The Slade

290 Million Years Post-Establishment

The slade is a very wide sinkhole in southeast Serinarcta that has over millions of years formed a valley some 500 miles across, the result of a large area of the coalseam caves' gradual collapse a little over ten million years ago. The valley that has been produced by erosion of limestone bedrock from the constant rain of the hothouse era now separates the eastern savannahs from the western plains, and a narrower western fork of the slade has also isolated the polar plain from the firmament. The slade is now a dividing range, but one which goes down rather than up. Its primary biome is rain plain, an inundated grassland related to the stormveld habitat type and a variation of relict sogland. Without strong winds here, it is primarily intense grazing pressure from large herbivores that limits the extent of tree coverage, much as occurred so long ago in the beginning hothouse. Tens of thousands of shallow lakes and damp grassy plains are interspersed with steep stone spires and plateaus, remnants of the former terrain height. In these spots that never collapsed, small islands now rise above the soggy landscape below, and a very different ecosystem can be found: forest. Woody plants take root only atop these plateaus and precipices, protected from large but cumbersome animals that would feed upon them, if only they could reach. These tree-topped spires may resemble cementrees found in drier places, but they have formed from entirely different processes. Unlike cementrees, karst towers cannot be built higher, and so continue to slowly reduce in size as they are weathered. Eventually, though not for millions of years more, the entire landscape will be smoothed out. With no more volcanic activity to build mountains, Serina now becomes a little flatter every year - and as this process wears away its walls, the slade is still expanding in size. 

Pocketfowl are a lineage of hothouse birds most notable for being the ancestors of giraffowl, a group of gigantic, giraffe-like animals which are flightless after infancy. But though they may be the biggest and most eye-catching species of pocketfowl, they are not the only branch still extant. The goose-like birds called drakefowls are common worldwide, and what they lack in size they make up for with their stronger parental care, and an efficient and innovative ways of consuming their vegetable food by chewing with their spiky tongues against their upper mandibles, a method that has only evolved one other time before them, in the unrelated viva lineage. This makes these pocketfowl generally better adapted than other seraphs at grazing. But the downside is that unlike many pteese, pocketfowl are strongly adapted to a semi-aquatic lifestyle, with webbed feet and often very heavy bodies for their wingspans which can gain lift only with some difficulty and a running start over water. Thus, the pteese graze the land, while drakefowl are firmly birds of the water, eating mostly shoreline grasses and sedges and other weeds.

Drakefowl are undoubtedly the more "primitive" member of the pocketfowl clade, because they still fly, yet they are not mere "living fossils." These are animals just as well adapted to the hothouse world as their giant cousins, and which surpass them in some ways. Species such as the dark-eyed drakefowl of the slade region are alike giraffowls in being strongly dimorphic, with bill-crested colorful males and plainer females. They also share the ventral pouch in which the female broods her pupa, protecting them from predators until they emerge. But while young giraffowl are independent from their first breaths and fly, while the adults become flightless, the reverse is true of drakefowls that have evolved flightless chicks that gradually become volant adults. This change has occured in tandem with the evolution of greater parental attention toward the chicks, and young drakefowl imprint on their mothers and are tended for as long as a year after hatching. They do not return to the watertight pouch after hatching as it doesn't provide enough oxygen exchange for the chick's higher metabolic rates once they are done pupating, but they cling to her back as she swims and wades in the wetlands most drakefowl are found in, and she defends them from predators as well as shares pre-chewed food with them.

A male's role is not generally direct childcare, but rather defense of a harem of several females and their young, each of which is usually its own responsibility. It is his job to fend off predators as well as rival males, and so he is up to twice the size of his mates. Still, a harem male is tolerant of his young clambering on top of him and will fetch one if it strays far from its parent. But like many social species where relatively few males claim most available female mates, male drakefowl are aggressive and often come into conflict. If an usurper displaces the current leader of a group, he is likely to kill all of his competitor's offspring so that he may sire his own in their place. Females live together, but seem to lack the ability to cooperate together against this threat, with the result that a new male usually takes on each one individually until all unwanted chicks are gone. Sometimes, however, single mothers may judge their best chance is to flee a take-over with their offspring and defy the expected natural order by staying with their previous, now beaten mate and settling in a new territory; they are faster and more nimble than the males, and cannot be made to stay with them through force. Though this decision might mean she is settling for a male that has been proven less fit, the survival of her current offspring that would otherwise not survive with a new male can make this the best option. There is only a relatively narrow window of time where a female will be able to make this choice, however; her chicks must be young enough to carry with her in flight, yet old enough she has already bonded with them strongly. It's a set of constraints that usually only apply to chicks between two and five weeks of age. Any younger, and she may feel her investment has not been enough to warrant uprooting her life when she could soon have a new brood of chicks with the new male. But any later, and she will be unable to carry her offspring even if she wanted to. Oppositely, if a female's young are already able to fly themselves, and could flee with her on their own power, then they are old enough they no longer require her care to survive and will simply be chased out of the harem on their own. Though in this case it may happen sooner than if their father still lead them, they will likely be able to fend for themselves by then, and thus their mother lets them go.

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The crested vulpynx is a more basal member of the same genus as the larger plains vulpynx, and in many ways resembles its last ancestor. For though that species is now an inhabitant of the savannahs and upland grasslands, these feline-like foxtrotters have an origin in the soglands that formerly covered the entire continent, and evolved their long legs to wade in water as they hunted their prey. Wading is still the lifestyle of the crested species, named for a halo of long golden whiskers that encircle its face, which are raised or lowered to indicate its mood. Though their range has contracted since the earlier hothouse, it is still quite broad, and this animal ranges widely through the center of the continent from the slade up to the diluvian divide and as far north as the polar basin.  This is a fish-eating animal, and it thus lives quite a different lifestyle from its cursorial cousin, rarely eating prey larger than about 2 pounds, or around 5% of its weight. It hunts by stepping through shallow water and raking the mud and through the weeds with its feet, which are hairless and have bright yellow skin that makes them contrast sharply against its black wrists and ankles. This seems to serve to startle small aquatic prey from their hiding places, sending them swimming out of cover, and into the vulpynx's line of sight. With cat-like quickness, it pounces and snatches fish with its front paws, the first digit of each being recurved into a meat-hook to secure a grasp on even the slipperiest prey items.

Crested vulpynx are social animals, for though they may be found hunting alone much of the time, they exist in a connected social network with many other individuals in dispersed, loose clans in which most individuals interact every few days. Males and females alike care for their young, which will often be tended alternately by each parent for several days at a time, giving each one a break to tend to its own needs, and sometimes subadults from an older litter will also assist in caretaking. These vulpynx are rarely aggressive, though unfamiliar adult females may be hostile when they meet, especially when with cubs. Territory boundaries between clans are often very ambiguous, with different clans introgressing together where some individuals may be part of more than one group and not every member of each clan has the same social circle, an unusual social structure that is made possible because vulpyynx feed on such small and abundant prey species that there is little competition between individuals, which has made them one of the most social foxtrotters, and not just with a small circle of family members. Crested vulpynxes' inherent sociability and willingness to form friendly bonds with other individuals sometimes extends outside the species barrier; they are sometimes known to develop attachments to somewhat unexpected animals including their distant relative, the arctic snagglejaw, with which they share similar social habits, and which importantly does not view them as a food source. Instances of mothers of both species permitting their offspring to play are documented, in which the larger snagglejaw shows extraordinary gentleness, demonstrating that a great deal of trust can come to develop between the two species. It's easy to see what benefit the much smaller vulpynx may gain from its association with a larger and fiercer animal, but the snagglejaw seems to gain little except company and entertainment. For a large animal with relatively few concerns and food security, this may be more than enough to receive in return. At least one instance of an arctic snagglejaw going so far as to adopt an orphaned crested vulpynx cub and rear it has occurred. In other environments the crested vulpynx may also interact playfully with sawjaws, particularly smaller viridescent forms with specific diets. They may also cooperate in a more business-like manner with certain pickbirds that may use their aerial advantage to locate large shoals of fish and direct this small hunter toward them in exchange for a small fish of their own to eat as payment. Yet it does not usually interact well with its own close relative, as the plains vulpynx is often very aggressive where the two might meet, and may even prey upon it if the chance arises. Of course, even the worst aggression between vulpynx is nothing compared to the next species we meet.

The slade provides a lasting refuge to relics of an earlier hothouse. It is one of the last remnants of the north continent's soglands, still inhabited by huge, burly thorngrazers. In fact, the largest thorngrazer of all time now dwells down in these lowland, permanently swampy plains. The emelantouka is a long, short, and rotund descendant species of hadropotamus and has now reached a weight of almost two tons, regularly reaching 3,600 lbs. This giant eats mainly plants and feeds gluttonously on grasses, sedges and water plants with its enormous paired teeth, the lower one of which serves as a shovel to dig up its diet roots and all. Yet it is not a gentle giant; the emelantouka's name is said to mean "killer of elephants", and though there are not technically any elephants here, this is a thorngrazer so large and so territorial that it could potentially kill a cygnosaur. The emelantouka's hind leg is extraordinarily powerful to support its weight and make even its very slow, ungainly terrestrial movement - in which the back leg propels the forelimbs ahead in a series of thundering, clumsy flops and is then swung forward with what must be exhausting exertion - possible. No tripod has ever reached such a size and still managed to walk on three legs, and that alone is remarkable. 

That it can stand and walk at all at this weight is a marvel, but it is only because the slade is permanently wet, its length and width run with rivers and wide deltas that remain full year-round, that the emelantouka can really move freely even at such a large size. It spends almost all its time with its weight borne at least partly by the water. A dense creature, both literally and not so literally, like most thorngrazers it can't float, but must run along the bottom sediment, and there it is weightless, able to run and leap and almost fly. It uses its long crest to reach the surface to breathe even as it feeds with its head completely submerged. The crest of the emelantouka is uniquely non-ossified; it remains soft and mobile like that of a newborn into adulthood, and is able to be angled backwards, forwards, or directly up in order to always keep the nostrils above water. Its ears, too, are specially adapted to remain out of water even when the rest of the head is below, being shaped into long hollow tubes with a sealing valve at their tips, letting the creature always be aware of its surroundings. Blade-like spurs on its shoulder blades defend its neck from bites from predators from above as it grazes underwater.

This thorngrazer travels alone, for it is a solitary animal as unkind to its own kind as any other, with the males combative but the females the real ones to reckon with, at least when they have a calf with them, as they will not back down against any foe if their young is in danger. Both sexes sport large, curved chin tusks and will charge anything that approaches them too closely near the water, posing a very real risk even to much bigger gantuans as they lower their heads to drink. This aggression is not wholly defensive; as a very primitive branch of crested thorngrazer, the hadropotamus genus diverged before others became specialized herbivores. The emelantouka eats meat when it is able to, and will hunt live prey if the opportunity is available, slashing at their heads as they drink, or dragging hapless animals that try to swim across the floodwaters underwater to drown them under its body weight. Like some horrible hybrid of hippo and crocodile, an emelantouka is one of the most dangerous of any animal on Serinarcta: with motivations as varied as territorial defense, protection of the youth, or simple hunger, this is a thorngrazer that will kill for any reason, and thus for no reason. It cannot be trusted by anything, and is so aggressive that even its own kind cannot tolerate being near to it for any longer than it takes to mate, and then partners separate with a formidable roar as they quickly flee one another before passion turns to violence and the dim-witted couple forget their love and turn on one another. As if taking revenge on those newer animal lineages that evolved to displace its relatives elsewhere in the late hothouse world, the emelantouka at times seems to have compiled countless generations of vengeful rage, which it now takes out on anything that it can. The only time a emelantouka ever tolerates another being in its vicinity is when a mother gives birth. But even that is a temporary arrangement.

A calf gains the special privilege of tolerance from its mother for about one and a half years; after birth, a mother emelantouka is flooded with maternal instincts that temporarily bond her to the only thing she will ever care about in her entire life, and she will do anything to keep it safe. But by the time her young is six months old, she will have mated again; often, she will do so in order to keep her young safe from a roving male which would quickly kill it if it caught it (mating with the male can provide time for the young to hide.) And though this doesn't change anything right away for her young, a year after that a new baby will become her focus, and in a single day, so strong is this new bond that she will no longer remember her old one. It runs away, and if it isn't quick enough to realize the danger its own mother now means, she will kill it with no more care than the male. It is on its own, and the harsh and lonely life it will lead from now on is thrust upon it with little warning. If only they could experience just a bit more tenderness in their youth, might this fearsome beast's anger be quelled? Unfortunately, evidence suggests that not even a longer childhood welcome does any good to tame the rage in the emelantouka's heart. For very rarely, a female will lose her offspring, and in her agony, she will try to get back what has been stolen, with drastic consequences for all involved. 

Transferring the pain to yet another, a larger and more dominant female who's own young has died may steal the calf of another, even one much older than her own, and use it as a substitute for her own young. Driven by her motherly hormones to nurture, a kidnapping adoptive mother may care for a calf for as much as a year longer than it normally would stay with its parent. Far from making the adopted calf well-adjusted, though, this prolonged care spoils it. It grows into a huge, belligerent brat, and fed on nutritious crop milk much longer than nature intended, it also grows grossly obese, weighing as much as 4,500 lbs: too big to support its own weight on land, especially as its unnaturally rich diet has produced deformities in its limbs - excessive, overly rapid growth. They've by now grown overly long, and very frail; to even try to stand would dislocate its own joints. So limited in its movements and used to being fed constantly, when the time comes that the adoptive (or thieving) mother gives birth again and now abandons her substitute child, it doesn't just run away. No, it's much too big for that, and mother now seems so very small. It doesn't relent in begging for food, for it has been babied for so long, it does not know how otherwise to find food. As its mother grows angrier and pushes it away, the big baby grows madder and madder too until at last it attacks her, dragging her into the depths and killing her and her new young. Then, in ravenous hunger, it will eat them both, guarding their remains for days from all other scavengers until nothing is left, not even bone. For it does not know how else to feed itself - it never had to learn. Its adoptive parent gives everything it had to keep the stolen child alive, and yet it still won't be enough. It has gotten so fat it can neither walk, nor dive underwater; all it can do is float. From the moment it was taken from its biological mother, it never had a chance.

 Now it is too late; this calf will never be normal. Floating around, it mindlessly attacks all it comes across; it has become a distended, enormously oversized carnivore, and a cannibal that may be so large no other member of its species can outmatch it. The reign of terror of such a beast is violent, but doomed to end. Once all its rivals are killed and consumed, it will be left marooned; others will all move on to other waterways overland, a route it cannot follow. Behaviorally maladapted, physically crippled, and now accustomed only to a flesh diet, it will ultimately starve to death, unable to ever leave the water, unable to ever have a normal life. Far from a gift, an extended period of maternal affection is a curse to the calf, turning it into a monster even among monsters. No such adoptee ever lives more than a year after its independence.

From the heaviest to the tallest of all thorngrazers, our next species dwells down in the tall-grass soglands of the slade but does not swim. Reaching an average height of 14 feet, the thousand-pound stilted sirenhorn compensates for a comparatively short neck with extraordinarily extended legs which let it see above the vegetation of the slade and always remain wary to potential predators, grazing the tops of grasses and sedges while never dipping its head out of the open air. Its height provides other benefits, letting it splay its legs out in three directions further from each other at the feet than at the hip and shoulders, which changes its gait. Most tribbetheres have a fundamentally dog-like body shape, and must use a bounding movement where the hind limb must always be lifted and pulled forward with each walk cycle, which is very fast but becomes energetically inefficient at larger sizes. The stilted sirenhorn, however, is shaped like a pyramid, with its center of balance located in its shoulder hump. It walks by alternately lifting its hind leg and one forearm forward at the same time with a smooth, rocking movement which uses much less energy. No other animal walks quite the same way. As herds of these animals steadily travel through the grass, they appear to rhythmically shuffle along, their bodies swiveling left and then right alternately with each opposing step, and turning their necks to always face forward with each motion. Herds are usually very large, numbering hundreds to thousands, as numbers provide safety and more eyes to alert to threats. The strongest males remain at the center of groups, defending individual female harems, while younger and older males tag along the periphery, biding their time to try and oust a harem-male and win the right to mate, but also being the most vulnerable to predators.

Speed is not the sirenhorn's specialty, but if pressed, it can still run, switching suddenly to the typical galloping gait of other thorngrazers, and its long legs lend it an extremely large stride, which can let it quickly put distance between itself and its predator. It is not defenseless when confronted closely either, having evolved sharp blade-like osteoderms along all three legs, with which it can strike widely out in virtually any direction to lacerate attackers. Tusks, much larger in the male, are used mainly to wrestle with other males, their location so high up on the animal being inconvenient for defensive use. The unusual hooves of the stilted sirenhorn also resemble fierce claws; they appear overgrown, arcing forwards and upwards from its digits. They aren't used as weapons, but they are a perfect adaptation to stride over soggy, muddy substrate in and out oif water, where smaller, sharper hooves would simply sink. With each step, first the pad of the foot presses the ground, then the middle of the nail, and at last the tip of the nail. Each toe moves in a rocking chair-like sliding motion from back to front, and in doing so its weight is splayed over a wide area so that the sirenhorn does not become bogged down in the muck.

The crests of the stilted sirenhorn resemble those of its earlier ancestor the spiral sirenhorn, but are both relatively larger and more tightly whorled, resembling a pair of snail shells. Present in both sexes, they produce deep booming calls like the notes of a tuba. Most communication is below human hearing range, being felt as a deep, resonant vibration. Only the highest pitch notes are audible, specifically the distress calls of calves. These are shrill and trumpet-like and quickly draw the ire of the whole herd, which will come to the aid of a youngster in danger. This cooperative behavior, where each individual demonstrates care toward others even if unrelated, has evolved by necessity with the evolution of other competitors in the late hothouse, especially the many large skuorcs. With so many other rivals to face, it has proven beneficial for these thorngrazers to aid one another and stand as a united force against others - already, they have been forced to adapt to an exiled life in the slade because cygnosaur aggression has largely excluded them from the drier grasslands their ancestors evolved on. By helping protect someone else's young today, a sirenhorn may have the favor reciprocated in the future. Only in numbers can they survive against the late hothouse age's bigger and badder competitors. 

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The emelantouka and the stilted sirenhorn share the slade with a relative that seems so close and yet now so far; the thundering helmethead is the last primitive crested thorngrazer of the genus Galeocornus, from which all other species of this clade in the late hothouse descend. It is still very similar to the rumbling helmethead of 15 million years before it, differing only in size (it is about 30% larger) and subtle proportions of its crest and tusk structure, as well as a darker pelage and more varied crest pattern. It is a grazer and remains an inhabitant of sogland - vast grassy wetlands that once covered almost all land in the early hothouse but which are now globally rare. It is one of few thorngrazers still living with six toes - four of which are widely splayed and bear weight over muddy terrain, while two are elevated as dewclaws (a small set of hooves usually lifted above the ground.) In most other, more derived crested thorngrazers like loopalopes and unicorns, the outermost toes have disappeared entirely, and weight is carried on only the center pair, with the intermediate set becoming dewclaws instead. This species is still locally abundant where it occurs, yet its current range is discontinuous. Some three-hundred thousand animals living within the slade, and a much smaller population of about 50,000 found many hundreds of miles north and east across the boreal soglands. The two populations do not significantly differ, though the slade animals are usually bigger. They have only recently become separated as the land around the Centralian Sea became drier and sogland retreated within the last 150,000 years, isolating the two groups away from one another in suitable habitat that still remained.

Thundering helmetheads, like their ancestors, live in large herds and are prone to conflict resulting in frequent injury. Social groups are only stable with females and young, always led by a hierarchy, and each such herd contains only a single adult male who is frequently changed out for another. This is no big deal to the females, for it is in their best interest for only the fittest males who can fight to the top sire their young, and the more often the males switch out, the more genetic diversity the herd will contain. Males compete over access to herds frequently and with high aggression, striking each other with sideways blows of their heads, using their jaw tusks rather than their delicate hollow head-crests to batter their opponent. They are almost constantly in a state of injury, becoming heavily scarred by the age of three when most begin trying to secure access to a herd for their fleeting moment in power. Unlike many other harem-dwelling animals, male helmetheads don't kill existing calves sired by previous males when they claim a herd - the females, a united front, are the rulers in the group and do not permit it (a male which tries is likely to be outnumbered and driven away if not outright killed.) Males are viewed only as visitors, inherently temporary, serving only to bear young, and not even protecting them from predation. Yet the large groups of combative males that follow female herds do serve to protect young, in a roundabout way, because the males injure one another in combat reliably enough that carnivores are much more likely to wait for it to happen and then close in to finish it off, than they ever are to bother hunting a juvenile (and facing its comparatively much stronger mother.)

Though they look much alike and live in similarly violent ways, the two populations of helmethead have very different lifespans. In the north, most live only six to eight years, with similar cause of death to their ancestors: frequent fighting, especially in the male, leads to wounds that eventually become infected, leading most to succumb to disease or making them vulnerable to predation. But in the slade, the species is longer lived: 12 - 16 years is entirely possible, and though still predated by carnivores, many individuals reach adulthood and survive in fair health for a long time in comparison - even the badly battle-scarred males. The reason why lies in a relationship with another species that only the slade helmetheads have access to, and the result there is a symbiotic partnership which significantly benefits the helmethead, and may well be responsible for its continued survival here in such better numbers than anywhere else in the hothouse world. The pintail pluvie associates readily with this thorngrazer, snapping up the bugs it disturbs as it walks in the grass, and gathering around any new wounds to catch the flies (and fly-like verminfan birds, like squicks) that gather there intended to feed on the wound itself or worse, lay their eggs within it and infest the host with their parasitic larvae. Pluvies climb all over helmetheads and are entirely tolerated, for these natural little nurses provide a tremendous service in keeping injuries clean and free of all infections. Wounds that would eventually prove fatal to the less fortunate helmetheads in the north, where the pluvie doesn't occur, become only minor inconveniences here thanks to the dutiful and ever-hungry birds' constant presence. It is a most intriguing partnership, and one which shows that even for species which have been able remain almost unchanged for long periods of time, forging new bonds can still be a useful trick to survive in this ever-changing world around us.

The slade serves as a dividing range between east and west, but is just isolated enough on its own to host animals no longer found anywhere else. This is a land lost in time, a relic of an earlier hothouse, where herds of soggobblers that never evolved into cygnosaurs still roam, and where top predator is neither sawjaw nor skuorc, but a real callback to bygone days: the largest gravedigger ever to walk the world of birds.

The goliath landshark is a tremendously large carnivore reaching a weight of up to five tons, as large as an average bull elephant. It is one of the largest of all terrestrial predators to have lived on Serina, only slightly exceeded in weight by the contemporary atrocious crossjaw and cutthroat subjugator. Its front legs are still lacking elbow joints, for this leviathan comes from the kittyhawk lineage, a descendant of the cookiecutter gravedigger, not the hawkyenas. Yet this makes them ideal for bearing weight, and a disproportionate amount of it is supported by the front legs, so much so that the hind ones are comparatively small. Though slow-moving on land by necessity of their forearm anatomy that can only swing back and forth at the elbow joint, this is a predator that always hunts near water, and so this is of no consequence. Indeed, its legs really only really serve to occasionally carry it from one lake to another, and for brief rushes up the shore to capture prey. It spends most of its life swimming or resting just below the surface, taking prey like soggobblers and hadropotomid thorngrazers by surprise as they pass by. Its closest relative, the common or lesser landshark, is similar in general form to itself but still much smaller, weighing only around 500 lbs. But its next nearing relative is the lacer of the Centralian sea, a species that has become fully aquatic in only a few million years, and which evolved from a near ancestor of this genus. These three species share a strong resemblance; all of them have robust, devastating jaws and bill cusps shaped like shark teeth, which deliver destructive bites that cleanly slice flesh in huge mouthfuls. None of them can chew its food, and the huge portions they tear from carcasses are swallowed in their entirety. The goliath is often accompanied by a commensal pickbird called the malachite, which feeds on its scraps but seems to perform little service in return, being tolerated only because it is so small.

Solitary and ornery, goliath landsharks are territorial and each require a lot of space to find food, but they don't have to maintain their populations through in-fighting like some other apex predators. They pair only to mate, and females have just one offspring every seven to ten years, making it a very significant investment, as each female may have only four of them in an average lifespan. With low reproductive rates like this goliath landsharks remain uncommon. They rarely come into conflict, so individuals tend to live for decades. Territorial boundaries are established in an unusual way involving the creation of towers of rocks, wood, or simply soil and vegetation. These creations can reach up to 30 feet high and over 100 feet around, and eventually may be colonized by plant life on their top surfaces, becoming small elevated mound forests above the wetland. Landsharks may spend long periods rearranging the materials used to construct them again and again until satisfied with the result, and different individuals often tend to create characteristic towers unlike their neighbors, indicating this may be a form of art in addition to its practical purpose as a boundary line. Possibly the landshark is more intelligent than it otherwise may seem.

The goliath landshark's total population may be one of the smallest of any animal ever to evolve on Serina; it has stayed mostly stable at around just 1,000-1,500 total individuals of all ages for thousands of years, which are widely distributed across the slade and which rarely meet their neighbors. This massive gravedigger has very low genetic diversity because the cap on their population is so small; for the most part, they cannot escape the slade's walls, for all water drains here, and they cannot climb out to disperse as adults, nor survive without adult care when young and more agile. It would take only one plague or natural disaster to potentially wipe the entire species out. This giant, though without rivals among other animals in its microcosm, thus walks a fine line just in front of extinction. Yet the species may be more resilient than expected, for its lack of genetic diversity indicates it has has already endured at least one bottleneck in the past when some calamity may have reduced the total number of animals to possibly no more than fifty individuals, which then slowly recovered their numbers over centuries. Though the exact mechanisms which allow the animal to avoid acquiring large numbers of deleterious alleles through inbreeding are uncertain, the species appears to be adapted to tolerate very low population levels. It is possible that most such harmful genes have already been culled out of the population in earlier generations and now few remain, leaving only outside influence like disease to potentially cause population declines. But this seems uncommon, perhaps because they socialize so infrequently that if one becomes ill it is unlikely to spread to another. Possibly aiding their survival in low numbers is the capacity for the female to produce male offspring without mating with another male through the process of parthenogenesis, rare among birds and not observed in any gravediggers except those of this genus. Such offspring are almost genetically identical to their mothers, and this could be one way that a few successful genotypes could come to dominate the entire population in a relatively short time. Most individuals alive today are as related to one another as siblings would be in any other species, perhaps because many originate as clones from others before them that happened to have survived disease outbreak and thus passed immunity on to their descendants.

The spoonbilled soggobbler is a relic of an older age too. It is one of only a few gantuans that descend from the soggobbler of ten million years ago, while not being part of the cygnosaur clade. It is the most distantly related among such non-cygnosaurs, having diverged a full ten million years ago, with its next nearest relative being the snippo. It is also the only one to live in southern Serinarcta; all others have a distribution across the north of the continent. Far from being a relic left behind by time, the spoonbill is as much changed from its ancestor as the cygnosaurs are, having developed much more social behavior in addition to a noticeable glow-up, and evolving from a ratty and belligerent beast into an animal both elegant and complex. Native exclusively to the slade, the spoonbilled soggobbler provides a peek into a window at another timeline, one in which the cygnosaur lineage never became dominant through sheer aggression, but instead evolved down a path toward a more peaceful way of life.

One of the most important differences between spoonbilled soggobblers and virtually all cygnosaurs is that they are not predatory, nor do they feed on carcasses. The majority of their diet is water plants and especially mats of algae, which they skim from both the surface and from up to ten feet underwater with their swan-like necks. They are more semi-aquatic than any cygnosaur, and spend most of their time near or in the water; their feet are webbed, though they only occasionally swim, preferring to wade and wallow, and quietly submerging to hide from large predators in the depths of lakes and bogs (this species rarely confronts enemies given a choice, almost always preferring to flee). While crustaceans, fish eggs, and insect larvae are inevitably part of their diet - after all, they are wholesale feeders that swallow anything that comes tangled up in their salad - these animals don't hunt animals specifically and are not generally aggressive, except when rearing young. This is another major difference from most of their relatives: spoonbilled soggobblers are social, not just in a selfish way in which associating with con-specifics reduces individual's risk of predation, but in a cooperative manner which extends toward protection of their offspring.

These gantuans generally assemble themselves into groups segregated first by age and then by sex. While adolescents, caught between infancy and adulthood, will live in their own mixed-sex herds, adult females and adult males spend most of their lives apart. The former remain in loose and shifting herds, sometimes of up to fifty adults, while males - uncommonly for any skuorc - form stable coalitions of two to five which may or may not be related. Females have looser social bonds and their herds can break up and re-form with new individuals, but males remain in their groups for life. Females are attracted to males that show strong social ties to other males, and which behave cooperatively, because it is the male that has evolved into the caring parent in this species. Females don't care for their offspring, instead relying on these small males groups to collect their young as they are born and shepherd them around, keeping away predators. Though male groups are smaller than female ones, males are up to 25% larger, and so they can effectively defend the creches of chicks that they come to care for every breeding season. By caring for chicks for about ten months and getting them through their most vulnerable infant period, males have developed their own unique way to prove their worth to potential mates. Their ability to help young survive is what females look for in a mate much more than any physical attribute, though the male does exhibit a small color change of his bill from blue to red at the start of each breeding season, which he retains for about half the year; after it turns blue again, it indicates that the levels of hormones in his body that increase his affiliation with his offspring are decreasing, and he is much less likely to adopt additional offspring at this time. This means females usually time their reproduction so that all mate in a span of about two months, and thus all chicks are born in a similar timespan when males are most willing to care for them. Males in a coalition accept that they are not all the father of every chick in their collective care because proving the ability to raise offspring will mean even those that did not sire young this season will be much more likely to gain the chance the next season. During the time their beaks are red, their drive to care for young is very strong and they will follow female herds to collect any babies that are born, occasionally also nudging some entirely unrelated child into their creche in the process. In this way, the male spoonbill is sometimes exploited by "nest" parasites, one of the only situations in nature where babies of another species can trick an adult into adopting them without hatching from an egg in their nest.

Enter the cuckoo skoblin. This animal is its own lineage of skuorc outside the gantuan clade and related to the much larger skulossi - though they are not extremely close cousins, having diverged 15 million years ago. Adults are small for late-hothouse skoblins, growing to a max of 1000 lbs, and live as solitary browsers which live on the margins of the slade and feed on woody plants with a robust, blocky beak. Males are colorful with banner-like vertically narrow tails they raise to display toward smaller, drab females; these tails are featherless, like the face, limbs and underbelly, and by adjusting chromatophores in his skin cells the male can flush brighter patterns over his tail in rapid succession when trying to impress a mate, producing a dazzling visual spectacle of undulating red and black lines and lightning-like flashes of yellow. This is all quite impressive, but it is not what the cuckoo skoblin is named or most well known-for. That would be how it lives much earlier in its life, at a time when it has no such colors at all.

Cuckoo skoblin chicks are co-evolved to live with spoonbilled soggobblers, exploiting the male's parental instincts but lack of knowledge exactly which babies are his to gain free protection from predators amongst the chicks he tends. Females when ready to give birth descend to the lower elevations of the slade where they rarely otherwise dwell, and there give birth to between four and eight superprecocial chicks, each about five pounds and around 24 inches long. They can postpone the birth of their young for an unusually long time, within a window of around four weeks; it is one of few skuorcs that nourishes its young even after they hatch from their eggs internally, via a placental connection to the embryo that allows its young to be supported until conditions are just right for them to be born. And for the cuckoo skoblin, that means the moment that female soggobblers are also giving birth. These skuorcs don't care for their babies in any way, because they have found someone else who can do so more effectively. As the huge female soggobblers release their young, groups of males that have mated with these females collect the youngsters and gently shepherd them into groups, taking them away as their sole caretakers. The baby cuckoo skoblin mimics the soggobbler chick adequately in most respects, and is dropped off close by the real thing as their own mothers quickly move on.

The chick does not instinctively recognize the species it will be tended by, but does not need to; all it must do after birth is make a racket, and its plaintive peeping voice is just like that of the host species, drawing the males toward its source so that they take these slightly disproportional "orphans" under their wing and add them to their clutch. Cuckoo skoblins imprint on their foster parents enough to stay close by them from then on, but they don't form a template on which they will later select a mate based on the appearance of their parents like most imprinting birds (for to pair with a soggobler would be a very infertile union - the two cannot hybridize). When they are large enough, at about ten months of age, they will leave the soggobblers entirely and find their own kind again through innate scent cues they are born able to recognize. Cuckoo skoblins, despite the connotations of their name, are not harmful to the soggobbler chicks in any way; though they grow slightly faster initially and have longer legs, this actually has the effect to reduce food competition by letting the skoblins feed while wading in deeper water before the younger soggobblers are big enough to feed in those same places. By the time all of the young gain independence the soggobblers will have closed the gap and become larger than the cuckoos, and from then on the size difference will only become more extreme.

~~~

Sawjaws are diverse and widespread predators in the late hothouse, with many species having changed significantly from their earliest ancestors like the viridescent sawjaw, either by becoming much larger or conversely, far smaller, and eking their way into entirely new niches. Yet there exist a few species that are still very much like their predecessors, which have only changed in small or superficial ways, even as the world has shifted so much in all ways around them. The old sawjaw genus Satiuserrodon, which includes the earliest radiation of hothouse sawjaws from which most others descended, still remains today. Its survivors are widely scattered across the northern continent, no longer dominant in the global ecosystem, remnants of an earlier and simpler time. For the most part they remain in isolated places and in small ranges, still looking very much like their forebears, but sometimes adapting new behaviors to hunt which keep them competitive even against much more powerful, coordinated, or intelligent modern rivals.

The hillhunter is one of these relic sawjaws which is native today to only a small area around the slade, where they are exclusively associated with hilly terrain as the edges of the savannah to the east, the polar plain to the west, and the firmament to the south come together to form a deep valley. Along its rim, but never on any of the flat lands surrounding it nor directly in the slade's wetlands itself, this small and gregarious sawjaw makes its home. Never far from slopes, they have evolved to fully take advantage of the angled ground which makes it hard for larger rival sawjaw species like the elegant manticore or any of the subjugators that dominate the plains to catch them. By running to lower elevations when threatened, they can lose pursuers by suddenly stopping, turning around, and retreating back uphill, repeating the process several times before escaping. It works because by being small and light, they use relatively little energy to climb, and can also stop their momentum much more easily. Larger animals meanwhile cannot stop on a hill without significant exertion, and often trip, slowing them down further. Then they must use more energy to keep up, with the hillhunter already having gained a head-start. They inevitably tire out after a few trips back up the slope, while the hillhunter slips away unharmed. And so this little, clever sawjaw can survive here even where in other places its more derived relatives have all but replaced its kind, competing for the same food, and hunting these more primitive sawjaws as rivals to extinction.

Hillhunters also exploit their habitat to improve their hunting success. Though only a little over 2 feet high at the shoulder and no more than 40 lbs at the very most, these ingenious predators can take down prey that may outweigh them by over 30 times. They do this by targeting herd animals - like skungarus, thorngrazers, trunkos or juvenile cygnosaurs - and threatening groups in large numbers to panic them and cause them to scatter and then forcing some to run downhill. The chase picks up speed, aided by gravity, and while the nimble and light-footed sawjaws can stay on their feet and dodge obstacles (reaching an incredible speed of up to 60 miles per hour as they go), anything even a little heavier will soon struggle to avoid tripping at such rapid speeds. Racing downhill, relatively small animals, as long as they are at least slightly heavier than the sawjaws, will eventually trip up and are caught by the pack the moment they do. But much bigger ones inevitably come crashing down more dramatically; they lose their footing and tumble head over heels, falling to the ground at the bottom of the hill or against a tree or boulder, dead or already so wounded that finishing the job is easy for the pack that follows. Hunting in this way that uses the lay of the land itself as a deadly weapon, the hillhunter can feed a pack of several dozen hungry mouths in a single sitting for a minimum expenditure of energy. It is a specialized strategy that simply could not have evolved in any other environment, and even though this sawjaw does not truly live within the slade, its only habitat lies directly around it on all sides, and it can be found nowhere else. Thus, the slade makes its survival possible, too.

The social structure of the hillhunter is different from the earlier viridescent sawjaw in that a dominance hierarchy is now present, and not all adults can be expected to reproduce. This may be because unlike their ancestors, hillhunters are inhabiting a restricted range with finite space and resources and overpopulation would result in increased conflict and lowered survival for all. Each clan has become matrilineal, and rank is inherited from mothers. But unlike most examples of this sort of system, males can also inherit the ranks of their mates (with caveats, discussed further below.) This encourages dispersal of juvenile males, which might gain advantages in new clans while they will often be very low in the hierarchy in their birth groups (unless born directly from a high-ranking mother.) A clan typically has two to five actively breeding pairs, which are usually the oldest related females and their mates, and then many more unpaired members which assist in childcare and protection of the young of those few pairs. A matriarch female, who is typically the oldest and mother or grandmother of many other females in the group, maintains her position for years, yet not forever. She will be the leader only so long as she is still reproducing; if she becomes infertile, she will eventually be ousted by a daughter eager to rise in rank, and she will then fall down the ranks into a helper role, among the lowest in the clan. The number of young which will be tolerated in a clan varies based on food supply and territory size, with it becoming more and more risky for lower ranking females to mate, but not always impossible. Though in good times more young will be permitted by the matriarch, if anything changes she will kill the offspring of the lowest ranking pairs first, going up to the line until the number of mouths they all have to feed is matched to the amount of prey that can be caught. Hillhunters, unlike most sawjaws, typically have two young to a litter, but still can only give birth once a year (or more specifically, around every 10 months, as their environment lacks significant seasons, and so they do not cycle predictably with the months of the year.) The second sibling in a litter may have evolved only as a back-up in case the other dies, because a mother typically focuses most of her attention on only one baby and the other is raised mostly or entirely by lower-ranking assistants, which usually provide a much less doting level of attention. Seeking to ensure the survival of their matrilineal line, mothers most often favor any available daughters over sons, which may ultimately benefit the population by making those neglected males less attached to their family units and more likely to leave and join other clans, ensuring new genetic diversity. Thus while males can inherit high rank in a group, they will typically only do so if the litter is only males. A rejected offspring, raised by helpers instead, will not typically be viewed as one of its biological mother's offspring and thus will not inherit rank from her, but instead from its adoptive parent who is likely to be near the bottom of the hierarchy. Life, for a young hillhunter, is not always fair.

~~~

The arms race of predator versus prey has acted upon the sawjaws and the thorngrazers for over twenty million years. It is an ancient dance, where two opposing partners adapt to outdo one another for the incompatible purposes of eating the other and avoiding being eaten. As soon as one gains an edge, the other counters it. The sawjaws, as the hunter, becomes faster, smarter, and trickier to catch its prey. But as the slowest, dimmest, and least clever of the hunted are captured and devoured, natural selection can lead them into the very same directions. Descendants of the hillhoppers - the skybexes and the unicorns, among some others - are among the most divergent of all the thorngrazers from their burly and dim-witted ancestors. They have become quick, agile and often surprisingly intelligent, and it is largely because of the influence of their enemies like the sawjaw who have picked off all their kin who lacked in these traits. Sawjaws and thorngrazers represent two mortal enemies, their history written in blood. But what happens when the evolutionary game of turns ends... in a stalemate?

Enter the hillhunter and the uppendown bounder. One is a fierce and witty modern sawjaw, the result of twenty plus million years of successful hunts againsts its thorngrazer prey. It is a small animal, but an extremely successful hunter. By chasing herds of larger upland grazers down the slopes that lead to the slade, it trips them up and overpowers them. But the uppendown bounder is wise to this trick, and cannot be caught. A small, highly social, family-oriented thorngrazer closely related to the scurrying skybex, it has evolved a pair of small inflatable sacs at the base of its nasal crests which it inflates when excited, a form of communication. It's smaller than the hillhunter, and this means it is even more agile, able to stop sooner and turn around quicker to run back uphill and escape its pursuer. In effect, it has evolved to beat the sawjaws at their own game, and dances around them with no worry of ever being caught. The grassy slopes around the slade, a fatal trap to other thorngrazers from the surrounding plains, are its comfortable home. Half a million years or more have passed since the hillhunter's ancestors had any significant success catching the bounder's ancestors, and the hunter has long since stopped wasting the energy trying. This has had knock-down effects, because it has resulted in the bounder beginning to take advantage of its scary-looking neighbor that it knows poses no practical threat to it, but which can definitely hurt other predators that can catch the bounder, like foxtrotters and kittyhawks, which can pounce from ambush in the tall grass.

By grazing in close proximity to the hillhunter, the uppendown bounder gains a living shield that keeps away the really dangerous animals, and if chased by one, all it has to do to ensure its safety is run immediately toward a bigger threat; the animal that chased it will likely not be as able to outrun the sawjaws, and will meet a quick and bloody end as the bounder gleefully skips away and lives another day. At some point the hillhunter took notice of this, too, and realized that the bounder was perhaps useful in its own way, even if it was of little worth in eating itself. That little, annoying animal that followed them around like so many buzzing bees but could never be caught, could bring prey to them. So from a state of begrudging, apathetic tolerance, the hillhunter started to seek out the bounder. And it was a curious animal, confident in its abilities to escape any danger. The two had evolved as opposites, one once seeking to kill the other as its rival sought to avoid that fate. To succeed, each had long ago learned to pay close attention to the behavior and body language of its foe, to know when it was vulnerable and when it was dangerous. Each had come to know every aspect of the other, nearly as well as it knew itself. Now freed of the violent high-stakes game their ancestors had to play, they used this knowledge not to exploit, but to cooperate. They could not directly speak, but still they could understand intent, and little by little, the two became most unlikely allies. They came to an agreement; in return for the sawjaw providing protection, the thorngrazer would lure in other prey. One way to do this would involve tricking other predators to come after it and enter unknowingly into a fight they'd never win. But more often, they could do so passively, just by feeding and gambling conspicuously on the verdant steep slopes. They became decoys to catch the attention of other passing thorngrazer herds - only occasional visitors, and so naive to the dangers of the slade - and give them the impression that no danger lurked there, so that they too might feel safe going down to join them and eat in such a lush, inviting place. Lying in wait, the hillhunters could then startle them downhill, to feast.

Together the two former rivals have flourished, reaching higher population densities than either did before they allied. All around the slade's borders they occur together, their long-held animosity forgotten and smoothed over by time, and a familiarity with each other once born in blood now ties them together as partners, allies, and yes, friends. Though their relationship is still a working one, proximity breeds empathy, and many generations of living and growing side by side has resulted in the socialization of the two species in complex and close ways. Young hillhunters too little to know anything of the hunt curiously approach bounders as playmates, not prey, and bow to them, a gesture meaning "want to play a game?" that the bounder now innately recognizes from its long history among the hunters. A bounder so invited this way will respond playfully in turn, raising a patch of long hair on its lower back, inflating its crests part-way, and leaping a few times forward, a softened variation on a pronking behavior it will demonstrate to show its strength and fitness toward a real predator and suggest that it is not worth the chase. Just a couple jumps, and a look back at the sawjaw, is an invitation to chase that the cub will follow. The young sawjaw and adult bounder play this way in short bouts frequently, and in doing so the sawjaw practices hunting techniques while the bounder practices its escapes in a safe context where no true danger exists. Adult sawjaws rarely play with bounders, adopting a more gentle, parental role toward them, and bounders also keep young and inexperienced cubs away from their own young offspring until they are certain the cubs are old enough to know their own strength and not accidentally injure them; a threat display in which the bounder snaps its teeth and stomps its feet is an easily understood signal for the cub to find someone else to play with. Adult hillhunters however are typically gentle with young bounders, and will reprimand their own cubs if they are too forceful in their interactions with the young ones. The two species have learned how to interact with the other species in both innate ways acquired over time, and through social learning passed down from parent to offspring.

Only in a time and a place of such abundant food resources, and where so many species have acquired the social complexity to form such strong social ties that can extend even outside their own kind, could such a relationship occur. In a distant future, times may change, forcing the two apart and back down different paths. But today, it's a lovely day. The grass is green, the sun is shining. And the lion has lain down with the lamb. If only all cross-species relationships could be so sweet...

The malachite pickbird, a common scavenger of wetland regions across Serinarcta that is named for its brilliant plumage, evolved from the moonbreasted pickbird of 15 million years ago, a species known for its easygoing and cooperative behaviors. Since then, it has fallen from grace, turning from a symbiotic partner of many other species into a shameless freeloader - albeit a beautiful one - that survives on the kills of other predators too big to notice it, but except when under significant duress does virtually nothing in return for the favor. But this is only really true for those which live in the slade - it is not a species-wide characteristic. The reasons for this are many and complicated...

These pickbirds still have the long and slender beaks of their lineage, and with these tools they could clean parasites from their hosts, especially such vast ones as goliath landsharks that cannot reach much of their body to groom themselves... but they rarely do. To the malachite, fresh meat is a much more enticing option, and it's much more inclined to wait for a banquet than forage for scraps. Nor does the malachite do much of anything to assist its hosts in catching their prey; flocks do not stick with nor bond to any specific individual predators and lead them to prey, and live as free agents that simply keep an eye and hone in on whenever one makes a successful catch to profit on another's hard work. And yet despite all this, the landshark is so much more enormous than even an entire flock of pickbirds that it does not seem to care that they steal their portions from every meal it acquires; the pickbird may be lazy, but it is also successful, having found a way to find all the food it needs for the least amount of effort possible. In the wild, this sort of lifestyle is like that of royalty, and has historically been very rare, primarily restricted to a few kinds of highly adaptable animals like sea gulls and raccoons that profited from human food waste that was so abundant it allowed such animals to grow fat upon it for very little effort, and by animals kept in captivity. The malachite pickbird's ability even as a free-living wild animal in a time with no sapients to provide for it, and to rely solely on other animals to feed it anyway, is a rarity made possible by several concurrent factors. Its relatively small size of the species compared to its hosts means even in numbers it does not drastically reduce the food intake of those that hunt for it. The stable conditions of the late hothouse allow vast productivity of vegetable foods so that such large predators can reliably catch prey. And there has been a long ancestral history of the pickbird's ancestors associating symbiotically with a wide range of animal species, so that those species remain tolerant to its presence even now, when any benefit once being gained no longer exists. The malachite pickbird thrives in times of great prosperity and has learned to exploit them for all their worth. Without the need to devote time to finding food, it can spend its life frivolously; most of its time is devoted to social interaction, especially social play, as well as courting, mating, and raising many young. But such good times cannot always last.

Every so often, the malachite pickbirds of the slade reach extraordinary population densities: there can be too much of a good thing, and without limits, this lifestyle eventually becomes problematic. Abundance within reason is not inherently bad for the pickbird, a gregarious species that enjoys fellow company. Many eyes in the sky means someone will always spot the next source of food, letting other follow. But when there are too many pickbirds, they begin to compete with one another as well as cause harm to their host. There is less to go around before a kill is eaten. When the flocks grow too big, the malachites suffer, their free time lost as they must constantly rush to new kills that are often gone before it can have its fill, and the hungrier they are, the more reckless they must be to eat, putting themselves at greater risk of becoming casualties and eaten by the landshark, which in turn finds itself under attack from large numbers of increasingly desperate pickbirds that become aggressive when hungry and emboldened in larger numbers. The landsharks will not totally give up their kills, but may be injured while feeding when the pickbirds are extremely numerous, even losing their sight as the birds attack their eyes trying to secure enough food for their own survival. The pickbirds fail to breed, unable to provide for their young, and the landsharks may shortly follow suit. The malachites stop playing, their fellows becoming rivals for scraps that they fight constantly. Eventually - but only after a prolonged period of scarcity - they will begin to return to their origins; during peak population booms, malachite pickbirds become less picky, and some will begin to seek out other food sources such as pests that cling to the landshark's skin and small prey caught entirely on their own. Their laziness is not obligate, but a choice they make. It does not have to be this way - at least not yet - and the pickbird still demonstrates a retained adaptability when it has absolutely no other choice. But so enticing is the freeloading lifestyle that the slade's malachite pickbirds will always try to return to it as soon as they can, even though it inevitably leads to a crisis again in the future, when numbers again surpass the carrying capacity of their very specific "niche".

Eventually, when there are simply too many of them, large flocks will disperse from one location widely over the land, and in this way this pickbird has become widespread over wetland regions across Serinarcta from its initial slade origins. Afterwards, the remaining pickbirds with less competition can fall back on their lazy ways, quickly returning to how they lived before - and the landsharks too recover their health and vigor, and though individuals blinded by pickbirds may ultimately starve to death over time as they become less effective hunters, they may be replaced by a younger generation in a relatively short geological time. Hundreds of thousands of years of this process, in which the slade's pickbirds' numbers rise and eventually a substantial portion of the population must migrate to new lands to sustain themselves, has made the malachite pickbirds of the slade exceptionally lazy, while those in other regions of the world have descended inevitably from individuals which were more inclined to find alternative ways to survive during scarcity and leave to find new territory. Malachite pickbirds elsewhere across Serinarcta are not freeloaders, at least not exclusively. They descend from those which were, but now cut off from their old homes, they have returning to forming more complex bonds to varied types of animals, and provide them benefits: grooming, predator defense, and assistance in locating food to share between themselves. But those of the slade do none of this by choice; as those which left the slade become more self-sufficient, those which remain year after year become even more sedentary, self-serving, and degenerate in comparison. Every generation that remains in the slade throughout a population boom and never finds itself forced to adopt new habits becomes more entrenched in those it knows and less adaptable. Malachites still sometimes leave the slade when forced to, changing their habits to be join other populations or sometimes forming new ones, but malachites whose ancestors already left the slade never return there; the species has split into multiple populations that now differ both in genetics and in social culture, and those which earn their living and those that will do nothing but wait around for their food do not get along anymore and never intermingle; they may soon be categorized as distinct species. The divide between the slade population and all others is rapidly growing into a chasm. What will ultimately happen to those within the slade when they become so entrenched in their ways that they simply cannot adapt to anything except being provided all of their food on a silver platter, and thus they no longer migrate away and learn new skills when conditions deteriorate, is likely to be their extinction. From smart and resourceful beginnings, we may eventually see the first species on Serina to die off entirely due to their own unwillingness to change since the woodcrafters, who were reluctant to leave their forest refugia until much too late some 25 million years ago.

But maybe it doesn't have to be this way. There is still time, if only a little, for the slade's malachite pickbirds to turn it around before they lose the ability to do so. It would take a major change to their lives to make them, as a population, consider it. The possible catalyst? The extinction of the goliath landshark. A species which has long lived at very small population densities, this species single-handedly supports almost all slade malachites. As long as the landshark remains, the pickbirds here are unlikely to ever give up their easy living lifestyle, even if it ultimately is the end of them. But during a past event where the landshark's numbers fell and it became temporarily very rare - perhaps not-so-coincidentally occuring during perhaps the largest-ever population explosion of malachite pickbirds - most malachites then left the slade. Those few that did not have now given rise to the extremely self-serving ones that still remain. But if the landshark vanished for good, then all the pickbirds would be forced to move on, even these last persistent holdouts, and this would likely be for the better. Far from a symbiosis, the relationship between these two species has become a toxic one. In the end, there may simply be no way for both to survive here together much longer. But which of the two will come out alive, and which will fail, still remains to be seen.

~~~

The lesser landshark is the sister species to the goliath and still closely resembles its ancestor as well as that of the related lacer, bridging the gap between these disparate species' appearance and behavior. It is fairly small (relative to its kin), averaging 400 pounds but sometimes surpassing 500 (and some daintier females topping out at 300 or even less.) This makes it much quicker on dry land than the goliath, and allow it to climb out of the slade's steep edges: the lesser landshark is thus far more wide-ranging, occuring as far north as Sprawl Lake. Yet while it can migrate considerable distances over land when it must, the lesser landshark too is aquatic by preference and does most of its feeding in water. Like its larger cousin it is mainly an ambush predator that catches land animals coming near the shore unawares. Physically bear-like in shape and size, its favored niche is more akin to a crocodile; its bones are solid and its body very muscular so that it naturally sinks in water, a trait it uses to lay in wait unseen for prey to come close enough to strike. But when this method to hunt fails - and it sometimes does, for landsharks are gravediggers and as such have high metabolic rates that prevent staying in one place for days like cold-blooded hunters can - then the landshark remains capable of alternative strategy and can actively hunt prey on dry land. It then will prefer to catch young herd animals that cannot yet outrun it, or else to use brute force to kill slow moving but sturdy prey like the smaller armored thorngrazers.

Lesser landsharks are some of the most intelligent gravediggers, exhibiting tool use to improve their hunting success, which aids them in dispatching difficult prey items. They will manipulate rocks and boulders with their forearms to crush armored prey animals, or may simply drag them to natural slopes and throw them off the edge so that gravity becomes their tool. When ambush hunting they often disguise themselves beneath delicately stacked piles of vegetation, twigs and other material so they can keep their heads partly above water without being spotted by prey. This helps them, for though their eyes are set higher on their head than their relatives, they are still not as well adapted to ambush hunting in water as species like the alligumpus. Lesser landsharks are also often found in association with nesting colonies of wading birds. As they patrol beneath the nests, they deter smaller predators that could threaten chicks or eggs above, while themselves preying upon any chicks which happen to fall out of their safe refuge and into its jaws. It seems to be a satisfactory agreement, benefiting each party overall enough for it to continue.

Small enough to have their own enemies, lesser landsharks specifically avoid the goliath landshark across the slade where the two coexist, and lesser landsharks will flee to land when confronted, there easily outrunning their enemy. Shy and reclusive in this biome where they are not the top predator, the species can be much bolder in outlying regions, especially the further north they are found, and there also reach their largest sizes. Though their habitat preferences only overlap slightly, lesser landsharks and lacers coexist along the margins of the centralian sea. Both species den on land near shore, allowing for a small degree of territorial overlap, even though lacers hunt in open water and landsharks at the waterline. The two occasionally hybridize here where their worlds meet, producing a sterile offspring of (mostly) intermediate characteristics. Much more often the larger lacer claims the rockier shoreline while the lesser landshark creates a maternity den in alluvial soil somewhat further from water. Lesser landsharks pair-bond (though only temporarily) and have joint childcare where each parent regurgitates food for the young before they are old enough to feed themselves, while female lacers raise their young alone. This difference in lifestyle means that even if hybrid coupling occurs, the two parents depart soon after and the young is raised by only a single species. The hybrid is rare in any instance, but differs in appearance depending on parentage, with those coming from a female landshark being especially large and at times exceeding 1,000 pounds in weight, while those from a female lacer are average sized (small compared to their mothers) and only around 2/3 the lacer's average size. The reason for the disparity seems to be a lack of regulatory genes for growth that naturally come from the female lacer. The smaller hybrid has a higher survival rate, with the larger rarely reaching independence as the smaller parents have great difficulty in providing it with enough food, and it struggles to hunt on its own.

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The crocoduck is a large wormslayer bumblet, reaching a length of 4.5 feet and a weight of 60 lbs. It is not related closely at all to the murkmoles, merely resembling them through convergent evolution. Crocoducks are not aggressive, nor do they feed on large vertebrate animals - they are specialist feeders on hard-shelled aquatic invertebrates, and particularly fond of snails and crustaceans. The tips of their highly sensitive bills are flattened and slightly spoon-like, adapted to sift into soft muddy sediment for food, while the back part of the jaw is robust and built to close suddenly on prey to crush it. The keratin teeth at the front of the bill are still sharp and are sometimes used to catch small fish, but those in the rear portion of the mouth as well as on the tongue are broad and lay inward, having becoming sharp and powerful plates that split shells and slice their food with each closing movement of the jaw, rending it into small enough pieces to swallow. The top mandible presses against both the beak "teeth" and those on the tongue to chew, using the entire inner mouth surface. The flattened rear "teeth" of the crocoduck are prone to trap small particles of food between their overlapping surfaces, but the crocoduck has found a simple solution to this annoying problem through symbiosis with a small seraph called the pintail pluvie. A relative of the sandsnatches, this is among the smallest of all archangels, and uses its pick-like beak to remove any scraps of meat the crocoduck has left in its smile after its own meal.

Crocoducks differ from murkmoles too in their eyesight, which is not lost and indeed is still quite serviceable in the former, while the latter is entirely blind. Crocoducks forage through touch below muddy waters, but rely on their vision to spot predators above it. They will warn others of their species to an approaching threat by slapping the water with their flipper-like hind legs and emitting low-frequency clucks that travel well underwater. They also use visual cues to locate mates. These birds have iridescent and bio-fluorescent plumage which reflects sunlight in both ultraviolet and UV spectrums, lending their normally brown feathers a distinctly green, metallic hue in bright conditions. The intensity of this color varies with the health of their feathers, and in turn this reflects an individual's nutrition. Both males and females are drawn to brighter, shiner green mates than they are to those with pale feathers indicating poor success at hunting. A social animal, crocoducks usually forage in pairs or small groups, and this species forms pairs to breed, with the male defending the female from predators and providing food to her as she tends the altricial chicks born in a burrow in a riverbank that is only accessible underwater. These pairs are temporary, however, and the male is the one to tend the chicks once they leave the den, at which time the female goes off on her own and will later take a different partner, keeping the population very genetically diverse even in a relatively small and isolated region such as the slade.

The pintail pluvie, meanwhile, is the smallest archangel bird, not just of this period in time but which has ever lived, and it truly represents the most drastic deviation from the original niche of these birds as enormous soaring herbivores in the Pangeacene. Fully grown, it's as large as a sparrow and weighs only 1 - 1.5 ounces, and several could perch comfortably in one outstretched hand. Chicks are about 14 times smaller still - they weigh only 2 grams when they hatch from their pupal sacs and are among the smallest of any birds at all, if excluding the highly specialized verminfans. Like most archangels they can fly within a short time after emerging, though this species has well-developed parental care, and the little ones (usually hatched in a group of two to four) stick close to both the male and female parent, more often scuttling insect-like close by their feet on the ground for the first few weeks of life.

Closely related to sandsnatches, pluvies are also descendants of sandpiping seraphs, and have a long history as shorebirds which use their narrow tweezer-like beaks to catch worms and insects in mud, sand, and shallow water. Pluvies tend to be more versatile feeders, though, capable of a wider range of behaviors to locate food; despite their smaller size, they could be considered "smarter", at least as far as having a more adaptable set of behaviors which they can modify to solve novel problems. Though they can live much like their shorebird relatives, few today do, and pluvies are more often associated with larger animals which provide food indirectly by stirring up insects that the pluvie likes to eat as they walk around in tall grass, and directly by attracting parasites that the pluvie is just as happy to consume. This lifestyle is significantly easier, for most of their food will basically come to them as long as they stick close to the herds, and pluvies frequently climb all over on larger creatures to feed, trusted by their hosts in a straighforward symbiotic relationship in which both animals benefit.

Pintail pluvies are the most specialized in this respect, being virtually obligate cleaner-birds that, if they even can still live in other ways, never seem to do so. Yet are also the only pluvies which are territorial - indeed, quite aggressive - and which defend a rather small area of land as their home range, rather than fly around in nomadic flocks following herds, and this means they must use a different strategy to get food, which requires they bring the megafauna that attract that food to them. It relies strongly on the trust their lineage has built with the other animals over the last million years or so since this relationship began, for without that trust, no creature would approach them, and pintail pluvies thus remain honest partners that do not pick at healthy tissue or feed on blood as many similar cleaner animals over the world's history have learned to do, corrupting their relationships. Pairs indeed seem to take pride in their work, and stake out a favorable stream-bank, lake shore, or stretch of exposed ground where they can scurry about and be clearly seen, without being ambushed by lurking predators hiding in tall grass. They are fastidious about keeping their territories exposed, too, removing seedling plants and any debris that falls there. It's important that they can catch the attention of passing animals and draw them in to work them over, which they do with a dramatic "greeting' in which they rapidly raise and flutter one wing, then the other, to reveal striking and unmissable red and black and white patterns that naturally catch the eye. Both sexes are so colorful, and juveniles acquire these markings too before adulthood, starting at just 3-4 weeks old. This is because these colors serve no use in sexual signaling, but exist entirely as a signal to unrelated animals to come and visit them and receive a helpful cleaning up.

Many species have come to recognize the pintail's dance as an invitation to get worked over, and the pintail pluvie does an especially attentive job going through the feather, fur, or exposed hide of every visitor to their territory. Those little tweezer beaks can reach any fold or crevice that the animals themselves cannot, and over anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour the pair and their young will comb every inch of its body and eagerly swallow up every mite, tick, worm and leech that they find there. They also clean wounds, even from the largest of the slade's predators like the landsharks, and by neatly removing infected tissue, dead skin and maggots in and around it, they contribute to faster healing and a reduction in bacterial growth. Predators are more desirable as visitors than herbivores for the reason that there are often meat scraps to be found stuck in their jaws, which the pluvie will seek out before most other options, showing an incredible degree of trust that its hosts will not simply close those jaws and devour it, too (which none generally do, as the benefit of a clean mouth free of decay much outweighs the tiny and insubstantial calories it would get from such a tiny morsel.) As a territorial species, inviting such a large and flesh-eating beast as the goliath landshark to be worked over is very desirable, and many rival pairs and their young in a given area will all compete to draw the attention of the hunter as it passes them by, trying to outdo each other with more dramatic and exaggerated fluttering movements and even by leaping up into the air and whistling to further make themselves stand out, while simultaneously threatening unrelated pluvies by showing their strength. Opposing families of these birds will fight fiercely if either crosses the boundary of their territories, and naturally new families form only from dispersing juveniles once they are driven away by their parents; such young ones may have to fly a long way to establish their own cleaning station, and so they retain long wings and powerful flight despite not flying very far or often once settled as adults on a plot of land.

Pintailed pluvies do not always drive away their grown young, however, with this depending on how attractive their territories are to visiting animals. This is because a balance must be struck between the size of a family group and the available food supply, which is sometimes tricky to get just right. A single pair and their chicks of one clutch is the easiest option, ensuring that there is enough food to go around if the visiting animals are relatively small or relatively scarce. But a giant creature like a goliath landshark looking to be groomed will likely ignore a single pair if a large flock is available to give it a quicker and more thorough cleaning, and likewise a larger group can usurp the territory of a smaller one. It usually happens that a few unusually large family units will remain together in the places that large predators most frequently spend time, with juveniles here staying for several years with their parents and assisting in raising numerous younger siblings and defending these most coveted territories from numerous rival groups. Occasionally however, a landshark will die - or simply roam, leaving behind its previous favored cleaning stations, with the result that such a large flock quickly falls apart and breaks down into severe conflict until only a small number of its original members remain that can feed themselves on the visits of other animals. Larger groups, though useful in certain contexts, thus remain outliers and are inherently unstable. Few remain for longer than a few years before they fall, and once they do, rivals all too often take advantage to claim the territory; already weakened from in-fighting, they rarely have the energy to defend it from others who have been waiting in the wings. Sometimes the landshark then returns - males in particular often wander widely to find a mate, only to come back after several months time. And so then, with the return of this reliable food supply, the new flock that tend to it will grow in size, and the cycle continues.

~~~

The jumpuses are a clade of tree lumpus that are very distinct from all others. They differ from most ground-dwelling lumpus their very long limbs, which they use to pounce quickly on prey they catch unaware. Descended from arboreal ancestors, their legs once helped them climb, but they are now secondarily terrestrial. There are around ten species across Serinarcta, ranging in size from the burrowing jumpus at just 10 inches high to the alligumpus, which stands a little taller than 3 feet on all threes. Only that latter species can stand so tall on three legs, though, because unlike the others it is semi-aquatic. Using the water to free itself from gravity, it can stand on tip-toe in shallow water with just its eyes and nose emerged, waiting for prey to happen by. Other jumpuses lack the strength to stand fully upright on land, and when walking instead rest with their legs partially sprawled out to the side, erect only below the elbow and ankle joints, and the alligumpus moves in this slumped manner when it too has to leave the water. Larger species only leap when threatened or when capturing prey, while smaller ones will do so habitually to get around, as at their size it takes less energy to do so.

The alligumpus is native only to the slade, and it preys on a wide range of animals, though usually those its own size or smaller. It is very thinly built and has little body fat, rendering it heavier than water, and it uses this to its full advantage to stride along with wide steps on the bottom sediment of rivers and lakes with a grace almost like that if it were floating through the air. A slow metabolism and cold blood mean it needs minimal energy to maintain its body processes, and it can hold its breath for 70 minutes or more when not moving, letting it wait for food to come close enough to strike. Its jaws are flat and constructed of solid plates of bone, and a clamping jaw tendon makes it almost impossible for prey to struggle free. Its favored meals are water birds, though it will eat anything it can overpower. To tear flesh from larger prey without sharp claws or the ability to grind its jaws in a chewing manner, it will spin itself in the water like a crocodile to tear smaller chunks of meat away. When hunting, this species can leap as far as fifteen feet from a standstill, allowing it to take its victims by surprise, grab them, and rush back into the water before they ever know what hit them. Though its bite is strong enough to kill most animals outright, if it gets them by the head or neck, its aim is not so good and it's just as likely to grab a leg or a tail, so it must often hold its targets below water with its legs to drown them before it can feed.

Alligumpus are uncommonly social for lumpus, and often live in small groups, something that is unique to them among jumpuses, too. They don't cooperate to hunt, but they might share their own kills with familiars, a very unusual trait for this clade or any other lumpus group. These groups are usually comprised of one male, several females, and as many as ten young less than half adult size, who are protected from predators by the adults in their pod, and these groups are stable and don't readily mix with other groups. Adults perform loud, sharp warning calls to alert their offspring to danger, which causes the little ones to instinctively dive away underwater. Group living may have evolved in this species as a defense against the emelantouka, which will indiscriminately kill other animals that get in its way. By living together, they all gain many more eyes and ears and become harder to catch by surprise by their most unruly and inhospitable neighbor.

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The red catfish dragon, reaching a maximum length of 22 feet, is the slade's largest eelsnake, and one of the hothouse era's largest freshwater fish. This is a designation that applies to it better than some of its relatives, for though it is an eelsnake and thus breathes air and has terrestrial ancestors, it has become one of the most exclusively aquatic species, and has acquired one of the least serpentine body shapes among them. It is the biggest subspecies of catfish dragon, a variable species of eelsnake that is very widely distributed across Serinarcta by this time, and which descends from the earlier, still-sighted population of the spectral cave dragon which were freed from their dark realms as many cave ceilings began to collapse due to weathering, allowing them to return to surface waters. All catfish dragons - which are named for their long barbels - are ambush predators, but they differ from many river dragons in hunting mostly small, bite-sized fish rather than larger land animals.

Adapted to swim slowly in shaded, weedy waters, they have fairly short bodies and blunt tailfins that can propel them suddenly forward at high speed, but only for very short duration, in order to catch prey. Smaller individuals can move over land, usually during rain, but adults are completely restricted to the water. They still breathe air, but with a slow metabolic rate only need a breath once or twice an hour, and the surface is never far out of reach, as they prefer to hang motionless just below it, and grab unwary fish that swim by from below. In addition to fish, they may also prey on waterbirds and other small surface-swimming animals, yet they do not typically catch land animals which come to the shore to drink. Their jaws, relative to their own mass, have not scaled to match their new size, and this is especially true for the red catfish dragon. Their bites are much weaker than those river dragons which can feed in this way, and their teeth small and needle-like - able to hold slippery morsels, but vulnerable to break if subjected to tearing forces as would come from a bigger animal. This species feeds all but entirely on things it can swallow whole, and it grabs and swallows its targets down with extraordinary speed. Anything too big to fit in its mouth is likely to be ignored.

Like most river dragons, the neck of the catfish dragon is long and flexible, even though the body in this animal is otherwise truncated: it can strike suddenly to the side, snake-like, taking prey by surprise for few other predatory fish have such a wide range of motion. These traits served them well when their ancestors lived below ground, where food passed by infrequently and had to be caught whenever possible. Now returned to the surface, catfish dragons remain fine-tuned and very efficient hunters, becoming able to reach much larger sizes, rather than reducing their food intake and staying small. Yet only in the slade does this species reach this grandiose scale: in other waterways, most average only five to ten feet in length, and even those of the polar basin rarely exceed 16 feet. The slade is a region of both exceptional fertility, where the sediments from all surrounding lands wash down into its basin and support a diverse food chain, and where relatively few competitors exist to compete with it. Adults have little to fear from any other predator, but juveniles are commonly hunted, even (perhaps especially) by adults of their own species, and this is a way the species limits its own population.

Giving birth to up to 100 small young at a time - and up to three times a year - but providing them no parental care, a majority are eaten by something before reaching adulthood, yet so many are born that it ensures when an adult dies another will survive to take its place. Incidental cannibalism is not rare among eelsnakes, and is a way of life for many other fish which produce far more babies than will ever reach adulthood. But the slade's catfish dragons may rely on it for survival in a way that is more unusual. Though the region's waters have many very small fish species of a few inches long on which the youngest dragons feed, it has a notably lacking diversity of mid-sized species compared to other waterways. As has occured with some land predators like the red devil of the polar plain, here juvenile dragons have come to monopolize several niches as they grow, excluding other species from competing. The result of this is that up to 70% of each one's diet can become other, younger catfish dragons for a significant period of time when they are partially grown, and these numerous, ill-fated little ones can still comprise up to 30% of the adults' diet, too. They make an almost perfect source of food, for they grow rapidly, converting tiny insects and minnows into a mouthful of meat just the right size to fill a larger individual's belly. In the slade and elsewhere in the hothouse world, it really is a dragon-eat-dragon world out there.

The shish skurrbob is a large skurrel (up to 10 lbs), which has adapted to an unexpected habitat by feeding quite differently from any of its relatives. It is found in southern Serinarcta over a wide range of varied habitats, but is especially common in the slade, quite far from the tall northern polar forests that house most of its close relatives (the nearest being the skeavers, their sister genus.). Though the slade lacks widespread, dense forests like those near the pole, it does support some tree cover, especially along its margins, but the cliff walls of the biome are the most common place this skulking skuorc can be found. It has become a predator in this ecosystem, converging in some ways upon hunters like rasps, with a sharp skewer-like bill that it uses to spear small prey animals. There are not many insect larvae to dig out of rock walls, so this former tree-dweller has adjusted its diet to prey mainly on vertebrates, specifically nestling birds - and their eggs. Up to 90% of its diet is found via its nest raiding specialty, and it gets its name from its morbid habit of quickly spearing as much food as possible onto its sharp bill - like a shish kebab of chicks - before running off with it, avoiding defensive attacks by parent birds before they return. Its neck is long and curved, reaching up to peer into nests made in crevices in the rocks or in other hollows, and like a heron it can strike into these small spaces with rapid accuracy. Food items don't easily slide off the beak due to fine backwards-facing ridges along the length of both mandibles, and so it can cart home its morsels without concern about dropping them, which is especially useful when it travels through the air.

While it is now a better climber than glider, this skurrel will cross rivers or other obstacles by ascending to a high point and "flying" across the gap; its long tail is prehensile to aid in climbing, and so it lacks a rudder or a feather tuft, but can still help angle its direction. When the time comes to deposit them in its nest, it separates its mandibles using the powerful muscles its ancestors once used to pry apart insect burrows in trees. The meat drops off, and it can either eat in seclusion unseen by prying eyes, store its kills away for later, or feed its young. Shish skurrbobs are attentive parents and live in small close-knit colonies of related adults. They are cooperative breeders and their own chicks, though precocial, stay with them for up to a year. Though their chicks could survive without parental attention from a very early age, they are still actively provided food for the first couple months of life, which keeps them safe from other predators in the swamp by preventing them from straying far from the nest until they are larger and less vulnerable. This means more young survive to adulthood, which is countered by a slower reproductive rate: a dominant breeding pair will have only two broods in a year. Two generations of young usually overlap at one time, with the oldest assisting in feeding the youngest, and dispersing by the time a third brood is born.

Because they live nearer to ground than other skurrels, shish skurrbobs are also competent at traveling over land. Their arms and legs are long, and they move with an ambling gait, surprisingly fast when necessary. They can swim, too, and their ability to traverse most types of terrain makes them good at dispersing. The species itself likely evolved in northern Serinarcta and moved south along the center of the continent through wooded areas adjacent to the Centralian sea within the last 2 million years. Today the slade appears to be the center of its range, but it has also colonized the great barrier ridge along the Nexus Peninsula and migrated as far west as the dividing valley between the firmament and the polar plain, where it has returned to a life in the trees. A closely related and probably ancestral species still lives within the flood forest south of the polar basin, but due to competition from predators such as daggerbills and rasps whose ranges can extend there, it still feeds mainly on insect larvae and is only an opportunistic hunter of nestlings. It is only far away from the northern forests that this skurrel has had the opportunity to elevate itself from being the prey of such predators to becoming them.

above: Sometimes you look down into the water, and find it looks back out at you...

The kappa is a large saladmander descendant - more broadly, it is a type of avimander, one of Serina's most bizarre canary lineages and one which is hardest to parse as any sort of bird at all. As avimanders, they are permanently newt-like aquatic organisms with external ear drums and long, paddle-like tails; a very long time ago, this would have been just the first life stage of several, ultimately culminating in a graceful winged adult, but the days where this occurred are long since passed. Avimander's closest relatives outside are the skuorcs, a group which has also become stunted in development, but at a midway point between larva and adult - a land-dwelling quadruped - which happened to make them extremely adaptable in ways neither the larva nor flying adult ever were. And today the skuorcs are indeed far more varied and diverse and much more recognizable, for in the hothouse they have become the largest of all land creatures. Avimanders meanwhile remain trapped in the primordial soup; their land legs never to come, they have evolved back into a proxy of their earliest tetrapod ancestors. A fish-like thing that can barely walk and can never stray far from land, there may be irony in this, for the world in which they now live is populated with countless actual fish-descendants which now not only walk, but run, jump, and fly in places these luckless canaries can never dream of going anymore. Evolution, working towards no goals and only for survival in the moment, does not lead all to equally fair finish lines.

But the kappa makes do with its lot in life. It is not a smart creature, a fast one, or a strong one, but it is an abundant one, and that itself is one measure of success. Less adapted to plant-eating than its saladgator relative, it inhabits a similar but distant habitat - the slow-moving waterways of the slade - and here feeds mostly on other animals, though it retains some of its ancestors adaptations to feed on very small food like algae. It is a visual hunter, locating small morsels by sight, with big forward-facing eyes that are extremely attuned to small movements. Its wide beak is suited to crush crustaceans or molluscs, but also to dig up sediment-burrowing worms after seeing them vanish down into their tunnels. Fine bill pecten at the tip of the bill which once served to scrape algae off rocks now serve as a seine, letting it take up a mouthful of water and then expel it through this filter to collect small plankton organisms. Free-floating algae is still eaten this way, but now more important are arthropods like shrimp as well as tiny metamorph birds like waterwings, themselves examples of even more incomprehensible animals that were once recognizable as birds, too. The kappa, and all its relatives, still has clawed hind feet that help it to steer as it swims along with its muscular tail. It also uses them to grasp the bottom and to walk there at a slower pace when foraging for food, which it may do on just two legs or while also plodding along with its weaker front limbs, which have just a single fleshy appendage left, and no claws at all, and much of the time seem to serve little purpose.

Solitary by nature, males and females meet only to mate, which happens externally. Females lead males to a "nest" in a thick patch of submerged vegetation in which she weaves a string of small, frog-like eggs - up to 5,000 of them - that the male fertilizes. Only then does she use her otherwise seemingly useless front legs like knitting needles to carefully attach her egg cluster to the plants as they are laid, weaving stems and leaves around and around as the eggs are laid, preventing them from washing away. Larvae hatch in ten days to two weeks and resemble tadpoles, initially lacking any developed legs at all. Only one out of every 10,000 is likely to reach adulthood, and the rest are an important food source to all sorts of other slade predators, from the smallest shorebird all the way up to the larger carnivores. Adults eat their own young without recognition, and even mothers only avoid their own eggs until they hatch before forgetting their familial bond. And unlike some fellow animals of the slade with cannibalistic tendencies, like the catfish dragon, the kappa never truly outgrows the risk of being eaten at any moment, being quite modest in size and yet just big enough to be a worthwhile meal to many mid-ranged predators. It grows up fast, potentially reaching adulthood within 2 years, and usually dies young, but even a lifespan of only three or four years may be enough to lay several clutches of eggs and so ensure the survival of at least one living descendant for each individual.

Though it does have legs, and a lung to breath air, most often a kappa only ends up out of the water if grabbed and hauled away by a predator - during such times, it will emit a low wailing noise in its distress, that usually doesn't do much to help it, but will be detected by other kappas around, which will flee. But while it is primarily aquatic, the kappa can move over land on its own accord during wet, rainy periods if its pond dries up or becomes otherwise hostile to its survival, but with no front claws is helpless at climbing any steep slopes, and so remains ultimately restricted only to the valley that forms the slade. Much unlike our next species, who spends its whole life on those steep cliffs.

~~~

The cliff walls of the slade, not yet eroded into smooth hills, is the home of the stygymara, an eerie and odd tribbymara descendant that has evolved binocular vision and forward-facing eyes so as to navigate the steep edges of this basin, leaping nimble from one steep perch to another to avoid the floodwaters. It stares always ahead, its glare disconcerting and intense, just human enough to be uncanny. Its ears jut out from low on the sides of its weird, narrow head, always listening for danger, and its teeth form a sinister smile like some horror movie monsters. The top tooth has become rake-like in form, resembling a hair comb. Full of sharp cusps, it appears primed to bite and slice flesh. But the stygymara's threatening visage is all just a ruse.

This animal is in fact a timid, reclusive forager of the swamp waters, using this unique tooth to strain the shallow water near the cliffs for food. It feeds on soft water plants mainly, but also any small invertebrate life caught within them including insect larvae and small crustaceans and snails. The tooth rotates back and forth as in all the molodonts, but now has become so modified into a flat shape that it resembles a hinge more than a wheel. It extends forward into the water and is then pulled down and back, collecting debris in its tines and pulling them into its narrow mouth. Chewing has had to change drastically with a tooth effectively shaped like a comb, and there is no blunt hind portion of the tooth to grind its mouthfuls as is present in most molodonts. This is no issue to the stygymara, though, whose tooth is so mobile that it can fold all the way backwards into the mouth, and masticate its food by gnashing the front-facing edge against the lower jaw, folding its mouth inwards like a closing fist. This is the only genus of tribbethere which chew their food in such a way with the front of the tooth, opposite to the method used by other species where the backside of the tooth does the role. Always alert for danger, the stygymara never strays too far into the basin, for though it feeds in the shallows of the floodplain, it is quick to flee back up the cliffs to escape predators. By always keeping its back to the wall, it compensates for its lack of peripheral vision that its ancestors once had, so that it only needs to scan the land ahead of it rather than in all directions. The trade-off between a wide-view and keen depth perception has seemingly worked out for the stygymara, which can now bolt up the walls and bound seemingly effortlessly across the steep cliffs in a way even the nimbler unicorns cannot quite match, for unlike them this animal can always judge exactly how far a distance is, letting it be bolder in each leap, better comprehending and compensating for the risks. Despite its small size and few defenses, it has few enemies here. But it is not the only denizen of these cliffs.

High on the limestone spires of the slade, a strange animal frolics in the face of danger. It hops without fear between towering precipices, seeking seeds, nuts, eggs and insects on which to feed and effortlessly bounding across sheer cliffs of dizzying heights to reach each morsel. Its own Latin name is aptly confused at how to describe it; its fur is wooly and white, like a sheep, but it is a nimble climber with long arms and a monkey's hands, save for its two extra fingers on each and its equally numerous hook-like claws. Its long leaping legs and bulging eyes are frog-like, but it is warm blooded and playful; those same eyes reflect a feline intelligence, and it moves gracefully, always landing on its feet. It is a creature that seems to borrow the parts and pieces of so many things all at once, and at the same time something unique and all its own. It is the cloudcat, an animal with no close relatives, and which lives nowhere else but here.

The cloudcat is, in fact, a most odd looking molodont of the seedsnatcher clade. It resembles a molmo, but is not closely related; the handelopes of the Trilliontree Islands are in fact its nearest of its kin, but even they do not share much in common after fifteen million years of divergence. Like so many other animals it occurs only in the slade, but it is not a relict or a surviving member of a primitive group, but rather its own aberrant and derived lineage. It is not a creature trapped or marooned in this low-lying basin, but a willing colonist from the plains beyond that sought food and shelter as the karst terrain was left high and dry as much of the land around it washed away. Their ancestors scurried on the ground, little rodent-like creatures that could only seek cover in tall grass and burrows dug into the soil from countless hungry mouths. Now they "soar" with spring-loaded bounds between the lithophytic forests and thickets, these vegetation-covered rocks hundreds of feet above the floodplain below. And as the mists rise up from the wetland below, fog shrouds their alpine home, hiding the ground beneath. When conditions are just right, they really do seem to fly between clouds.

Cloudcats typically live in small troops of several males and one female. The female is slightly larger, up to 20%, and more robust. Her fur is all white. Males are lankier and have bright red fur on their legs, and matching rosy skin on the hairless faces, surely to draw in a female's attention. Two or three males typically share one female, and are not aggressive to each other, but females are extremely territorial to other females, and can fight to the death in conflicts over nest sites. There is a clear-cut division of labor in the troop based on sex, with the larger female being naturally better suited to chisel out a nest hole in the rock with her more powerful jaws, which she will spend most of her time inside when nearing birth and for several weeks further once her young is born, easily protecting it from predators by blocking the entrance hole with her gnashing teeth. She will spend most of her life nestled in here once she is mature, becoming much more sedentary than her mates. The littler males have greater agility and seemingly limitless energy in comparison. They can reach into small rock crevices, and climb further out on thin branches to collect food that would be out of her reach. They bring this back to the female and her young continuously, but only stay for a short duration; they may sleep in the den with her only at night, and at other times are forbidden access: she ensures they do not become lazy, for her young depends on their attention. Her baby grows quickly on their devoted care, and when it is about one month old and strong enough, it will leave the nest and join them. They, not she, will take it out into the world and show it how to find food, teaching it to safely traverse their sky-high vertical forest habitat each day, and bring it back safe each night until it gains independence and eventually disperses to join other juveniles and, with luck, begin a new troop. Its mother, who mates almost immediately after giving birth - prepares to have another offspring as soon as her last has fledged the nest, and may have five small litters of one or two each year.

Male cloudcats work amicably together to provide for their shared mate and her offspring, though a dominance hierarchy between them means that one is most likely to sire her offspring. The subordinates stick around anyway, even though it means they may spend a substantial portion of their lives caring for young that are not their own, because it's safe. And eventually it is likely the dominant male will die, and the next in line will rise into his rank. It can always be seen in a troop that the male which is highest-ranking and sires most or all of the young is a little harder-working than the rest. He must be, or else the female would not choose him. He is the one who forgoes the most of his own meals to ensure she gets her own. He is the one who may stray furthest down the spires, even going near to the water in his endless search for supplies to bring back to her. And so over time, he wears himself thin. Exposed to more dangers, and with less fitness to escape them, a dominant male rarely lasts more than a year in his position before he disappears. The next in line then takes his place, and if the troop is dwindling too small, a young, new male will also be recruited to join at the bottom of the pecking order. And so the males cycles through, typically living only three or four years, but most eventually getting a chance to mate. Females meanwhile, living their privileged and lavish lives in their high towers, can live up to 20 years. But this can eventually bring them a new kind of problem. Rare among wild animals, the female cloudcat's life can be so easy that they can truly reach old age - living years after the time they become infertile and unable to bear any more offspring. Eventually, if she has no new young leaving the nest, the males will grow suspicious. They will not waste their time caring for her if they are not successfully passing on their genes, and the longer that goes between successful litters, the more likely they are to abandon her. Then she must resort to foraging on their own at the end of their lives; rarely do they live too much longer at this stage, for a younger female is likely to take their territory at this time and displace them. So an old female, if she wants to keep living in prosperity - or living at all - must resort to crime to maintain her standard of living. And in these cases, they can show a shocking dark side to their nature.

The most benign trick an aging cloudcat will try to pull on her mates, if she has only recently stopped bearing young, is to imitate the sound of a young infant in the nest, while conveniently barring the males entry to see it for themselves. They will be re-energized in their devotion to care for her, excited at the prospect of a new baby after what may have been many months without. But this lie will only work for a short time; they will become suspicious if it goes on too long. So to perpetuate the ruse, she will eventually have to do something much more drastic and far more devious. When the males are away, she leaves the nest, something she may have not done in over a decade, and she seeks out a rival troop tending offspring of their own that are old enough to be out of the den, but not yet independent. The old, barren queen attacks them, easily overpowering the smaller males, and she steals their child. Carrying it shrieking and struggling back to her own nest, she bites the tendon on its hind leg to cripple it, but does not kill it. She needs it to be dependent on her, and unable to leave the nest. This is not an act of misplaced maternal affection, but a cold, calculating use of the baby as a tool to exploit for her own benefits. She presents it to her own mates, who are convinced at last she really does have a child. And so they lavish her with abundant food again, keeping her content and safe in her castle. The stolen infant, meanwhile, is treated harshly. She does not care for it well, and barely shares anything she gets with it, biting it fiercely if it tries to leave the nest - not that it can go far with its broken leg - and just as much so if it tries to take her food. It may last a few weeks, or a few months. Eventually her plan will fall apart, and it will die or - less often - heal enough to escape her. And she will have to do it over again to maintain her position.

Some old females might manage several successful kidnappings, prolonging their lives by several years past the time they should have ended, at the expense of other cloudcats that they sacrifice to further their own goals. But the older she gets, the harder it becomes. The weaker she is. And the more likely she is to fail. One day, her body failing in her old age, she will make a last ditch effort to catch another infant, so she can trick her mates into continuing to care for her, long after they should have stopped. But this time she will be met by a rival female, much younger and stronger than her. It will easily kill her, at last ending her reign of terror. But this is not an act of moral heroism, because when the female that replaces the fallen, wicked queen reaches such an age, she too is likely to seek to keep living at any cost just the same. No animal wants to die. Most just haven't the intelligence, and the circumstance, to find a way to avoid it. The cloudcat is a highly intelligent species, but it has put that remarkable intellect to use in ways that can be frightening without a concept of morality to go along with it. And no matter what wicked schemes it may think up to avoid its end, ultimately it's only delaying the inevitable. No queen rules forever.

And everything in life, is temporary.

But when the old cloudcat queen at last dies, or is slain, her abandoned nest does live on. It will survive hundreds, maybe thousands of years before erosion fully takes it away. In a "lifespan" that the living could not comprehend, countless generations of other animals will benefit from its shelter and protection, like the pinnacle mowerbird that cannot make its own nests and can only take those made by stronger animals long ago. From distant and even dark beginnings can still blossom bright new beginnings. And for its faults, the cloudcat is an ecosystem engineer, providing habitat for more animals than it could or will ever know, for long after it is gone.

The pinnacle mowerbird is a brightly colored sparrowgull native to the slade that has acquired a significantly different lifestyle from most of its relatives. This striking blue-plumed descendant of the horned mowerbird feeds underwater, but still nests high above the ground, in this case on the tall eroded karst rock formations that tower above the eroded landscape, where few predators can reach their vulnerable chicks. They are cavity nesters, but unable to excavate their own nests are dependent on naturally occurring eroded hollows, or the work of chewing molodonts, to create their homes. The relative scarcity of such suitable cavities has required these mowerbirds nest singly and live less social lives than others of their family; rarely do a large number of nest sites occur right alongside each other, and pairs will compete over those that do exist. But this solitary habit and rivalry only extends around their nest sites, which they will defend year round and roost in even when not raising offspring. When searching for food away from the nest things are very different: now pinnacle mowerbirds forgo their competitions and become uniquely cooperative, calling on help from their fellows to hunt food more effectively, to the benefit of all. For like most mowerbirds, this one cannot subsist on grass alone. It requires animal protein to raise its chicks to maturity. But that can be trickier to catch.

This mowerbird feeds mostly on submerged water plants, and as an adult could subsist entirely upon this diet, though it rarely has to. To support the growth of its young during the nesting season, though, it must bring home meat: fish, insect larvae, crustaceans, and small metamorph birds, anything they can catch and carry home in their serrated bills that can just as easily tear flesh as foliage. The pinnacle mowerbird is a capable swimmer, with webbed front toes, and will additionally propel itself with strokes of its wings, almost as if it were flying under the water. But it is not fast at this, being a recent colonist of the water, and individually a diving mowerbird may struggle to chase down prey and can also be vulnerable to aquatic predators. If singly, they are reluctant to dive deep, and will limit their feeding to the very edge of the water; it can work well enough, but they miss out on opportunities to find more food that lies hidden deeper down. So sometimes they team up, forming larger groups that can together counter both of these problems. While one parent broods the eggs or young, the other flies off to find another mowerbird near its nest site and signals its lack of ill-will with a choreographed dance in the air in which it flutters up, dives sharply down, and repeats two or three times. A normally black feather patch on each shoulder extends to reveal a violet iridescent patch with each dive, a flashing signal of UV light that is a clear sign to another mowerbird that says "I'm going to eat, care to join?". If the other mowerbird is also hungry, it will take flight and copy the gesture, and the two will fly on to find a third mowerbird and so on; if it is not interested, it will simply chase the interloper away with a shrill chatter. But the more birds that perform the diving dance together, the more enticing it is to join it, and in this way a dozen or more birds can quickly be persuaded to fly together as a team.

Such a foraging party has many advantages over a single bird. They are bolder, and they will land at the shoreline, but also enter the water and now swim down beneath it. Half the group will dive together, and so keep watch of each other's backs. They alternate with the others that stand guard at the shoreline, with some popping up from their dives with beaks full of food, as others dive down and take their turns. Their bills are long, and they can fit a whole row of morsels within them, pinching it at the back of the beak even as they collect more and more, until their mouths are lined with prey items and they can fit not a single more. Only then do they depart from the group to deliver their cargo to a waiting nest full of young. Though both sexes of a pair will take turns joining the hunting team once their eggs are hatched, while the eggs are incubated it's all up to the male to provide for a mate who will not leave her eggs at all until they hatch and who depends on this delivery service to feed. The foraging team will only stay together for a short time, though, so it is imperative the mowerbird does not delay long at its nest and rejoins it quickly if it still has to find more food.

Pinnacle mowerbird groups are more efficient at collecting food than any one individual is alone because they can synchronize their dives and surround shoals of small fish or other prey, closing in around them underwater like a fisherman's net. To do this the group will fly low over the water, circling until a group of fish is spotted, and then they will position themselves in a wide circular arrangement and hover there for several seconds until each is perfectly aligned. Now the one most distant from shore will dive down and hit the water quickly and vertically; those on each side of it will follow half a second later, and so on, until the whole group has submerged in formation. The first bird to dive has chased fish toward shore, where they find themselves trapped and turn around, only to find other mowerbirds coming at them from every direction and cutting off escape. When a single bird may have caught just one or two fish, now the whole flock catches mouthfuls. This close coordination to find food has no parallel in any other mowerbirds, but similar behaviors do exist in others, for entirely different purposes. The coordinated diving may have arose from an ancestral pattern of escaping their own predators, via synchronized flight maneuvers involving dropping out of the sky to avoid flying enemies that wanted to eat them. A ritualized variation of the habit then evolved and was used to select a mate by demonstrating their swift ability to dive and match a partner's movement, and this still occurs in the ritualized dance that pinnacle mowerbirds engage in before deciding to hunt together as a group. Other members of the pinnacle's genus use similar movements in courtship and social communication, but only this species has re-purposed them into a hunting technique. It's a rare strategy, but it's easy to see why it was favored. By feeding as a unit in this way, a group of pinnacle mowerbirds can find all the food they need for an entire day in as little as an hour or two, when alone it might take them all day. It's an efficient system, and to follow so many social cues and work together, the pinnacle mowerbird has become one of the most intelligent of its group: the peak of their diversity, perhaps, in more ways than just its regal looks and lofty choice of habitat. Pinnacle mowerbirds are the only members of their family to rise above their state as timid prey animals and become pack-hunting predators... if only on a very small scale. For now, anyway.

Clinging to the rough and rocky cliffs which delineate the slade from the savannahs to its east and the firmament to its west is the cryptic clingling, a very shy and well camouflaged seraph which can no longer fly, but which can climb so well as to render this skill all but obsolete. The clinglings are a genus descended from the clingoose which have gone all-in on their mountaineering skills, spending their entire lives on vertical surfaces. Some, like the communal clingling of the nightforest, dwell on the bark of towering tree trunks and live in large groups - many eyes for defense mean they can be more conspicuous, and those species are thus much more easily observed. The cryptic clingling, though, is a solitary animal and relies on its own eyes alone to detect predators. It survives by remaining still and moving slowly, hidden in plain sight by its cloak of mossy plumage which blends in spotlessly against the cliffs it calls home. It feeds here on the various mosses, lichens, and epiphytic plants that can grow attached to these sheer surfaces, and on the varied small invertebrate animals that live within such flora. Its beak is small and narrow, as is its small bill crest, letting it reach into cracks where soil can accumulate, and pull out the small plants which appear there by the roots.

Weighing only two pounds and with a wingspan of about two feet, the cryptic clingling never descends to the slade floor and now has difficulty walking upright at all. Its entire anatomy is adapted now to hanging, head-up, on vertical walls, which has resulted in a sprawling posture with both arms and legs permanently flung out to its sides with little range of movement under the body. It shuffles upwards and sideways, preferring the high slopes of the slade to the low ones, for it cannot turn itself around and descend down head-first and instead relies on elegant, controlled glides to get from a high point to a lower one. Such "flights" - now really just artistic falls - are only taken after great consideration. The clinging is wary to an extreme, attentive of every slight movement in its surroundings, and to glide carelessly to a new perch can give away its location to aerial predators. It lives a slow life, taking the time to think and observe. Only when certain that no one is watching does it let go of the cliff, turn, and soar smoothly to a new perch up to 300 feet away, where it will find new feeding grounds and, perhaps, a chance to find a mate. Of course there is much less consideration given to escape from a predator which has already seen the clingling, and in that case it will flee swiftly, often dropping to a lower elevation before spreading its wings briefly to catch its fall and careen safely to some hidden place below. Yet if a predator has not seen the clingling, it will remain motionless and hidden up until the enemy is nearly standing on top of it, and its camouflage will usually work so well as to render it all but invisible; when so near to danger, even its breathing lessens, and its slow metabolic rate - as is common for climbing leaf-eaters - allows it to hold its breath entirely for as long as five minutes until the threat has passed.

The male clingling is more active than his counterpart, for he alone seeks out mates, taking greater risk gliding to new perches often in order to find them as they remain still and so less likely to be found by predators. Thus males are more likely to be killed, and most older adults will be female, with males having a shorter life expectancy. Females make no special effort to be found, for anything they could do would also alert their enemies, and so it is a challenge for the male to spot one. Most encounters it seems are the result of random chance; clinglings are common enough on the slopes that they are bound to meet one another eventually, and unlike many animals, a female can mate at any time she meets a male. Even if she is not quite ready yet to breed, she will take the chance, delaying the development of her embryos for as long as a month after coupling. Males may be able to locate females by looking for signs of recent grazing on the cliffs, their vision attuned to spot tiny differences in the landscape even from a distance (the way they also spot predators), though this can also lead them into the territory of another male who will be quick to turn around and swipe at such an unwanted intruder with his claws. Females lay their pupal eggs in a sheltered rocky overhang or rarely the interior of a large woody tree growing near the cliff's edge and brood them for about a month. The chicks are flightless like the adult and closely resemble their mother; they imprint on her and remain close by for as long as four months before eventually dispersing on their own. When traveling along cliffs, they line up alongside her and the entire family will synchronize their movements so as to minimize being detected, lurching sideways or upwards together in tandem with hardly any delay from the first steps of the mother down to the last chick in the row. This way, if the movement attracts unwanted attention, it resembles one larger animal rather than as many as ten much smaller ones - a deterrent to many of the small hunters which would target a clingling chick. 

Some animals like clinglings want to hide from sight. Others, like the paradise wumpo, seem to want to be noticed.

The helmethead is not alone as a "living fossil" in the slade, for it shares this verdant wetland with another old friend. The paradise wumpo is a beautiful trunko with a characteristic bright red and yellow face and violet iridescence across a mostly black plumage, further contrasted by a striking crimson tail that is accented by several long, arcing saddle feathers originating from the back in the male. This most stunning and majestic bird is, however, a remarkably primitive descendant of the ancient watchtower wumpo, one of the many new species in the Proboscirostrus genus which radiated wildly in the early hothouse era. And save for its brighter colors - which evolved from simpler patterns already beginning to develop in that ancestor - it is very little changed, either in size, shape, or general lifestyle since that time, though it is a little thinner and tends to carry itself slightly less upright. It is almost completely identical in its skeleton, too, to the point if both species were known only from fossils, it would be difficult to find anything between them to classify them apart. The paradise wumpo is not the only living member of its ancient genus, as is the helmethead, but it is equally unique for having persisted for such a long time in the slade, where its adaptations to the soglands still serve it well.

Paradise wumpos are excellent waders with very long legs, and feed on soft water plants of all kinds (including their roots and tubers, which it pulls up with its trunk), as well as on small animals that it can catch among them such as lumpuses and small eelsnakes, or small birds like pteese chicks. They travel closely in monogamous pairs, and more loosely in flocks of two to ten such pairs, which come and go in unstable groups depending on food availability. Like their ancestors they often group up in the midst of helmetheads, benefiting from the arrangement by picking at bugs they disturb (often feeding alongside tiny pluvies with the same idea) and benefiting from the herd's numbers as protection from larger predators more likely to target them than the wumpos that cleverly surround themselves with such living shields. In return their higher vantage lets them more quickly spot dangers like sawjaws, which they now must fear equally, for the hillhunters that haunt the slade's edges have long forgotten the sinister, under-the-table understanding their ancestors once shared to sacrifice an occasional helmethead and share the spoils.

Though the slade effectively mimics the early hothouse environment, the creatures that inhabit it now are mostly new and strange, and this wumpo and its helmethead companion are now the outliers within it. Once among the tallest animals around, the wumpo now stands in the shadow of much bigger monsters that its ancestors could not have comprehended, and perhaps this is why its more savage habits have faded away over time. Opportunistic carnivorous behavior was just that - opportunism, when it was the biggest thing around - but now the wumpo finds itself prey more often than predator. It needs its old allies more than ever, for as the animals around it grew larger, it has become comparatively smaller and more vulnerable itself, and its young all the more so. Paradise wumpos that don't stick close with the herd very rarely rear any chicks to adulthood - they are too slow and exposed to danger if in the open. The species, with only a single chick per pair per year, does not reproduce quickly enough to cover many such losses.

So the slade continues to provide a home for the wumpo, but far from a trip back in time, this is more like a distorted memory of a simpler time and place. The slade is in fact its own new and dynamic modern environment, a much more dangerous and complicated ecosystem than anywhere on Serina was 15 million years ago. For now it survives, though this is its final hold-out, and it depends on the persistence of the thundering helmethead, the only thorngrazer of the slade still small enough and gentle enough to appreciate its assistance and so let it live in their midst. Stilted sirenhorns, one of the helmethead's stranger descendants, have grown to stand tall on their own and no longer tolerate the wumpo which is no longer needed, while the emelantouka became a hostile predator itself. And while in other places a few other wumpos have found new symbiotic partnerships with different species (like manticores), the very factor which has so far kept the paradise wumpo alive (the isolation of its habitat) also prevents it from finding and forming its own new connections that could let it escape its past and eke out a new niche in the changing world around it. Marooned in the slade now among some of the last of the helmetheads, there seem few new ways for either of the pair to adapt from here. Left behind by their derived relatives, and without means to cross the new horizons ahead, both may be destined to remain relics of a bygone time in a world increasingly unlike that either was forged from, destined to slowly fade away.

But until then they will have each other, together in beginnings and in ends. And there is beauty in that, too.

~~~

Sloghoppers are more common herding thorngrazers endemic to the slade where they thrive in the remnant soglands: shallow, vegetated floodplains that provide them both food and cover. Webbed feet and splayed hooves let them trod lightly over mud in which other creatures might become bogged down, and to gallop through water even as high as their shoulders with remarkable speed and grace. Though all sloghoppers are vegetarian and eat primarily sogland grasses, the two sexes are notably different in appearance. Females are gracile and lightly-built, with narrow jaws, and look like loopalopes - but these animals are not actually true members of that clade. Males are robust and up to twice as heavy, with large, blocky heads and snouts that angle sharply downward, and more resemble their true ancestor - the handlehorn. That early offshoot to the loopalopes, which branched off before they did, has by now gone extinct elsewhere in the world, but here survives in this single descendant species. Both sexes have straight upward-standing crests, differing from the arcing or looped structure of most true loopalopes, and though the male's are larger and brighter colored their main use in both male and female is as a pair of snorkels. This lets these creatures breathe while dunking their heads below water to feed, or as they cross deep water, for they are heavy and swim poorly, and are much more inclined to walk on the bottom of deeper water than to try and stay at the surface. Like some other aquatically-inclined thorngrazers, the nostrils close when the water rises above their height like a valve, keeping the length of each crest full of air that the animal can rely on for several minutes, like an oxygen tank. The sloghopper's ears are tall and funnel-shaped, letting them remain upright above water as it walks, but like the nostrils the tips of the ears will fold tightly closed when it submerges its whole body and so keeps their ear canals free of water.

Sloghoppers are very common in the slade: their single herds rarely number less than a hundred and often exceed 2,000, and tens of thousands in total live here across its wide area. Yet there is no permanent social structure, with individuals staying around others for safety in numbers but lacking strong bonds, and so groups will regularly break up and join together in new configurations. Males and females are always associated together, but do not quite mix evenly. Instead, stronger male sloghoppers always lead the way, opening paths in the grass and plowing through thick and overgrown vegetation that they devour in large mouthfuls. Their lower teeth are projected from the jaw like shovels, and with this underbite they plow through the grass and pull it apart in big, indiscriminate mouthfuls. Daintier females follow in their own groups close behind, leaping in cleared rows behind the steadily-chomping males that part the grass ahead of them. They take their time, selectively feeding on more nutritious parts of the plants that remain lower to the ground and often submerged underwater. Their thin jaws reach down the base of the grass and their smaller teeth neatly cut the softest new growth, far more nutritious than the old foliage the males consume, as well as to snatch up and eat small fish, crustaceans, bird's eggs or anything else that has been uncovered as the males plowed away the grass small animals may have been hiding within. These morsels help supplement their plant-based diet and allow them to produce nutritious crop milk for their calves, as the male takes no part in childcare. The differing shapes and feeding habits of the male and female compliment each other, letting the two make the most of available resources and access the nutrition each sex most needs; males only need a steady supply of bulk calories to break down to sustain their active lifestyle, but females higher protein fare to support the growth of their young. By feeding together, both now benefit without competing.

Sloghoppers are often hunted, but have several ways to escape danger. Diving underwater is a primary survival strategy when threatened by land predators, with herds scattering and diving for cover, then freezing motionless at the bottom; when still and not exerting themselves, they can spend up to 11 minutes without breathing, and may extend the time they hide by quietly rising up just long enough to pop their nostrils out of the water, take a breath, and return to hiding. Males are able to hold breath longer and dive more easily due to their larger body size, and are more inclined to hide this way. Females, lighter weight and faster, will dash to the shore if they are able and there can outrun most predators that here prey upon them, particularly when they double back on their tracks and outmaneuver their mostly larger predators. The greater agility of the female is also used to her advantage when it comes time to mate. Males of many thorngrazers will seek to dominate rivals and gain sole access to females, but this does not work for sloghoppers because females that do not want to be bothered by a male can easily dodge and outrun them. So male sloghoppers do not fight over females at all, mostly ignoring one another, even in close confines.

The primary means they demonstrate their fitness to a potential partner is by indirectly providing them food over a period of several weeks as they open paths in the grassland. Females will seek out the males that mow through the richest areas, and those who are selfless enough to leave behind the most nutritious morsels in their wake without eating everything themselves. And when the time comes, females will choose these males to sire their offspring. Even then, they are discrete about it. Mating only occurs at night, when the herds have bedded down to rest on dry land. Now a female who has been watching a male for some time at a distance will make her move, and as the others sleep, she leads her chosen mate away to couple where no others can interrupt them. It's a brief interaction, and then they part. She may stay with him after, but only if he continues to provide her good feeding grounds. If she finds another male who does so better at a later time, she will move to trail a different male. There will be no hard feelings, for this is how it is for all the sloghoppers, leading lives that are simultaneously highly social, and yet ultimately quite solitary. No longer quite as savage as its precursors, it nonetheless lacks the complexity of more advanced lineage which have changed more quickly from shared ancestors in the last ten million years. In a time where many creatures have now evolved more tightly interwoven social lives and higher intelligence, the sloghopper remains a relict of an earlier time in their evolutionary history when their kind were simple creatures. It was only for a fairly short time that this was to be a widely successful way to live, an interim in an ancient and ongoing pattern that ultimately favors increasing behavioral complexity. But here, in the slade, time has changed slower than elsewhere, and the sloghopper remains. As it travels in its herds across the sogland, it offers us a glimpse back into an already bygone age, in a world always changing. It will not last forever, but for now it still persists. And life still goes through the motions it has for twenty million years. To visit the slade now, in the end hothouse, is like to go back in time if just for a moment and return to simpler times.

It just feels like home.