The Scansorial Scroungers
Leaping, climbing, and going beyond.
The scansorial scroungers are a clade of shorescrounger descendants which split from both the squaboon lineage and the squelican lineage within 2 million years of the great thaw. They now include some of the most unusual and divergent members of all scroungers, species which have traded innovative behavior for more novel physical attributes. These animals today differ greatly in form and function, but have a common ancestor which evolved stronger jumping abilities. The ripper was a large, early representative of this lineage, pouncing on prey from the shadows and carrying its kills up into trees - a precursor to modern forms which include totally arboreal species. But the scansorial scroungers of today are more derived, their ancestors having developed fiercer, sharper claws on their tentacles and switching from running to full-time bounding locomotion with kangaroo-like hind limbs. Leaping swiftly through forests to escape larger predators and to snatch small prey. 285 million years PE, the sprounce still embodies the most basic, primitive form of this scrounger clade, and resembles the ancestor of the other living forms.
The sprounce is a 2.5 foot tall nocturnal carnivore that lives along the forest floor of the longdark swamp, weighing about 16 pounds. They are specialized strongly toward efficient jumping locomotion with long legs, powerful hips, and a highly reduced first toe that no longer touches the ground. They have large keratinous hooks on their tentacles which are utilized to grasp prey; sprounces are ambush predators, mainly of small, ground-foraging birds, which they flush from cover, then spring up and snatch from the air in a cat-like manner. These little scroungers stand just over two feet tall and weigh only about ten pounds, yet they can spring up to ten feet in the air from a standstill and leap more than 25 feet horizontally from a moving start, making them unexpectedly effective hunters and agile and nimble enough to avoid most larger predators in turn; their only significant enemies as adults are large flying tribbats such as the spook.
Though spending most of the year alone and generally quite territorial, pairs form to breed once a year; there are no physical differences between male and female, and courtship is not elaborate. Both sexes help dig out a burrow, using foot and tentacle claws, in which the female incubates two to four eggs while being provided food by the male. Both parents provide for the chicks for just three months, when they go off on their own; hunting is largely instinctive, rather than learned as in many birds. This goes along with a reduction in social complexity and problem solving capacity in this branch of scroungers compared to other clades, which is correlated with their more dramatic physical adaptations to fill new niches that the more primitive-looking, smarter squaboons or squabgoblins would instead adopt behavioral changes to exploit.
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Scrabblegrabbers are even more physically specialized than the sprounce. They are arboreal predators which have evolved to jump up trees and use their claws to "run" up vertical trunks in the same way as the twigswinger. Their toes and the claws upon them became larger and more capable of grasping until they were able to not only run up, but also descend tree trunks headfirst in the manner of a woodpecker. They have evolved three enlarged toes on each foot, the first and second of which can rotate backwards or forwards for stability when moving up or down the bark. To facilitate climbing tree trunks this way with only two legs and no arms, scrabblegrabbers are small and lightweight, weighing just a few pounds. The biggest of these tiny squorks stand only 20 inches tall, though they rarely stand upright, preferring to scurry along low to whatever surface they are standing on with their knees bent and their ankles nearly touching it.
These softbilled birds, like their relative on the ground, are mostly carnivorous, foraging high in the forest canopy for small prey that hides in small tree holes. They are more omnivorous, though, and also eat fruit readily and so are important seed dispersers of certain epiphytes. Its adaptations are still strongly suited for a hunting life, however, and its left and right tentacles are elongated and now end in sharp keratin hooks, and it uses them to enter narrow crevices and pluck out hapless animals - nestling birds are a favorite, but it also consumes insect larvae, lumpuses and roosting tribbats. The lower tentacle is shorter and edged in a sharp spike, like an ice pick, which is used to quickly kill animals as it yanks them from their hiding places. The upper tentacle is shortest of all and has a large curved nail which is used to enlarge small holes in the bark in the event they are too narrow to reach into and to dig out their own nests in old rotting wood, which are used year round for sleeping in addition to housing their young. Unlike sprounces, which are not quite a perfect analogue for the common ancestor of the scansorial scroungers (having evolved into increasingly carnivorous, solitary forms in the millions of years since the lineages diverged) these birds retain social behavior. Most species are monogamous for life and families remain together for as long as two years - a very long time for a small animal - but all members forage separately during the day.
Scrabblegrabbers prop themselves up to rest vertically on tree trunks with an enlarged pygostyle in their tails, which is further covered with stiff barb-like feathers. While woodpeckers are reliant on their own tails for support so much that they cannot climb down trees, only up, these birds can also climb down easily, using their largest tentacle hook to brace themselves on a face-first descent. Completely wingless, they cannot glide or even flutter if they fall, but their light weight and a strong righting reflex means occasional falls are generally not harmful - not that they like being on the ground. Landing on their feet, they quickly scurry back up to safety.
The many species of scrabblegrabbers are all distinctly colored, some subtly and some highly flamboyant. The sunspotted scrabblegrabber is one of the biggest species at 7 pounds and is reasonably colorful in both sexes, with a black plumage over most of the body highlighted with red, white and gold on the neck and four bright yellow spots on the featherless face from which their name derives. This species has a wide range, including into the longdark swamp, and during the dark winter they molt their bright markings for solid black as do some other animals. Scrabblegrabbers are somewhat unusual for many species being both seasonally nocturnal and having decent night vision, yet still able to discern the bright reds and yellows that they adorn in the summer breeding season with decent color vision. The cones and rods of their eyes have evolved to shrink and grow throughout the seasons to best capture available light. In summer color-sensitive cone cells enlarge and color vision becomes stronger, while in the polar winter more light-sensitive rod cells expand and provide much stronger night vision. They are thus fully colorblind for part of the year, while developing full tetrachromatic sight during the summer. Spring and autumn are transitional periods where their eyes slowly adjust - if moved suddenly from light to dark or vice versa, a scrabblegrabber would be temporarily almost blind until it adapted, a process which is initiated by changing day length.
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More specialized still than the scrabblegrabber lives a third offshoot of the scansorial scroungers. It is a truly bizarre species that diverged earlier than the scrabblegrabbers but which also evolved from an earlier jumping animal. Like the sprounce, it still hops more than it walks, and its hind legs are strong and well-built to withstand the stresses of leaping. Yet this animal has taken its bounding locomotion off the ground and into the treetops, and has done so independently of the scrabblegrabber, in a different manner. The lolligolugo is one of the many scansorial scroungers which has become arboreal in the forests of the hothouse - but the only one which has also evolved to travel beyond the tops of the tree branches.
As unexpected as it sounds, scroungers - birds without any forearms - have evolved arboreal adaptations multiple times, and not all tree scroungers are close relatives. The lolligolugo, like all scansorial scroungers, split from the squabgoblin-squaboon lineage some 13 million years ago. It, too, is small - only a little bigger than the twigswinger at 6 pounds. Like that species, the lolligolugo has powerful hind legs. But the legs of this species, though also useful for grasping, are not the primary way in which it climbs. This scrounger, unlike other tree scroungers, uses its tentacles to pull itself upwards, and has a proportionally massive head to provide the muscle attachments for these limbs to operate in this novel way. Descending from a sprounce-like ancestor, lolligolugos also originated as small jumping predators. Their legs splay wide when climbing, hugging the tree and so preventing them from sliding backwards, but are not strong enough anymore to push them up trees on their own. Once it reaches a high perch, though, they can aid it in horizontal jumps from one branch to another, and as the only gliding tentacled bird in the world, it can cover vast distances this way. Leaping from its perch, it careens into a descending glide of up to sixty feet, catching the warm swamp air under a skin membrane that stretches from its first toe to near the tip of its outer tentacles and using those appendages in place of the forelegs its ancestors lost hundreds of millions of years ago to steer itself to another safe landing.
The lolligolugo is an oddball in many ways. It climbs, it glides, and though it descends from predators, it has become the most strictly vegetarian of any scrounger, moreso even than the most herbivorously-inclined squaboons in that it eats nearly nothing except leaves. Its gliding adaptation may be directly related to this dietary preference, for it greatly reduces its energy expenditure to reach food sources compared to the athletic leaps of the twigswinger or the energetic clambering of the scrabblegrabber, which both requires a much richer diet to sustain them; a lack of any gliding relatives which eat more varied diets lends credence to this idea. Though it descends from at least omnivorous ancestors, the modern species is now a true specialist and eats tree leaves exclusively, sometimes supplementing with flowers. Its tentacles have comb-like spikes which serve to strip twigs of foliage and bring it into the mouth, and these combs are also used to groom its plumage, especially a long cape of hair-like feathers which can be erected when it is startled to increase its size and intimidate threats. It can be inferred from its diet, and a seeming inability to recogize anything else as food, that the lolligolugo is not a very clever animal, and this is true. It is probably the least intelligent of any species of scrounger, living or extinct, and has experienced a dramatic reduction in its brain to body ratio over the course of its evolution. Every aspect of its biology now caters to trying to reduce energy expenditure, and a large thinking brain long ago became a burden unneeded to survive. Lolligolugos use no tools, live wholly solitary lives, and are unable to innovate. Yet they are very successful, widespread over most of the southern continent, and rarely preyed upon due to their slow movement and cryptic coloration; their species epithet, "rare" refers not to their numbers but to their unique attributes.
The lolligolugo and its relatives prove that there are many ways to be a successful species in the hothouse world, and that trends that seem to lead many Serinan organisms toward higher states of complexity, particularly of intelligence and behavior, are not irreversible.
Phylogeny of the Scansorial Scroungers
