ceo of hamster evolution — yet another big heap of asks

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

yet another big heap of asks

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Roughly Australia-size, perhaps smaller and more irregular due to raised sea levels in the Temperocene.

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Not much more than ten kilos in weight, they’re primarily insectivores but will occasionally take bigger prey like ratbats. They are, however, nowhere near as macro-predatory as their relatives, South Ecatoria’s midnight howlers, who grow to large baboon size and take on other lemunkies such as chimpmunks.

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They’re primarily restricted to Gestaltia and have become specialized myrmecophages like pangolins, feeding mostly on ants and termites with their long tongues.

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Entirely self taught, actually, just something I started doing for fun after learning of The Future is Wild and Expedition, and then sort of just lurking anonymously in Speculative Evolution forums and blogs and comment sections before making a Reddit and later a Tumblr (my Reddit account is pretty dead tho. Reddit stopped working as an app entirely and it did get tedious posting to two sites regularly so I stuck with the more functional of the two).

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They weren’t intended to be *more* successful because they were humanoid, they just happened to get lucky. That said, I have been working on some concepts to make the final sophont more alien-like, but well…it’s gonna be a long, LONG time before we get anywhere near there lol. Took me nearly two years to get to the Temperocene.

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Basically just having brighter displays and more gregarious behaviors, as it was in Lacero that the first tigerillas evolved from the treegers to specialize on tackling bigger prey, so they found strength in numbers.

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Probably facultative omnivory that favored individuals able to process at least *some* sustenance. Even crocodiles are known to eat fruit from time to time and some sharks consume both seagrass as well as animal prey, so it could be an extension of that.

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They were on their way to being more sociable, as they first got over their wanton aggression at first, but still hadn’t developed social empathy. Perhaps if given enough time, with cooperation being more valuable than competition, their social mindset would have gradually shifted toward something more akin to the calliducyons as part of their sociopathy is a cultural, learned thing. Had they survived longer, maybe they could have become proper sociable, cooperative and even altruistic species.

Unfortunately for them, however, they lost out on a game of ferocity, and the least vicious species came out at the bottom.

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I don’t have a Deviantart (mostly because I don’t think I’d be able to keep up with having two social medias with recent busy-ness) but I look around there on browser sometimes and I stumbled upon some Hamster’s Paradise fanart! Especially from some guy who goes by TheTiger773 who does really great spec evo art and also covers quite a bit on the eras in the original draft sketches that I haven’t even gotten to yet. Still, it’s fun to see how my work inspires ideas from others too, and if anyone has a DA let them know I gave them a shout-out. :D

(POTENTIAL MAJOR SPOILERS DOWN BELOW)

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The caterpedes are a group of abundant and diverse insects found well across HP-02017 in the Middle Therocene. They are, as their name would suggest, the larval forms of moths: yet, oddly, they never actually become moths at all: they are neotenic, maturing and mating in a larval form without ever undergoing pupation.

A misplaced hormonal signal that halted their metamorphosis but allowed them to grow functional gonads has enabled the caterpedes to spread far and wide in a world that, in its inception, was filled with the essential insect life such as pollinators and detritivores, but had many ecological vacancies left unoccupied. Thus, these mutant, non-metamorphosing caterpillars came to fill the niches of various other arthropods: in the case of the caterpedes, some became scavengers on the leaf litter feeding on dead vegetation like millipedes, while others became predators that hunted smaller insects, much as centipedes or arachnids would.

But even still, this was a world where predators abounded, even the founding hamsters that were present since the beginning. As such, the caterpedes have had to innovate with various defenses since day one: and in the Temperocene, few are as remarkable as the fiery blackbuff (Pseudophiops caudatucephalus).

Fiery blackbuffs share their habitat, the damp tropical forest floors of Mesoterra, with the five-eyed whipwyrm (Pyrophimys pentoculus): one of the most lethal of the burrowurms delivering a deadly sting in its front claws that can incapacitate an animal the size of a piggalo and kill anything else smaller. The five-eyed whipwyrm is generally a placid insectivore: yet it is this diet of ants, slurped up with its long flexible tongue and narrow mouth, that provides it with the toxins it needs to produce and concentrate an even more powerful paravenom.

As such, the distinctive arrangement of three false eye-spots and red stripes on a black background is one recognized and feared by every creature that lives in those same forests that the whipwyrm frequents: and the fiery blackbuff takes full advantage of it. Mimicking the distinctive conical head and five false eye spots on its posterior end, the blackbluff flashes its distinctive behind when bothered by predators: primarily small ground-dwelling ratbats. The sight of something resembling a deadly burrowurm sends many would-be attackers fleeing: and they usually do not return to confirm, allowing the otherwise-defenseless caterpedes to inch along another day.

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The tetracorns are a group of remarkable ungulopes native to Austro-Easaterra, with a most unusual trait: their highly-pronounced sexual dimorphism. While females are smaller, and drably colored, males boast four huge prominent horns and striking patterns, even ones of peculiar colors, thanks to pigments in their diet that accumulate in their skin and hair as a marker of a well-fed, and thus strong and fit, individual.

One of the largest tetracorn species is the fourform fourhorn (Quadratus colossaeus), whose males can grow to three tons or more and sport a distinctive dull muddy-yellow hue of their hair and a pale saddle-like marking on their backs, in contrast to the female’s browner, earthy tones. Like many of the larger tetracorn species, they are monogamous for the breeding season: one male and one female pair up to guide and defend their calves, usually born two at a time as twins, together as a pair (though often split up after the young disperse and may take a new mate the next breeding season), and herds of them consists of mated pairs and their young grazing and traveling in close proximity: yet noticeably segregated in small groups of four, two parents and two children.

Yet something most peculiar has happened to this particular species: a gene that guides the growth and hormonal activity in male tetracorns flipped in a chromosomal inversion, several million years ago, and became passed down as an inverted mutant copy of this gene. This has also reversed its function, leading to rapid growth and later sexual maturity in a female, as opposed to a male, which in turn displays a more gradual growth rate and an earlier sexual maturity like a female if it inherits this gene. Thus, fourhorns that inherit the mutant gene display a reversed sexual dimorphism size-wise, though still retaining their color patterns as those are governed by a separate, unrelated gene and affect a different androgen hormone. Present on one copy of each gene, half of the offspring of a fourhorn with the mutant gene will also exhibit the gene themselves if they mate with a normal partner.

But what has allowed this gene to proliferate and become widespread in their population is the way the resulting differences affect the fourform fourhorn’s social behavior. Being larger and physically stronger, the males, or specifically, large-morph (normal) males are bigger as to defend their single bonded mate from rival bachelors during the breeding season and the resulting calves from predators during their vulnerable first year, while, being smaller and less powerful, small-morph females would rather seek out and prefer pairing with large-morph males for safety. As such, it would seem that normals would pair off only with normals, and mutants only with mutants with smaller males conversely relying on bigger females, resulting to those two groups eventually reproductively isolating from each other’s gene pools and becoming separate species.

Yet, with predators like blubbears and lipgrips to concern them, calves born to a large-morph male and a large-morph female have two stronger parents to defend them and have a greatly heightened survival rate, and so, over time, these pairings became more frequent and more favored by natural selection: leaving small-morph males to pair off only with small-morph females, which compensate for their smaller size by gathering in larger groups to find safety in numbers. Thus, by usually segregating their mate selection to a partner of a similar size, they, inadvertently, make mutant + normal pairings the vast majority of mated pairs over normal + normal and mutant + mutant pairs, ensuring that the mutants and normals’ genes keep mixing and preventing them from diverging into separate gene pools, and also allowing the mutant genes of large-morph females and small-morph males to persist as, by mating with normals more frequently, half of the resulting offspring are mutants, and half are normals.

The fourform fourhorn has thus, in essence, evolved a pseudo-sex chromosome that determines its morphology based on its sex–and functionally has become a species with four “sexes”: large-morph normal male, small-morph normal female, large-morph mutant female and small-morph mutant male. To the pairs of large-morphs, their combined might against enemies virtually guarantees that both calves make it to their first year. To the pairs of small-morphs, less-favorable “left-overs”, they have instead resorted to adaptive gregarious behaviors to compensate for the less-than-ideal circumstances. Either way, the next generation, generally a half-and-half mix of normals and mutants, become independent at about two years of age and disperse: forming loose herds that include random assortments of all four forms, until they pair up in the next mating season, often every two to three years in the spring or summer, depending on food availability in each particular year.

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speculative evolution speculative biology spec evo speculative zoology hamster's paradise ask species profile
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Once the specialist arboreal hunters of the Glaciocene and Early Temperocene, the tigerillas had been in steep decline with the coming of the midnight howlers: carnivorous lemunkies that were more intelligent, adaptable and cooperative in the trees than they were. Slowly pressured off the trees, and retreating off to the ground, now but a few genera remain: still some of South Ecatoria’s most notable predators, but nowhere as diverse as they once were.

Some, such as the red dwole (Cynosimiomys vulgaris) have become small, omnivorous opportunists, relying on their flexibility to exploit multiple different niches. They still climb trees and forage on the ground, searching out small animals, insects, carrion, and even fruits and fungi on occasion. Faced with competition in many of the major niches, the tigerillas have found momentary success relegating themselves to the sidelines.

Their bigger, more specialized cousins, however, have not fared too well in a time of great changes. The woodland chimpanther (Pithecopanthera leucops) still retains its role as tree-dwelling lemunky hunter in regions where midnight howlers are less abundant. They have stuck to this niche and surived in marginal regions where competition is scarce, particularly in dense jungle: however, in howler territory the chimpanthers are hopelessly outclassed. Solitary creatures, they are no match for whole troops of up to a dozen midnight howlers, who don’t take kindly to rival predators in their territory: and sometimes even considers the chimpanthers prey.

But by far the most notable species is the greater foldpaw (Malupantherimys malignans), a 200-pound carnivore that reigns as South Ecatoria’s apex predator. For long, it has benefitted off the success as a megafaunal hunter, tackling boarochs, ungulopes and podotheres alike with its powerful forelimbs and prehensile arms that allow it to wrestle prey to the ground. A formidable predator, the greater foldpaw is dreaded by any other predator in its territory, as it has no hesitation in disposing of any rivals that may cross its path. Yet, ultimately, this may as well prove to be its undoing: by making an enemy of a rival carnivore with the intellect and capacity for grudges and retaliation.

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On the former continent of South Easaterra, a specialized clade of zingos, the bearhounds, once roamed the continent as its apex predators. Armed with stocky bodies, big boxy heads and powerful jaws, they hunted the local tetracorns, oingos and rhinocheirids with the help of bone-crushing bites in a heavy convergence with the carnivorous badgebears of Gestaltia.

But their dominion was not to last, as in the Temperocene South Easaterra would collide with the drifting Peninsulaustra, merging to form the continent of Austro-Easaterra. There, the blubbears, powerful hunters descended from the flightless blubbats, would gradually push them aside to the margins, and in the midst of the mutual decline of both blubbears and bearhounds, during a brief window of low predator density an opportunistic big-game hunter would emerge as well: the lipgrips, a clade of carnivorous rhinocheirids.

The end seemed certain for this strange, experimental lineage of bulky, bone-crunching zingos, but one, the lesser burbruin (Cynarctomys taeddi) would hang on in the northeast corner of the continent and whose close relative the greater burbruin (C. ursamajor) would barely hang on over the millennia before finally disappearing entirely only less than a million years ago. This region was the farthest from Peninsulaustra and thus the blubbears would move in more gradually: giving the burbruins a chance to adapt.

Burbruins, thus, have survived where the larger bearhounds have not: by partitioning niches with the blubbears. While the blubbears used their powerful forearms, formerly wings and then flippers, to grapple large prey in a deadly embrace, the burbruins would instead focus on scavenging carrion, unearthing small prey, tearing up logs and dead wood in search of insects and even wading into shallow rivers and lakes to hunt for shrish and pescopods as they migrate during the spawning season. Thus again, the small, unassuming and yet very adaptable members of the family, with a varied diet, would survive a sudden change, able to fall back onto an alternate lifestyle if pressured by competitors. This is not to say, however, that the burbruins have entirely escaped the wrath of the blubbears: while their niche partitioning has spared their lineage, they have now in turn found a dismal place in the food web– as a blubbear’s occasional prey.

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