The Tiger Varpike

Tribbetheres are not the only tribbets that have diversified in the wild, new world of the Pangeacene, 228 million years PE. The tribtiles, a grade of less derived, hairless, and generally ectothermic tribbets that more or less resemble three-footed lizards have also seen success. More primitive than the tribbetheres that some gave rise to, they have nonetheless evolved their own successful adaptations and found a stable place in their environments. From small survivor species no larger than geckos have come a wide variety of newly-evolved groups of novel form and function. The hardiest little lizard-like tribbets which survived the dramatic Thermocene-Pangeacene extinction recolonized newly sprouting forests in the aftermath as the world recovered, snapping at insects, and by now some forms have grown considerably... and moved on toward more substantial prey.

Sneaking through the undergrowth of the jungle today lurks a formidable hunter. She is not a huge animal, just three feet long or so, and not much heavier than a Jack Russel terrier, but she presents herself with an intimidating confidence in her every step; this is not an animal that lives its life in fear. She paces along the ground at a leisurely pace, swinging her body forward with alternating outward steps of her sprawling arms which don’t quite rest underneath her body. Her head jerks to the left, to the right… up and down as she shuffles along. Though her sense of smell is acute, and her gill covers-turned-ear pinnae able to flex and rotate to pinpoint tiny noises, her piercing golden eyes her primary tools to navigate her world and staring into the distance and into nearby crevices in search of a meal. A long pink tongue slithers between many needle-like teeth that line her wide jaws, strings of sticky spittle drooling out the sides of her open mouth as she pauses to yawn and reveal the full extent of her dental armory. Her body is smooth and covered in innumerable tiny scales; her group never evolved a fur coat, for even though in the heat of the tropical day she can hunt with speed and accuracy, she produces no internal warmth of her own to retain and depends on the sun to stay active. She is a tiger varpike, one of the most raptorial of her clade: a group of predatory tribtiles which hunt the Pangeacene forests, chasing down prey in the trees and the undergrowth with surprising endurance and killing them with their long toothy maws.

Suddenly she catches sight of something; a small furry form has dashed into a hollow knot high up in the branches of a nearby sunflower tree. A little molodont returning to its safe den after a night of busy foraging… or a varpike’s supper shutting itself in the pantry, ripe for the picking? The hunter heaves herself up to check it out, clinging to the bark with seven recurved talons on each forearm, with four opposing claws on her tail-leg serving to push her up, inchworm-like and almost effortlessly, until in just a few seconds she reaches the prey’s hidey hole. She peers in with one eye, pressing her face against the wood, and frightened chattering tells her at once she has found her quarry. She presses her snout into the crevice, taking in the scent of prey, but finds it too narrow to open her jaws and so has to reconsider her tactic. All the while the prey, now trapped inside, cries out in a desperate attempt to frighten her off. For lesser predators this bluff might work, but the tiger varpike - a creature which survives by being bold and blustering with ferocious snapping jaws and slashing claws to scare off her own threats - does not even fear much larger enemies, let alone little molodonts. After trying to reach her jaws into the space through other angles, she pushes just one arm down into the crack in the bark and touches fur. Seven hooked claws contract on a struggling mouse-like form and yank it from its refuge and into the light. It squeals and tries to bite its assailant in a last futile attempt at survival but hope is already lost; she swings around her jaws and crushes it swiftly with a vigorous shaking bite, and the prey falls limp and silent. Once the prey is slain she pulls back her head and swallows it whole. She licks her lips, scratches her neck with her arm claw, and then inches her way back down the trunk the same direction she went up, now tail-first. She will need to eat at least one other similarly-sized prey today to sustain her caloric needs, so she wastes no time in returning to the hunt while the sun is still high and the forest warm. Come the cool of the evening she will bed down in a den of her own, one of several she will maintain in her territory, either hollows in trees or holes in the earth below the tangled roots of the trees. She will sleep there throughout the night, and wait for the warmth of day to wake her up again and bring a new daily hunt for sustenance.

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Varpikes are a new lineage of successful predators on Serina, diversifying as we speak and fitting into niches that have been little taken thus far as small mesopredators. The warm temperatures over much of the world suit a cold-blooded metabolism such as theirs well, and a huge variety of birds and other tribbets provide abundant prey. Unlike tribbetheres the varpikes retain an extensible dorsal fin used to absorb heat and as a display structure for males to impress mates or either sex to threaten their enemies. Like all the tribbets they bear live young, and being such vigorous predators these are a highly cannibalistic bunch, the tendency of the new mother to kill her newborns thwarted somewhat only by her instinct to give birth off of a tree branch so that the young making an escape instantly once dropped down to the ground and away from her jaws.