A Panorama of the Ocean Age

In this artificially busy scene near the Serinarctan coast of the ice box seaway, the many isolated and inter-connected dramas of the day-to-day life of a wide variety of creatures which all share the shallow seas of the ocean age is depicted.

At the surface, a family of social gravediggers catch a sharkbird using hook and line made from fish bone and animal sinew. A tamed pretenguin - a flightless but still very intelligent sparrowgull - rests on the bow in between dives to collect shellfish from the sea floor for its owners. Kept as a pet and imprinted from infancy so that they choose to stay, such animals enable the gravedigger to more effectively collect food hard to obtain even with advanced tool use, like a spiked glove that provides them a prosthetic thumb to improve their grip. In the far distance, small winged sparrowgulls fly and soar in search of food while below a shoal of shimmershiners - social filter-feeding snarks - play in the waves between the gravedigger's lines.

On the left side two fisher daydreamers are traveling along an opening in the vegetation where the current is stronger. Three luddies - near-sapient porplets - join them for protection from their predators and additional company. As fishers are pescetarians they are harmless to the luddy and indeed these two beings' lives are highly interconnected.

On the right side, two dramas unfold independent of the other as above a pack of skystrikes attack a floatcrane and attempt to drown it whilst below three pastoralist daydreamers defend their nops from an attack by an opportunistic predator burdle. One on one, the burdle would have an advantage, but it stands down to the group, whose cohesion and cooperative behavior let them dominate even the fiercest solitary sea predators.

At center a shadowskimmer searches for small prey along the vegetated surface, despite being primarily nocturnal. A huge metamorph bird which begins its life as a pike-live larvae in the sea, these birds have remained almost unchanged for more than ten million years, but now reach never before seen populations in the ocean age, soaring over the sea at times in flocks of hundreds - each one with wingspans as wide as small airplanes.

Various jetguppies shoal and hunt in the seagrasses and algae... this clade of fish, descended from the ancient turbo eel, is noteworthy for evolving jet propulsion and are now some of the most successful ray-finned fish in a sea dominated by birds.

Near the sea floor an itamae, a specialized fish-eating, fully-marine metamorph bird, flees the fishers as they approach as fishers do not always distinguish metamorphs from ray-finned fishes. Nearby an urutrel, a predatory squotter, makes way for the pastoralists who, despite their farming ways, still show the physical adaptations of the tetrapod-eating daydreamer lineage. Despite being a hunter itself, the urutrel knows it is no match for a pack of daydreamers were they to decide he was on their menu.

Lastly, sensing multiple life and death battles unfolding in its midst, a sinister sea shoggoth, moving slowly like a living oil slick on the surface of the water, cruises in to investigate.