Life is changing rapidly now upon Serina, as nature begins to try to balance-out its artificial environment. The canaries have spread to all major landmasses and adapted to a great variety of diets. For the first time for its avian inhabitants, notable predators are beginning to emerge. Having moved from egg-eating to also include pilfering of nestlings, the hook-billed egg-eater canaries are experiencing a boom in diversity, having spread to most continents, moving further and further south as local birds become wise to their hunger and become increasingly intolerant. In the bamboo forests, the snails begin to decline following the evolution of Serina's first social, highly aggressive carnivores - the ants.
Though only small and naturally docile ant species, predominately though not wholly of genus Formica, were introduced to Serina, it took only one million years for them to significantly alter their behavior. Without predators or significant competition, it did not take long for docile omnivores to turn to hunting, pillaging the nests of Serina's hapless ground-nesting birds. Their aggression grew, gathering in larger and larger swarms to overwhelm nestlings and eventually sitting mothers as well, desperate to protect their young. Their jaws became larger and more powerful as several species began to develop venomous stinging bites. The first wave of predators to hit Serina would be perhaps the worst - the Empire Ants.
Growing up to an inch in length, these large-jawed, meat-eating insects become a terrible curse to the planet's large, defenseless gastropods, overwhelming them by the millions and dismembering them piece-by-piece to carry as stock back to immense underground colonies composed of several hundred miles of subterranean tunnels. Within ten thousand years more, these most abnormally large snails will have been eaten all but to extinction, survived only by more reasonably-sized forms able to climb into the canopies to escape Serina's new apex predator. So too will be ravaged the unfortunate few large ground-canaries to have totally forgotten how to fly in their brief era of prosperity - it is no longer safe to nest on the bare ground, and those birds which cannot quickly remember to place their nests above it or learn to fight off the hordes will soon lose out in this game of life as their young are repeatedly destroyed by the world's new rulers.
It is the ants which also now begin to take over the snail's role in the ecosystems. While the carnivorous Formica ants pilfer the snails themselves, they open up a path for the Leafcutter Ants to quickly take their place. Soon there will be no forest glade free of their eternal harvesting, as tens of billions of ants begin to fulfill the roles normally filled by a few million large ungulates. Originating in the tropical belt, they will gradually move further both north and south to take over a niche otherwise all but empty. Until vertebrate life catches up to them, thus ends the era of the snail and begins the age of the ants - but neither too can this glut last forever. As the ants proliferate, so too do the number of creatures that begin to view them as a source of food. The first creatures to do so are the predatory mites, which begin to infest the nests of the insects, devouring their eggs and young. Soon many creatures will follow suit as Serina's ecology attempts to stabilize itself to reasonable boundaries.
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Serina's meadows at this time begin to explode with color as a handful of clover and sunflower species begin to speciate at a remarkable rate. Initially both clades experienced a great drop in diversity, unable to compete with grasses and lacking natural insect pollinators. By now, however, a few surviving species of both have re-established in great numbers, pollinated now by either the wind - these plants being notable for a signifcant atrophy of their petals, which became of little purpose - and others by unusual ants which exhibit the peculiarity of retaining their wings throughout life. Like the leaf-cutters, these ants are entirely herbivorous, but they share a much closer relation to the Empire Ants as belonging to the Formica. Lacking the venomous stings or large mandibles of their relatives, the sweet-tasting Honey Ants become both a vital food source to many bird species, their unique ability of flight reversing an earlier trend towards flightlessness in the groups that begin to pursue them, and a life-line for Serina's flowers, now able to spread far and wide, taking their pollinators along, but which otherwise would likely have died out within the next few million years. Throughout damp regions worldwide, bamboo forests now climb to heights of over 130 feet.
Below ground, a fertile soil has been taken over in the absence of moles by the invertebrates. Millipedes proliferate in the leaf litter of both meadow and bamboo glade, reaching lengths of half a meter or more. Also having taken to the soil are the crickets, which feed upon the plentiful starchy roots of the moon's plentiful grasses. Already they've begun to grow in absence of competition, with one species reaching a body length four inches long and the weight of a small rat. Growing up to twenty-five feet long, however, the Serinan Bullworm of the deeper subsoil is now the longest terrestrial animal on the planet.
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In the sea, an evolutionary arms race has begun amongst the live-bearing fishes, as the largest individuals begin to specialize in preying upon the smaller. The largest fishes alive are now pelagic swordtails over twelve inches in length with males carrying elongated tail swords of equal length. Magnificent and colorful, they are free to take display to extreme lengths, lacking predators themselves. Producing up to three hundred offspring every three months, which needn't survive the perilous period as eggs or larvae like many other fishes do, they spread rapidly across a sea abounding with opportunity, ravaging the hordes of small Poecilids that until now roamed with near-impunity in a world without predators. They are absent now only from the coldest of polar waters, where the most adaptable small guppies can still glean a brief reprieve from their hunts, though even here death is never far as these regions experience a boom in the population of cold-water jellyfishes taking advantage of this food source.