers. Raftants, aquatic species native to floodplains, developed specialized castes to act as oars and floaters to propel the colony along the surface. Perhaps stranger, at least for ants, are the lonestingers: ants that no longer live in colonies and have become solitary, with all individuals being winged and wasplike, no longer producing wingless sterile workers and taking on a niche akin to solitary wasps and bees.
One of the most unusual species in the Middle Temperocene, however, are the lime ants (Citromyrmex polyregina), an abundant and widespread species found all across South Ecatoria and the neighboring islands. Easily recognizable by their distinct yellow and black coloring, these ants are generalist omnivores diet-wise: consuming both plant and animal matter, though prioritizing carbohydrate-rich sugary food like fruit, sap and nectar for the active adults, while saving protein-rich seeds, bugs and meat to the larvae to encourage their growth. Like most ants, they communicate by pheromones, travelling across the forest floor in single file to scout out food sources they can carry back to the colony. They, too, have specialized castes for their vital activities, such as small minor workers that participate in foraging and nest cleanup, major workers that act as heavy lifters and back-up defense, and soldiers, armed with large heads and powerful mandibles who defend the nest, cut up large pieces of food, and even ferry around the smallest workers hitchhiking on their bodies.
But one truly remarkable characteristic of the lime ant is its behavioral flexibility, thanks to an unusual recessive gene, the Q gene, that causes the species to produce three separate types of queens, depending on which alleles they acquire. Each one lives a completely different lifestyle: one that affects the behavior of their corresponding colonies as well. These genes mix together during nuptial flights, where alates from different colonies pair together queens and drones that in turn, produce offspring that are homozygous QQ, heterozygous Qq, or homozygous qq. This is further complicated by male ants being haploid, and thus males are always only Q or q.
Homozygous QQ queens develop into what is known as the despot morph: a sedentary, highly-aggressive queen with a bulky body and large mandibles. Her colony dwells in a fixed, permanent nest that occupies the same space for as long as she lives, which can be as long as fifteen years. During which time, their nests can grow into immense proportions, spanning tunnels and chambers many meters across and inhabiting up to 100,000 inhabitants. Despot morph queens tolerate no other reproducing female in the colony, and a single despot morph queen rules supreme: aggressively killing any other breeding female in her nest, be they rival invaders, her own alate daughters, or a worker that starts laying unfertilized eggs. All of her genetically fatherless drone offspring will be Q drones. If she mates with a Q drone, all her female offspring will be despot morphs as well, and if she mates with a q drone, half her offspring will be despot morphs, and half her offspring will be Qq heterozygous: the communal morphs.
Communal morphs, the second kind, are long-bodied and capable of traveling long distances on foot, unlike the sedentary despot morph. These queens, the most common kind, are different from despot morphs in another way: they tolerate the presence of other communal morph queens, thus producing a polygyne colony that is much larger than those of despot morphs, with as many as nine or ten queens and colonies growing to up to a million or more. Their large colony size instead favors them to constantly be on the move, foraging for food in an area and building smaller temporary nests and moving on once food becomes depleted in migrations every few months, with the queens marching along in the swarms and the brood carried by the workers as they go. With multiple queens that can be regularly replaced as they die, the colony as a whole can survive significantly longer than those of a despot morph, which is important as their nomadic lifestyle also leaves them with a higher mortality rate due to exposure to environmental factors and predators. Being heterozygous Qq, they can produce either Q drones or q drones, and a communal morph queen that mates with a Q drone will produce half despot morph offspring and half communal morph offspring, and a communal morph queen that mates with a q drone will produce half communal morph offspring and half qq homozygous offspring: the usurper morph.
Usurper morphs are unusual as they do not build colonies at all: they never shed their wings and remain solitary, similar to the lonestingers. As they disperse from their parent colony during the nuptial flight, they mate once with a drone and store his sperm, but do not start laying eggs right away. Instead, over the course of their long lifespan which may last many years (but rarely as long as the despot and communal morphs), the usurper queen instead infiltrates the nests of the other two kinds shortly before the nuptial flights begin, lays her eggs inside, and leaves all the effort of childcare to the workers of the colonies. Covering the eggs with pheromones to trick the colony into accepting them, she functions in essence as a solitary brood parasite whose progeny are raised by others. As she does not form a colony: none of her offspring become workers and soldiers, and instead always hatch into queens or drones: drone offspring are always q as they are born from unfertilized eggs. If she mates with a Q drone, half of her daughters will be communal morphs and half will be usurpers, and if she mates with a q drone, all her daughters will be usurper morphs.
This unusual arrangement likely evolved as an advantageous trait due to fickle, changing seasons and environments, allowing the species as a whole to persist. When food is plenty despot morphs become more common, able to defend a productive patch of land. When food is scarcer, communal morphs dominate, able to travel long distances to scout out new foraging grounds. And when times are the toughest, the most common morph becomes usurpers: being solitary, they need less food than a whole colony and can depend on the few hardy colonies to rear their young. Through a complex set of environmental dynamics, genetic inheritance, and competition between the queen types, the lime ant proves itself an adaptable and tenacious species that finds great success in the forest floor ecosystems of South Ecatoria.
Despite its complicated and bizarre life history, however, the local northhounds that occupy its range, in particular the vulpins, have found a rather mundane use for this abundant species. When threatened, major workers spray formic acid from specialized nozzles in their abdomens as a ranged mechanism. This, however, has been exploited by the vulpins who intentionally provoke the ants to get them to spray their acid onto food items: in effect acting as both a preservative to ward off fungal and bacterial growth on food, and as well as a seasoning that imparts a sour, citrus-like flavor onto said food. While toxic in large quantitities, the ants’ formic acid is harmless in small amounts to larger creatures like the northhounds: making for a surprisingly ideal additive in the vulpins’ cultural fondness of imparting different tastes in their primitive form of ‘cuisine’.
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Lepidopterans, the insect clade including butterflies and moths, were among the invertebrate species seeded onto the planet’s biome, in order to act as pollinators that allowed the numerous introduced plants to survive. While most of them adhered to this lifestyle and ecological niche, as ravenous leaf-eaters that metamorphosed into flying pollinators, a few began to experiment with more unconventional lifestyles.
Some of the stranger kinds included the caterpedes: a group of neotenic species that matured simply as larger larvae and skip metamorphosis altogether: filling niches as forest floor detritivores, folivores or occasionally even predators of other insects. And perhaps more unusual are the clade known as the Hemimetamorpha, or “half-changed”, which do pupate and emerge as adults with proboscises: yet retain their silk glands ejecting silk through a spinneret located directly below the proboscis and between the labial palps, allowing them to construct nests or wrap their eggs in silk sacs for protection.
Many of the Hemimetamorpha do not develop wings, and instead, thanks to their piercing and sucking mouthparts, fill the niches of true bugs on Earth: as sap-suckers akin to aphids, leafhoppers or cicadas, predators of small arthropods, or even as as flea-like parasites on larger animals. And in the case of one clade, the spooders, they use their retained silk glands to spin webs to catch their prey, in a manner akin to their arachnid namesake.
The red-spotted skeeter (Arachnopapilo rubrum) is one widespread Middle Temperocene species, ranging well across the tropics and temperate zones of Gestaltia and Arcuterra. Despite appearances, it sports two ocelli, one next to each compound eye, large feathery antennae possessing olfactory receptors, and a proboscis, albeit a short, sharp one rather than the long, coiled ones of nectar-feeders, all of which mark its lepidopteran ancestry despite the otherwise lack of resemblance to them.
Female red-spotted skeeters spin webs among grasses and branches, waiting to ensnare flying insects that they then immobilize with digestive enzymes in their saliva, while males are smaller and nomadic, instead hunting by pouncing on their prey and traveling across larger areas of territory compared to the more sedentary females who prefer to stay in their webs. They are also more brightly colored, in order to entice a mate, as the larger female is not above preying upon a suitor she does not like, though occasionally, a male may resort to restraining a female with his own silk, immobilizing her long enough to successfully mate and fleeing before she escapes.
Once mated, the female wraps her eggs into a silk pouch, searches out a safe place with plenty of food, and leaves the egg sac there to develop with no further intervention. The young hatch out as fairly typical caterpillars, yet are carnivores like the adults, tracking down and ambushing other small insects, in particular ants due to their foraging trails being a reliable source of food that comes to them as they lie in wait, as well as their toxic compounds being sequestered by the larva for its own defense. With a nutritious protein-rich diet, the larva matures faster than a leaf-eating caterpillar, and is ready to pupate within a week or two, producing a camouflaged chrysalis that is attached to branches and stems and further disguised by bands of silk. After another 5-7 days it emerges as an adult, and is immediately ready to hunt for a meal within minutes, being wingless and thus bypassing the long vulnerable phase of waiting of their wings to unfold. Within the span of a month, another generation is fully-fledged and ready to breed: a rapid turnover vital for a species with high mortality rates and many enemies– including members of its own species in both their larval and adult forms.
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The subcontinent of North Westerna, in the Temperocene, had become a lifeboat for the hammoths: a relic clade once dominant in the Glaciocene, now relegated to this small landmass, here they flourished and came once again to approach the diversity their kin once did, sporting species both great and small. For a time, North Westerna remained virtually free of large predators, and here the hammoths flourished, but then in the Temperocene, an intruder would arrive that would change the dynamics of this isolated land: the pterowrists.
Pterowrists are among the most bizarre and unusual of the pterodents, as they display easily one of the most drastic examples of of sexual dimorphism on HP-02017: females of these species are many orders of size larger than males, and in most species have become too heavy to fly: thus, splitting the two into completely different ecological niches. This unusual distinction was merely an exaggeration of a trend also present in many other pterodents, of females growing larger due to needing to bear young and defend their nests, while males grew smaller to compete less with their mates. This duality was furthered when they arrived onto an environment with no large land predators and little competition except small burrowing fearrets, and thus, the larger female pterowrists eventually came to occupy the niche of dominant land predator, while the males remained more or less occupying the niches of a more typical pterodent: an advantageous distinction that allowed a single species to essentially divide resources between two groups and thus reduce competition with itself.
The earliest of these were likely forms akin to the grassland bandrunner (Annulocaudopteryx equimensura), a very basal species where the size difference between the male and female is not as pronounced as other, more specialized forms. Yet, in the bandrunner, a behavioral and anatomical dichotomy can already be seen that marks it as part of the pterowrist lineage. While males have long, slender wings, fit for soaring, females have proportionately shorter and more rounder wings, and instead hunt on the ground: while still perfectly capable of flight, they prefer to hunt on foot and are swift runners, chasing down small bite-sized prey like furbils and duskmice, while the males in contrast have a preference for insects, wingles and small aquatic prey they can snatch in flight, as well as any scavenged carrion they can locate.
As female pterowrists came to eventually fill land predator niches, they over time grew bulkier and heavier and denser than their male counterparts to better tackle larger prey: ultimately leading to them abandoning flight entirely to specialize on becoming terrestrial macro-predators. Yellow brevtails (Xanthopteromys brevicauda) are a relatively small species like the bandrunner, but one that already exhibits the marked reduction of the females’ forelimbs, and conversely the increase in size and strength of their hindlimbs, to better facilitate sustained chases on foot. The difference is not too marked while they are young pups, but, as they grow, the males, upon approaching sexual maturity, develop a growth spurt in their forearm bones and chest muscles while remaining fairly lightly built, while the females hit a more generalized growth spurt with their forelimbs remaining small, stunted, and proportionally similar to a young pup, but at the same time growing denser bones and stronger muscles especially in their jaws, necks and legs. Female brevtails are pursuit hunters that can tackle prey up to the size of small hamtelopes, seizing them in their jaws and repeatedly striking captured prey against the ground to dispatch them. Males, on the other hand, are dedicated scavengers and foragers, with a particular fondness of dropping bones as well as small, hard-shelled prey such as terrestrial shrabs from great heights to crack them open and access their prize.
As the pterowrist females grew larger and more capable of tackling bigger prey, they soon turned their sights on the subcontinent’s most abundant local herbivores: the hammoths, of which many smaller species were abundant at the time, including beaver-sized burrowers or goat-sized grazers. Thus, some began specializing to hunt them and the native ungulopes as well, becoming even larger and more built for jumping onto and grappling bulkier game. The black rapteryx (Phorusracomys dimorphis) is the most notable of these species, being a four-to-five foot tall ambush hunter typically reaching weights of up to 150 pounds, heavy enough to tackle medium-sized herbivore prey, pinning them down and delivering deep lacerations with their large forward-turned inner dewclaw, striking and retreating repeatedly until its quarry eventually succumbs to exhaustion and blood loss. Male rapteryxes, on the other hand, prefer much smaller prey such as small hamtelopes, rattiles or ratbats, especially ones they can seize in their talons and carry off to a roost high up in trees, rocks or cliffs where they are less likely to be bothered by thieves: including opportunistic female rapteryxes who will not hesitate to use their greater size to bully a smaller male and steal his kills if she happens upon him on the ground, thus prompting them to use their advantage of flight to safekeep their food and spare themselves from harassment.
The arms race between hammoths and pterowrist females thus began, fueling the growth of both into increasingly larger forms better suited to attack bigger prey or defend itself. From the hammoths eventually arose the giant maustodons, rivalling the hammoths of the Glaciocene in size and strength, and in response, the peculiar saga of the pterowrist finally culminates with the pterowrex (Pterovenatrix regina): North Westerna’s apex predator during the Temperocene era. Growing up to six-to-seven feet in height and reaching weights of up to 700 pounds, these powerful hunters sport hooked talons and muscular limbs to maintain a secure grip on prey and broad crunching jaws to deliver devastating bites. They have easily one of the largest disparities between sexes size-wise, as male pterowrexes weigh a comparatively measly weight of 30 pounds on average, with a wingspan of roughly three meters. Adolescent females are lean and lightly built, resembling much like the more basal rapteryxes during their youth, but continue growing for far longer, developing disproportionately large heads and muscular necks as they age and finally reaching full size in about ten years, whereas males, on the other hand, reach their final adult size in about half the time.
This extreme difference in size and shape between the sexes has significantly impacted their lifestyles, both in their ecological niches as well as their social interactions with other members of their species. Female pterowrexes are capable of tackling the largest of the hammoths, as well as opportunistically chasing away smaller pterowrists from their meals if the chance presents itself. Males, on the other hand, are ground hunters that stalk in grassy plains, stirring up small furbils and duskmice from their burrows and snatching them up as they flee. This, ironically, has led to them frequently associating with the very same hammoths that the females hunt, pouncing on the small scurrying creatures roused by their stomping feet. The hammoths, unaware and indifferent of the relationship between the small flying males and the large predatory females, tolerate the presence of the males and view them as no threat, even allowing them to pluck insects from their coats.
Male and female pterowrexes, given their massive differences in scale and lifestyle, generally live their lives apart, and only come together when mating: an otherwise difficult affair mitigated by the male’s proportionately-lengthly reproductive equipment that enable him to inseminate a female many magnitudes of size larger. This is where his responsibility ends, as he contributes little else to his offspring but his genes and departs almost immediately to try and court another female, with the resulting child-rearing falling entirely in the responsibility of the females, with a litter of up to a dozen small but relatively precocious young weaning at three weeks of age, males fledging and flying off at about a year old, and females remaining with their mothers for as long as four to five years until they reach the adolescent to subadult stage where they eventually disperse from their mother’s territory over time. Outside of breeding seasons, however, the two sexes of the pterowrex keep to themselves: seeking social interactions with same-sex members of their species, with males gathering in small all-male flocks that roost together, preen each other’s coats and even cooperate when flushing small prey out of hiding, while females often pair-bond with another female, with the two cooperating during hunting, sharing food and territory, and even rearing their young together once the males depart after their brief and momentary encounter with the females.
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‘Boarochs, the largest of South Ecatoria’s herbivores, sport tough, wear-resistant teeth that grow constantly as they are abraded, helping them cope with rough vegetation. Yet, as they age, this growth rate slows down, eventually causing the teeth to wear away, leaving the elder of the boarochs only able to chew with much difficulty. This leads to the phenomenon of the marsh boneyards: wetland areas, with plenty of soft aquatic plants, become sought-after by old boarochs reaching the ends of their natural lives due to the increased difficulty in foraging, the marshes coming to serve as a retirement getaway of sorts for the old, ill and infirm. Here, most of them eventually succumb to age, health complications and simply natural causes, leading to many of the dead to accumulate in such specific areas over centuries so long as the area remains wet and plenty of palatable vegetation grow in the area.
The abundance of carrion in these zones in turn attract veritable flocks of a close relative of the maned stormspirit: the nowherewing (Calvariocephalornimys nusquam), nomadic, scavenging pterodents with distinctive pale, bald faces that have no fixed home or preferred biome, simply settling wherever food is abundant, and moving on once food becomes scarce, a lifestyle well-suited for species capable of long-distance flight, searching for carcasses few and far between while expending minimal energy in the process. The nowherewings also perform a vital function in the marshland ecosystem by cleaning up rotting carrion, thus depriving diseases and their insect vectors a place to breed, and depositing their droppings far and wide as they migrate, spreading the recycled nutrients back into the ecosystem as they go.
Despite their beneficial impact on the environment as a whole, however, the nowherewing is feared by the calliducyons, especially the northhounds, due to its grim appearance and association with the dead and dying, especially its tendency to gather around ailing animals patiently waiting to feast, like a foreboding omen of impending doom. In some cultures, while its elegant-looking cousin the maned stormspirit is viewed favorably, at times even in a divine light and a bringer of rain, the nowherewing is seen as a dark and ominous harbringer of ill tidings. As both species are scavengers, which are known to feed on the remains of deceased calliducyons, the dichotomy of the two are pronounced too in their dealings with the dead: with those scavenged by stormspirits being seen as attaining a sort of ascension, but those scavenged by nowherewings being consumed by darkness and nothingness.’
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‘HP-02017 may be a world of hamsters, but the smaller creatures added on the side, to perform basic ecological functions, have not been exempt from the trials of evolution, as they, too, had changed over time with the passing of countless millennia.
On the forest floor, an armored pillipede (Ankyloniscidea armatidea) scurries along a branch, unperturbed by the aggression of a predatory club-headed stingtail (Venatocollembola skorpis) and its weaponized furcula. Descended from woodlice and springtails, introduced to the biosphere to serve as detritivores to aid in recycling nutrients into the soil, these two unusual arthropods are but one of many thousands of their kind– but while diverse, their range is quite restricted, with both woodlice and springtails preferring dark, damp locations and leaving the hotter, drier biomes to the taking by the better-adapted true insects.’
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The falcyons, once the dominant aerial predators of HP-02017 in the Therocene and Glaciocene, which preyed upon both grounded prey and other flyers, have seen a significant level of decline since the coming of the pterodents, some of which filled large, soaring scavenger, seagoer and migratory forager niches and thus gradually pushed the falcyons aside. Yet the falcyons, despite the competition, are doing quite well even in the Middle Temperocene, thanks to a fairly recent adaptive radiation at the Temperocene’s dawn that allowed them to claim new niches and make a living in a changed world.
Some, such as the eastern Gestaltian triathler (Triathlopteryx gestaltis) have become generalists, taking advantage of any food source they can find. Triathlers, in particular, gained particular success thanks to being good runners, flyers, and swimmers all at the same time, allowing them to seek food in the sea, on the shore, or in the air, snatching up any small prey they can grab in their jaws in a wide variety of environments that reduces the pressure of competition. Hunting insects and wingles in the air, shrish and pescopods in the water, and small crustaceans and mollusks on the shore, triathlers such have many options and no shortage of available food should seasonal availabilities of one prey item come and go. Nesting in cliffside rookeries by the hundreds, even thousands, triathlers boast precocial young that can hunt on land within a few weeks, even while still under their parents’ care, but still have to learn, through imitation and experience, the skills required for the air and sea.
Not all the falcyons, however, are as versatile, but are much more specialized in one specific medium. The swift airstrike (Velocipteramys aerovenatrix) is notable for its aerial prowess, able to dive-bomb its prey at incredible force and speed. Easily one of the fastest flyers, the airstrike specializes on hunting smaller flying ratbats, knocking them from the sky with such power that they are instantly stunned or killed upon impact, which the airstrike then snatches up midair. They live and hunt in mated pairs, with the female the larger of the two, as the smaller male can take on smaller but more-agile aerial prey and thus reduce competition with his mate during the breeding season, when she needs far more calories than he does.
On the other hand, the ground pterrier (Terranyctocyon ambulus) is, conversely, a far more terrestrial species. While a perfectly capable flier, it instead greatly prefers to hunt on the ground, or in trees, chasing down squizzels, furbils, duskmice and small rattiles in grounded pursuit, before pouncing upon them to pin them with its wing-claws and dispatch them with a bite. Ground pterriers rarely take wing unless threatened or provoked, or when traveling longer distances to find new hunting grounds, mostly preferring to roam on foot while foraging.
While fierce acrobats in the air, falcyons, like many ratbats, are more vulnerable on the ground, and thus the reason even the more ground-dwelling ones are still capable at flight. They are at their most exposed during the time when they are nesting: as pterriers and their relatives build their nests on the ground in hidden dens concealed by overlying plants, where their young, not flighted until they are several months old, remain. One of the pterrier’s relatives, the wounded bloodwing (Erythropteryx pseudosanguis), has developed a peculiar strategy to protect its young: females possess bright red marks on the dorsal surface of their wings, hidden when folded and walking. If a predator is in the vicinity of the nest, however, the mother bloodwing will make a display where she pretends to be injured, flashing the red mark on her wing and making distressed sounded cries and limping motions to create the illusion of an easy prey. This is all a ruse, however, to lead the threat far away from the nest, and once she reaches a save distance she drops the act and flies off, leaving the confused enemy in the dust.
Among the largest and fiercest of the Temperocene falcyons, however, is the skewering harpshrike (Phobocynonyctus crucifigere), with a wingspan of up to five-and-a-half feet. Native to arid desert or semidesert regions of South Ecatoria, this unique species is remarkable for being a larger-scale predator able to tackle small hamtelopes, podotheres and zingos on occasion, which it then stores away in a grisly fashion: a larder of thorny trees, with the impaled half-eaten, dried carcasses of small animals hanging from their branches. But perhaps its most unusual feature is its rather canine-like head bearing facial markings that, by coincidental convergence, came to eerily resemble those of the sapient calliducyons: earning the harpshrike a place in their folklore as “person-headed flying monsters” notorious for occasionally snatching up unwary pups who stray too far from their parents.
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Created the tag #species profile for some of the one-off species that first appeared in asks. Unless stated otherwise they are intended to be from the Middle Temperocene.