The Sea Shoggoth

The ocean now a bountiful refuge in an ice age world, all sorts of organisms adapt to survive here and flee the chilling land. Creatures large and small adapt to find food and shelter in and nearby the open water, where temperatures are less severe and food more nutritious than further inland. Alongside the larger vertebrates, even some insects have turned to the sea at this time... most notably, the ever-present ants.

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Still recognizable are the sea-ants, spindly-legged insects that still live in colonies, holding onto a coat of air against their bodies via a fine coat of hair and using this bubble suit as a lung to absorb oxygen out of the water. They have changed little since their appearance in the Thermocene, reproducing by creating diving bells of stitched leaves beneath the water in which they lay their eggs and rear their larvae and are an accessory pollinator for aquatic flowering plants. Other ants such as the descendants of the salt flies, however, are now so far removed from their ancestors that there are few lingering resemblances. Completely solitary, the larvae of these fly-like winged insects evolved to be aquatic like mosquito larvae, floating near the sea surface and feeding on any sort of passing organic detritus, while the adults generally lived just a few days and did not feed at all. Formerly these ancient insects, which first appeared more than 230 million years ago in the Tempuscene, were restricted primarily to shallow coastal areas due to their requirement for floating vegetation to lay their eggs upon and shelter their larva. Today, with most of the sea pocketed with such densely vegetated, calm-water refugia the salt flies exist in unfathomable numbers across its entire surface, providing a huge supply of food for both small aquatic and winged predators like ornimorph birds and tribbats related to the flapsnapper, that flutter and soar just above the water’s surface to gather them in huge quantity in wide mouths. A wider variety of salt flies exist now than ever before, some with aggressive, raptorial larvae that hunt other invertebrates and even small fish and tiny metamorph birds, while others have re-developed feeding adults. These simply retain fierce juvenile jaws through their final molt and become hawking aerial predators in a place where other predatory insects like the vespers and other wasp-ants, mostly tied to terrestrial food sources, cannot survive.

Yet it is neither of these clades of ants that are the most advanced, most distinct from any before them. That honor goes to a group which is only a recent convert from the land to the sea. A lineage of ants not so much distinct for any major innovations in each individual’s anatomy, which remains primitive, but rather the complexity of their social interactions and ability to cooperate. The capacity for one group of these insects for cohesive organization has increased steadily since the late Pangeacene. Billion-stingers, ferociously carnivorous army-type ants that learned to construct permanent, mobile nests by linking the bodies of millions of specialized workers that were then carried by the rest of the horde, have not succumbed to the change of climate that destroyed nearly all the rest of the formerly tropical equatorial ecosystem. Rather, they too have sought refuge on the open water, to the bane of anything that gets in their way.

The sea shoggoth is a specialized, semi-aquatic but still very much amphibious type of billion-stinger which can survive indefinitely as a living raft-like structure of bodies floating on the surface of water, an ability their ancestors utilized to survive periodic flooding. Like the sea-ants, workers of a sea shoggoth colony are covered in a fine layer of setae which can hold a layer of air over their bodies underwater and so allow them to respire. In their case, this air also helps them to float, so that millions of individuals can prop up the large bivouacs - the mobile nests in which the breeding females and larvae are protected. In this species colonies may be so large as to extend five meters across, with multiple nests within each one reaching sizes of up to one meter across and half a meter high. They are literal living rafts, linked together with individual ants several inches thick. Sea shoggoths have developed the most complex system of castes of any insects, with distinct forms adapted to hold together the structure, to support and propel the colony, to scurry along over the raft and deliver food to each individual, and to hunt and defend the colony. Propellers, the caste of ants responsible for supporting the lowest level of the colony underwater, are capable of linking themselves together in wide, flat aggregations in the shape of paddles, which are then pulled forward and backward by synchronized contractions of the ants that serve to link together the main body of the colony, which function together like “muscles” to move the “limbs”, all formed by other masses of individual ant workers and so propel the colony slowly across the water’s surface resembling a singular large animal. When environmental conditions suit it, similar paddles will form along the top of the organism with the goal to catch the wind and increase their speed.

Supporting such a massive community of insects requires a huge quantity of food resources, but the sea shoggoth is an efficient and varied feeder, able to utilize nearly any prey it comes across through extraordinary behavioral flexibility. The caste known as foragers are likely descended from the propeller caste, as they similarly link themselves into long aggregations extending off of the main body. Foragers, however, link together into chains up to two inches thick and many meters in length which snake away from the colony and seek out prey via scent. These chains operate nearly like an additional large animal independent even of the body, slithering through the vegetation like an amorphous snake or eel. The chain is hollow, and so anything that any single worker forming the outer edge of the chain catches is immediately pulled into the fold and dismembered, while couriers, the least specialized caste, take the scraps of meat and run them back up the interior of the chain to distribute throughout the colony. The foragers will catch any sort of animal prey from tiny shrimp and copepods, which are simply absorbed into the chain largely intact, to any sort of large animal that does not flee in time. Bigger prey such as a large fish or a seabird is restrained by the foragers adjusting their shape into a wide net, creeping over the body like a lattice and biting in with hundreds of sharp jaws, each able to deliver a dose of stinging venom. Communication of contact with prey is rapidly sent via mandibular clicks, a chain of communication that is quickly transmitted back to the body of the colony which in turn sends reinforcements down the chain until the prey is utterly wrapped and overwhelmed beneath the colony’s strength. These collective clicks, millions-strong and indicating the killing of another victim, are audible for some distance.

The sea shoggoth functions like a singular large, warm-blooded animal. Its individual ants could not survive here in the cool water, and neither could a tiny colony of just a few thousand. The shoggoth requires the accumulative warmth produced by vibratory movements of its tens of millions of members to remain an active predator; its jet black color also absorbs a maximum of heat from the sun during the day. The need to stay warm in this new aquatic environment has been a major impetus for its increasingly complex behavior. The interior of the shoggoth’s nesting chambers maintains a fairly steady temperature up to twenty-five degrees fahrenheit above that outside, insulating the developing young and the precious queens from the cold nights. The brunt of the chill is endured most by the outer individuals forming the walls, which alternate their positions bit by bit every few minutes to ensure every individual gets time inside to warm itself.

Producing so much heat requires a lot of energy, and an average, ten foot wide colony, weighing perhaps five hundred pounds, requires at least 5,000 calories a day to survive, which it will collect from almost any animal it touches, as well as some types of seeds and algae that are high enough in fat and protein. But this is not the maximal size of the superorganism - where resources permit, sea shoggoths may grow to more than thirty feet across and weigh almost a ton spread across the water, consuming as much as 20,000 calories a day. But growth potential is not infinite; eventually a colony will outstrip its ability to locate enough food to sustain itself and be forced to divide. This is the way they are adapted to disperse, however, with each colony continually producing fertile females which form new, reproductive nests within the colony. When the time comes, a sufficiently large, mature colony will break into two or sometimes three smaller colonies, each “baby” fully developed and large enough to keep itself warm.

Sea shoggoths as individual superorganisms may multiply via division of the colony, but to eventually do this first requires that the colony’s individual ants mate. The colony is, after all, dependent entirely on the survival of breeding queens - the gametes of the superorganism - which bear the eggs that can hatch into every caste depending on the need of the colony. Shoggoths and their billion-stinger ancestors were notable for each colony having many queens which cooperatively coexist within the colony, sharing workers but living in separated nests. Sea shoggoths average ten to twenty queens divided between two to ten distinct nest chambers within the colony, though large ones may have more than thirty queens all reproducing. All queens in a given colony are close relatives, if not sisters then cousins, and their genes benefit from cooperating with their relatives. But to ensure the health of the colony, they must obtain new, unrelated genes from males from other sea shoggoths. So when the time comes for young queens to mate and begin producing eggs, two colonies must exchange their “gametes” in the form of winged, flying, fertile males. If shoggoths simply released flocks of their males into the air to find one another by chance, some would manage but most would just be lost to predators, exhaustion or bad weather, as sea shoggoths keep a wide distance with one another at all costs, requiring lots of resources individually to survive but also trying to avoid physical confrontation. War between colonies can easily kill both shoggoths if their internal nests are breached by the cold water and the queens drown, as they are the only individuals too large to maintain a lung of air around their bodies to survive underwater. There is thus a complicated equation to calibrate when the colony needs to mate; send off drones to their fate, or come closer to another colony to make fertilization more likely… at risk of bodily harm.

To solve this, the sea shoggoth has evolved a clear signal of its intentions when it needs to reproduce. Shoggoths seeking to breed give out low, infrasonic mating calls via the synchronized clacking of all of their jaws which is so loud as to be heard up to a mile away in calm water. These booming noises are picked up by other distant shoggoths that may also be seeking to breed as a signal of clear and mutually beneficial intent, and this is one of the only circumstances where two shoggoths will intentionally approach one another short of starvation. Two, sometimes more colonies respond to one another’s calls, speeding them up as they come closer to one another until they are a few tens of meters apart at which point both release massive clouds of waiting males. The males hone in on the scent of unfamiliar females and quickly cross and enter the opposite colony where they seek to enter the bivouacs and mate with the receptive queens. After mating the males are killed and eaten by the colony, which otherwise has no further use for them. The shoggoths then depart, for some months at least, until they require new fertilization and meet up for another tryst.

Sea shoggoths have few natural enemies, being too well-defended to be preyed upon by almost anything. However, they are vulnerable to bad weather and rough seas which can break them apart, chill the interior of the nests, or drown the queens. They thus preferentially live in the calm and highly vegetated pockets of the sea, using the turbulent stretches only for temporary dispersal during which many young shoggoths die before finding new suitable territories. Though few wild animals can kill a shoggoth outright, many are able to exploit them as parasites, with invertebrates of many kinds able to slip inside and consume larvae or feed on the scraps of food they catch. Gravediggers living at sea must contend with these ravenous creatures which are highly inclined to take trapped fish from nets, sometimes attacking boats, but this species has a unique tool to thwart the shoggoth. Shoggoths fear fire - just a passing wave of a torch over the queen’s nesting chambers atop the raft will induce it to abort feeding and flee, a retained instinct from the days their ancestors lived upon the shore and had to contend with wildfires. All the more reason to remember your torch when you go out to check the nets after dark.

Just don’t let the flame go out.