Janitor

The janitor is a large pretenguin native to coastal waters off southern Serinarcta in the middle hothouse, 285 million years P.E. Standing up to four and a half feet high, it is plainly colored and mostly brown, lacking the decorative plumage of many other hothouse pretenguins. This reflects nocturnal habits; janitors are active mostly in low-light conditions, and have acute eyesight to aid them in foraging after dark. The adult is a good swimmer and feeds on a wide variety of prey, but favors soft-bodied fare such as escardine snarks, which are among the most widespread of 'baitfish' in the hothouse seas. Its sturdy bill is slightly hook-shaped, angling downward from the snout to its distal edge, a shape which lends members of its genus the descriptor hookbilled pretenguins, though the trait is less prominent in this species than in its relatives. Though they are capable hunters, janitors are strongly associated with only near-shore coastal waters and in particular with islands lacking endemic predators. Here they spend much time out of water, being surprisingly adept walkers with long legs, balancing themselves with a nearly vertical carriage of their body. Though unusually solitary among pretenguins, they are frequently seen among the crowds of pterdevil nesting colonies, yet they do not generally prey on these animals, except sometimes upon their very weak or already dead pups. This association has more to it than first meets the eye.

Janitors do not form pair bonds, and females lay only a single large egg, which they incubate in a shaded place such as a rock crevice or a thicket of vegetation. Upon hatching, their chick is quite large and is exceedingly self-sufficient and highly precocial - true for all the hookbilled pretenguins - so that it does need need prolonged maternal attention. Within two days of hatching, the mother returns to the sea to feed herself and simply leaves her young in its nest. She will never return back to the nest to tend it, and it knows this. Soon, growing restless, it runs off from the nest, toward the sea. About 14 inches high and weighing two pounds, the chick is a fast runner and very aware of its surroundings. In an emergency, it could swim even at this tender age, but it lacks strong waterproofing, and so cannot remain wet for long without chilling. So rather than go for a swim immediately, as other pretenguins might be inclined, it seeks out a different refuge. The female janitor always makes her nests immediately nearby a tribbfisher colony, usually alongside pterdevils, and so it is among these that the nestling seeks company.

Pterdevils are somewhat aggressive, carnivorous tribbats. The adult males, in particular, work to defend their colonies from threats, while females brood and protect their young pups before later moving them, once mobile, into protective creches of their peers. The janitor usually times the hatching of her egg with this stage of pterdevil development; the chick is about the same size as a juvenile pterdevil of this age, and instinctively seeking social contact, it enters the creches too. For the first two days after hatching her young, the mother janitor remains on the periphery of the colony, keeping a close watch. Her chick does not imprint on her, but she does have some attachment to it, at least for now. Her role now is not to feed it, but to ensure its 'adoptive family" doesn't harm it. When a chick first tries to join a creche, it may be attacked by a defensive adult as an unfamiliar presence; this is where the mother will intervene, reprimanding any pterdevil which snaps at her young harshly. Far bigger than the tribbats, her intentions are quickly understood. She could kill their own young if she wanted and they could do little to stop her, but as long as they tolerate her own young among them, she will refrain. They soon come to an understanding, and within a day or two, the interloper is accepted as part of the group, even though it does not really make much effort to resemble a tribbfisher pup. The mother janitor, at this time, leaves the chick behind and returns to the sea to feed herself, and may never see her young again.

The young janitor, now a couple days old, is growing hungry. Its egg yolk is fully absorbed, and it needs to find a meal soon or it will starve. But with its mother gone, it has no one to come to provide for it. The mother pterdevils come and go to the creche, delivering regurgitated fish and snark to their own young, but a janitor chick stands no chance of getting a free meal this way, either - a mother pterdevil only responds to her own specific young, recognizing them by sight, and a janitor is not even close to resembling her pups; at best, it may glean a few dropped scraps. Yet a sustaining meal can be found here quite easily, once the chick begins to look. These young tribbfishers are covered in bloodsucking parasites: tick-like mites, and swarms of flying, biting insects. The janitor gets its name for the niche it fills early in life as a cleaner species, which preens tribbfishers and removes their ectoparasites and cleans up the pests that thrive in the dirt around their nesting grounds. It is for this reason that the pterdevils put up little opposition to the chick remaining in their midst even after the mother has gone; they benefit greatly from its appetite for biting bugs.

With a much narrower, tweezer-shaped beak relative to the adult, the young janitor probes through the fur of its companions and deftly pries up their bloodsucking burdens, eating thousands of such pests a day. It wanders widely throughout the creche, going over every youngster and grooming it, a process the pups come to appreciate - soon, even adults will tolerate it poking and pecking, letting it clean areas they cannot reach like the backs of their own heads. The female janitor is territorial, and one mother claims an entire stretch of beach for her own chick so that it does not face competition from many others of its own kind, and so this diet is abundant enough to sustain the chick until it is big enough to ultimately leave the beach and join the adults at sea, just around the time the last of the pterdevils leave their colony, around 50 days after the chick hatched. By then, it will have ballooned to ten times its size on its diet of blood-filled bugs, and will be around 20 pounds: much better set both to avoid dangerous aquatic predators and the chill of the water itself. As its childhood companions take flight and leave it behind to start very different lives, the chick - now a juvenile - goes off on its own. But it will remember the calls of the pterdevils, and if it is a female, it will follow them back to the beach in a few years, and then every season thereafter, to nest and leave its young in their company. At first it may seem a burden to the tribbats, but in fact both species have much to gain from this arrangement. The mother janitor's fitness is increased as she does not expend energy raising her young, while the pterdevils experience increased survival rates of their own pups due to the janitor chick removing their parasites, which could otherwise grow to such populations as to literally drain the fragile youngsters of blood, causing anemia and death. Their relationship is symbiotic, and both parties ultimately benefit.