The Scraggle

The largest animals of the savannahs, indeed of all of the land on Serina, are the gantuans and their relatives the skulossids. The largest animals ever to walk the land on the world of birds, being so massive comes with some problems. And one of the most persistent, irritating, and downright itchy, are the droves of parasites that can make a living on their bodies, which are almost like mountains of flesh and blood trodding over the landscape. Adults of these giant metamorph birds have few predators, yet they feed entire food chains unwittingly as parasitic insects, birds, tribbats, and even snarks drain them of blood and energy in endless tiny nibbles.

Yet, not all who climb over the giants bring woe. The scraggle is a nightbiter of the late hothouse which has, over the eons, redeemed itself. It has become a cleaner organism, adapted to pick pests off of massive animals with specialized teeth that no longer gouge flesh from their hides. As nightbiters as a whole originated from insect-eaters that learned to bite large animals on which they hunted bugs, this reflects a full-circle change for the scraggle from cleaner, to parasite, to predator, and back to where they all began.

The scraggle roosts by day in savannah trees, foraging by night like nearly all of its kin. But where it once descended on helpless hosts in the night and attacked them bite by bite, now it strips mites and lice from their feathers with comb-like lower incisors. These fancy teeth, though they may look spooky, are also useful to remove an even worse pest of the gantuans, the sinister but amusingly-named pancake snarks, which have evolved in the wetlands of the continent and now gain their sustenance by adhering to passing animals with a suction-cup like body, biting them, and subsisting on their blood. The recumbent lower jaw of the scraggle is curved upward and slightly back, and is able to be inserted at the edge of the very flat and smooth snark and to pry it off its holding, at which time the hunter can slice open its soft underbelly. Larger snarks may require multiple snaggles to work together to flip them, but the scraggle is gregarious and clever enough to coordinate their behavior in order to succeed. In this way, this tribbat's mouth is not only a naturally-evolved comb, but also a spatula.

While scraggles do still fly, and do so to reach hosts from their daily roosts, once on the gantuan's bodies their wing digits fold up so closely to their arms and their membranes retract so tightly that it is difficult to discern that they have any wings at all. Only as big as a hamster, they scurry with great agility over the mountains of meat and feather, clinging with a total of six hooked claws as they hunt their pesky prey. Their hind toes are especially mobile, able to spin to face completely backwards, and so let the animal hang upside down to reach a particularly hard to access parasite. Unlike some other cleaner animals, scraggles lack bright colors or visual signs to advertise their services; they are nocturnal, and so small relative to their hosts that they go unnoticed and unseen, by design. The black and white stripes along their backs serve not as a signal but as camouflage, breaking up their outlines during the day as they sleep in communal roosts in hollow trees.