Pirate Pummel

Though much smaller than the gantuans or skulossi which share its habitat in the trilliontree islands, and lacking the potent stinging spurs of its waspeng cousin, the pirate pummel is still a creature which many other animals dread the arrival of on their island havens. This is a massive pretenguin, now reaching a ten foot height and a 2,500 lb weight. Every ounce of its body is designed by natural selection for maximum heft, for it is a fighter through and through; an animal which has survived by becoming truly, downright mean. Their wings are modified into hoof-like clubs which can be propelled forward with enough power to break bones. Males fight each other for access to female harems, females fight anything that even comes close to their eggs or their young. Chicks even just one day old begin to punch one another, forming dominance hierarchies that will last through to adulthood, and which often results in the death of the weakest in a litter of two or three as it is prevented from feeding by its stronger brothers and sisters' constant bullying. Through its immediate response to throw hands at literally any problem it encounters, the pirate pummel can keep most potential predators at bay which know even if it kills one member of a flock, the others will continue to strike it, taking it down with its victim. Big enough to bully its way to whatever it wants, the pirate pummel has also learned to use its aggression offensively, mobbing small to medium carnivores for their hard-earned kills: carrion is nutritious food it would have a hard time getting on its own, for even with all its ferocity, the pirate pummel is slow and ungainly and anything small enough to catch gives it a very wide berth. To take advantage of this new food, this species has evolved a slightly hooked bill which is more effective at tearing meat, and can also crack bones. Not one to waste any sort of weapon, they have also taken to adding bites to their aggressive arsenal, having learned that now in addition to punching, they can also deliver savage tearing bites to anything live that comes too close, powered by side to side swings of the muscular neck.

Pummels have been able to take advantage of a diet which includes up to 50% animal matter to support an uncommonly high reproductive rate; females can nest three times a year, incubating two to three eggs at a time, and their chicks grow much quicker than those of strictly herbivorous pretenguin species. So many eggs, each almost three times as large as those of an ostrich, requires a great deal of dietary calcium, all the more because the shells of this bird have become the thickest of any bird which has ever lived on land. It is for this reason, to build these shells, that the pirate pummel often cracks and consumes bones. And such spectacular shells are vital for this birds' survival at such gigantic size, as only at an enormous scale can an egg be maintained without being destroyed while being brooded beneath its mother's clumsy body as she sits hunched forward with a thick dewlap of skin on her neck over the eggs like a blanket. So thick are the pirate pummel's eggs that a chick cannot hatch without direct assistance; when a mother hears her chick's plaintive cries for help as it begins to hatch inside the egg, she must use her forearm to carefully split the eggshell around the top air pocket to let her offspring be born. It requires that she be extremely devoted to her task, never leaving the eggs for the last week to ten days of the incubation process, because if she misses the short window where the chick has begun hatching, it will die trapped in its egg of suffocation. A diet rich in high-calorie food, like animal flesh, helps her put on enough body fat to endure starving for this length of time to maintain her close vigil and help her young when they need her.

Like a roving mob, the pirate pummel as a species does not stay in one place for long. Instead, it wanders from one island to another in search of easy food. They travel between isles in an unusual way; they have solid limb bones, much denser than those of any other sparrowgull, and nearly all of their body mass is muscle, not fat; their deceptively fit condition makes them neutrally buoyant in water. Rather than swim between islands, the pirate pummel walks along the seafloor, bounding along with an occasional kick up to the surface for a breath of air. It is an intriguing reversion to a diving habit from a lineage which had become all but totally land-dwelling for some 10+ million years. Moving along in groups which keep a collective eye on their surroundings, even fierce sea-going snark predators may reconsider attacking a pirate pummel, whose strikes can blind an eye. When pummels come to a new shore, they often face animals which have evolved in isolation from any such creature and which do not know what to expect. With every new island they conquer, they exploit a brief bounty of vulnerable, naive local predators who will either abandon their kills when confronted, or stand their ground and die, until all who remain learn that to resist the pummel invasion is futile. When easy meat runs out, the pummel will begrudgingly return to a vegetarian diet, but this no longer provides them everything they need to support their rapid growth rate. Without higher nutrition food in the form of meat to supplement this diet, they often have very poor nesting success and their chicks rarely reach adulthood, being prone to leg deformities from nutritional deficits, their rate of growth meaning any lack of nutrition even for a short time can have lasting consequences.  

And so it all comes full circle; for all the destruction this pretend penguin may cause, its behavior is self-destructive too, based entirely on short term benefits but often resulting in long term loss. Eventually, though some species may go locally extinct, others on an island will learn ways to counter the pummel. On time scales of centuries, a pattern repeats time and again. Pirate pummels reach a new island, they pillage it of its easy food resources until they are no longer available, and then the pummels begin to struggle to make a living. With less easy meal options, chicks already born can starve to death and those not yet hatched may suffocate in their eggs when their hungry mothers must leave the nest to feed on whatever plants they can find, which require she eat much more of than if she still had access to meat. Meanwhile, species on the island that survived the initial onslaught may now begin to turn on the weakening invader when it is vulnerable and restore balance; weakened incubating females especially can make easy prey if they can be ambushed from behind without time to fight back, and the population begins to skew biased toward males, which in turn kill each other over increasingly scarce mate choices. And when all is going wrong for it, the pummel's confidence may extend too far; in its desperation, it may eventually challenge a huge animal, some sort of gantuan rival it has no hope to overpower, and it will be tossed like a ragdoll to its death. Pirate pummels are always seeking out new islands to inhabit because their lifestyle is unsustainable, and to remain in any one place more than a few generations results in the breakdown of their strategy and their eventual extinction. This strange species has become dependent on exploiting ecosystems naive to it, an invasive species by design. It is only by constantly moving on to some as-yet untouched island somewhere else that the pirate pummel, for now, manages to survive. But its good times will always be brief, and inevitably every new haven becomes its own personal hell. Going all-in on aggression allows this pretenguin to survive in ways that others cannot, but the sword is double-edged. Times of plenty always end and become times of scarcity, and for this wicked creature thus forced to always keep searching for paradise it will never really find, it finds no rest. The pirate pummel may be a bully, but in truth it's always running from an enemy it could never fight against, the specter of its own extinction that follows its every migration... and creeps a little closer each new island the pirate checks off its list, as its options slowly but surely fall away like sand in the hourglass.

One day, there will be nowhere new left to run.