Land of the Lumps 

The Anstevan Archipelago off the northwest coast of Serinaustra is an exotic land of strange animals. Sealumps reached this island continent just as they did mainland Serinaustra 5  million years ago. They found there, following the great thaw, a  landscape of low-growing vegetation - an endless buffet, and no competitors to fight for it. Though flying birds later joined them, they would remain the dominant  grazers on this place, which they alone as flightless animals managed to reach. For the burrowing burdle and the foxtrotter never came so far west; the currents they rode and ice bridges they crossed took them due south, missing the archipelago. And because these islands, even when under the ice sheet, were so far west that they didn't sit on the richest stretches of the icebox seaway few molodonts or pretenguins gathered here to breed. As a result,  snowscroungers never established themselves there either, and were marooned away from it when the lands thawed. When the ice was all gone, the sealump inherited Ansteva. They diversified greatly, filling many niches taken by wildly different creatures in other places, and were joined later by other unusual colonists to produce one of the most unique assemblages of animal life on Serina in the middle hothouse.

The largest herbivore on Ansteva is a plump, tall, herd-dwelling animal of the forest known as the heffalump. Weighing up to 2,500 lbs and reaching to heights of 18 feet with their long trunk, they are within the rank of the of heaviest bipedal birds to have existed, exceeded only by Cryocene serestriders. The heffalump is a relatively typical sealump, albeit a giant one due to the lower number of competitors here. It is mostly a plant-eater, a high browser of the jungle, feeding largely on leaves, but can also rip bark from trunks with two hook-claw claws on each of its facial flanges - flexible structures used to help pull food into the mouth in addition to the trunk - in order to access a favored treat: honey produced by tree-dwelling ant colonies, which they detect by smell. The secondary flanges, near the eyes, are elongated and disc-like, rich in blood vessels, and serve to disperse excess body heat like the ears of an elephant, their position happening to lend a resemblance to their pop culture namesake.

Heffalumps live in closely-bonded herds that are at their core composed of related females, and males marry-in by pairing with females born into the group. Both sexes provide parental care in this species and alternate incubation duty, and individuals in the same group also care for the young of other pairs as a family unit, ensuring their survival through their collective skills and attention. Though groups can number many dozens, they are surprisingly delicate browsers provided that vegetation is plentiful, pulling the most tender new stems from up high and not causing significant damage to the tree by virtue of always moving along, mostly to escape biting insects, and so not feeding too much in one place. Adults have few regular predators, but their young, if unwary, are vulnerable to the lumpredator. 

Though in the first thousands of years of the hothouse the land of lumps must have been a paradise to the animals which found it, nature doesn't like a vacuum. A system without limits is not a system that can sustain. When herbivores breed unchecked, eventually they exhaust their food supply. With nothing else around to eat, the most adaptable sealumps turned on their weaker fellows. They became cannibals, feeding on those which succumbed to starvation on the overcrowded island. When numbers were low enough that plant life returned to health, some of the sealumps promptly returned to their preferred food, and life was good again for a while. Yet it was inevitable that a crash would follow eventually, and then some of the survivors would have to eat their own kind again. Tens of thousands of years of booms and busts led some of the sealumps here to differentiate into very unusual roles, as the opportunistic cannibal scavengers learned that meat is a valid food source even when times are good and the grass is green - indeed, those are the times it too is more nutritious. Some sealump populations learned to kill the young of others, and then the sick and the old, and then the fit, too. They no longer interacted as one kind, and over millions of years, they became something new. Here, in the absence of more conventionally suitable hunters, evolved the lumpredators: the carnivorous sealumps that now hunt their kin.

Lumpredators are meat-eating trunkos that now mainly hunt other sealumps, though they will eat anything they can catch. As tall as a human and somewhat heavier, these predators may hunt alone or in pairs. They are fast runners that seek to ambush herding prey from cover and then catch in a swift chase, and their plumage has dulled to better hide in the forests they live in. Their jaws are now much larger and stronger, with a sharply hooked upper beak that is easily visible and protrudes from the fleshy tissue of the face. Unlike nearly any other trunko, the neck pouch is featherless in lumpredators - an adaptation to keep it from accumulating blood and gunk when the animal sticks its head into carcasses to feed. The facial flanges have sharp tooth-like nails on their edges and can be spread outward or partially folded up along the face as an additional weapon to subdue prey with lacerating injuries. The trunk is now smaller and roughly textured to help grip prey, but its main use is now social communication; to keep it safe, it is usually held folded over the snout. 

Lumpredators are not big enough to kill adult heffalumps, and those animals indeed have just one major predator, one that all the animals of the archipelago fear equally. Swamp-dwelling bog shoggoths, swarming semi-aquatic ant swarms which target animals that become bogged down in mud and thus become too slow to escape in time, can kill prey of any size. For though big, social animals like sealumps can defend themselves against equally sized enemies, they are helpless against those too small to strike, who work in even greater cohesion against them. For this reason, heffalumps and lumpredators both are untrustworthy of new places and prefer to follow well-worn trails through the islands which have been proven safe for generations, avoiding even seemingly food-rich groves if they haven't been there before unless exploring becomes absolutely necessary. When such animals do venture into uncharted territory, they are exceedingly cautious and wary, especially of areas where they could encounter their enemy. Muddy, unstable terrain is avoided, so that the herd favor uplands, and new water sources are investigated over multiple days over which the whole herd tosses sticks and rocks into the water and observes for any sign of shoggoth activity; they will still not likely go close to drink until some other animal paves the way and demonstrates that no enemies are present. On Ansteva, far from being a land of peace and prosperity, not even the predators are without their own horrors.

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Not every animal living upon Ansteva is a sealump. Though many of the charismatic animal groups of the mainland did not reach the island, others did manage crossings later on including a clade of derived skuorcs known simply as skuzzards. These reptile-like birds originated about 2 million years ago on Serinarcta, where their lineage diverged early in the hothouse, but shares a closest relation to the skuossums, their ancestor splitting from them 7 million years ago. Both groups exhibit a similar distribution of integument, with bead-like scales and small scutes on their lower sides and faces and a a coat of hair-like feathers along their backs. Skuossums however have long limbs and prominent beaks, while skuzzards have very short legs and only a tiny vestige of a beak, with their lizard-like mouths lined with over a hundred keratinous spines that serve a similar role to reptilian teeth. Their small limbs are an adaptation to their different habitat preferences to squossum ancestors, the ground instead of trees, and in particular thick grassy areas that impede running locomotion. Its easier to chase prey through the plains as a small animal by slithering instead of running, and this is what skuzzards do, moving with surprising ease through tangles and tussocks, using their limbs only for traction as they wiggle their way around in search of small animals to eat or to avoid bigger ones that want to eat them. Molodonts and ground-feeding birds like mowerbirds are frequently hunted in the north, and are struck by ambush with a burst of speed from within cover. The bite of these skuorcs is deadly; glands in their saliva contain mutant proteins derived from those which function as neurotransmitters in the avian brain. When injected into the body of prey with the long, hooked pseudoteeth of these skuorcs, these altered proteins now block the release of the other neurotransmitting chemical acetylcholine by motor neurons in the prey's body, by taking its place. This replacement in the body prevents the unfortunate creature's muscles from activating, and causes rapid paralysis in small animals, similarly to the venom of certain snakes. The victim flies or runs off for a short time but quickly succumbs to the effects and drops to the earth in helpless spasms, while the hunter follows the scent and trails its quarry, then eats it once it is immobile - but not necessarily dead - allowing it to catch food on little energy. 

This was the way of life for all skuzzards, at least until the ancestor of the woozle rafted to this island continent. Now, in this new place with different neighbors and foods unknown elsewhere, things have just begun to change, as the new group interacts with those already established in complex and sometimes unexpected ways.

The woozle is a skuzzard species whose ancestors reached the southern hemisphere by rafting on ocean-bound mats of vegetation, mostly masses of grasses and root-bound soil dislodged by coastal hurricanes, less than a million years ago. In doing so it became the second skuorc group to cross the seaway, after the ancestral skuorc itself some 9 million years earlier. The woozle - though an island species - can be viewed as an archetypal example of the skuzzard clade, and has changed only a little physically from similar animals living on Serinarcta today. Its metabolism is largely dependent on its environmental temperature, and by sheltering in the shade under soil and vegetation on these rafts the animals can enter a near-dormant state and endure starvation for a number of months, which is sometimes long enough for their "boat" to crash on a distant shore. The arrival of these birds on the Anstevan archipelago just a million years ago has allowed them to branch out to wider diets than they take in Serinarcta. The woozle, though still predatory and capable of hunting small murds that have also reached the islands, takes advantage of other food too. A much greater amount of flowering and fruiting plants grow in the forested habitat it now lives in compared to southern Serinaustra's grassy wetlands, and the woozle is an unpicky omnivore, that will use its tiny legs to haul itself off the ground and along tree branches to lick sweet flower nectar or grab a cluster of fruit, even if the only way it can get down again is to fall quite ungracefully. 

Leaving the ground where it evolved to take advantage of new foods also brings the woozle into contact with all those other strange animals its ancestors would never have met, sealumps such as the huge heffalump, which exhibits a similar taste for sweets. Both animals will eat the honey produced in tree cavities by flying ants, and go to significant lengths to get it. It's a challenge to get up into a tree when your fingers are just a few centimeters long, and once there the woozle doesn't give up its spot in a good honey hole easily, not even to animals thousands of times its size. Masters of intimidation, if bothered by the heffalump here the woozle will inflate its throat and emit a blood-curdling screech. If still harassed by an animal intent on taking its treat and pushing it aside, it will bite the trunko on the snout. But the venom of the woozle, an animal weighing about one pound, is evolved to kill prey not any bigger than itself. The effect it has on far bigger animals, which receive a miniscule dose, is very different - and the weapon backfires in its effectiveness in a remarkable way. 

The woozle's toxic bite affects the heffalump positively, as the chemical binds to its acetylcholine receptors in low enough concentration to not cause immediate, permanent harm in such a large body. Instead, the venom induces a mild state of euphoria - making them "woozy", as the heffalump's sensitivity to pain is diminished and they become almost giddy, with adults acting much like small chicks and playing more frequently. The heffalump thus not only doesn't avoid the woozle's bites but may even seek them out as a recreational drug - much to the woozle's displeasure. By seeking out woozles at honey trees and other likely feeding sites and picking them up, heffalumps seek to anger the animals enough to make them bite them to experience the high. The heffalumps don't usually injure the woozle - the effects only work if injected, and nothing would happen if they ate it. The woozle however is at a disadvantage if it bites the heffalumps, because it takes time to replace its venom stores and in the interim they can run out, rendering it unable to hunt effectively. This results in the woozle seeking out even more honey and fruit - food that can't run away - and meeting the heffalump more often. In some places the cultural knowledge of using the woozle's bite as a feel-good experience is so widespread among the heffalump that the woozles that live in these areas are primarily herbivorous and eat mostly fruit and honey, because their venom reserves are constantly depleted and they can't kill prey. Too much harassment can have the effect eventually of habituating the woozle to being held and prodded and carried around though, causing it to stop biting, and forcing the heffalumps to move to new areas where their drug dealer is still naive to them and will get them their fix.