r/SerinaSeedWorld

Shattered Islands (Ansteva)

The skunkatrice is a large skuzzard of the shattered islands southwest of Ansteva. Its ancestors were creatures not terribly unlike the woozel, very reptilian skuorcs which evolved on Ansteva. But while woozels relied on toxic bites for defense, the skunkatrice's ancestors evolved an alternative discouragement to their predators in the form of noxious secretions produced from their cloacas. The first form of this defense would have simply relied on the animal's natural waste excretions to render it unpalatable. This would also be used to mark claimed land against others of its kind, and so the scent would be strong enough to persist and waft some distance, keeping rivals out of an occupied territory. Over time a large gland under the tail would appear which stored a separate potent secretion which combined the scent molecules and pheromones with an oil base which would linger for longer on scent marks than droppings. This also allowed for more specialized defensive secretions, as the chemical cocktail in the gland could grow more toxic as necessary to keep ahead of increasingly persistent predators into the late hothouse. It has reached its pinnacle in the skunkatrice, an animal which communicates almost entirely through its noxious scents.

Skunkatrices mostly resemble a woozel sized up dramatically. Their bodies are mostly covered in smooth scutes, but their backs, throats, and tail tips support bristling manes of plumage. Virtually mute, and with near-sighted vision, skunkatrices are extremely solitary and make rivals aware of themselves through their brightly contrasting patterns - visible even to weak eyes - and through marking their island territories with scent signals. They lift their tails and back up to trees, logs, rocks and other boundaries, spraying their messages - which usually say "stay away!", but can also be enticing to the opposite sex at the right time of year - and then brushing against the marks before they dry with their plumage. Now having marked both themselves and their surroundings, they will leave their scent trails on everything they pass against, scraping their feathers to leave more traces. They may even stand on their forearms alone to brush their tails against high branches, giving competitors the impression the leaver of these marks is much bigger than it really is. Where two individuals meet at the edge of their territories, they engage in fights of scent, flinging secretions from their tail tufts at one another from a distance. Two males or two females only argue this way, their scents vile and intended to overpower the other's and drive it off. But males and females may have conversations of much greater depth this way, flicking back and forth and exchanging information about one another like age, diet, and receptivity to mate. Females are larger than males, and if one likes what she is smelling, she will tentatively enter his territory, and he will dance around her slowly and elegantly. He raises his tail and his head at the same time, until his tail tuft tickles his chin, and he emits a quiet purring call, vibrating his throat. It is the only sound this species ever makes. If she is ready to mate, she will lay down beside him and mirror his movements. The two will couple and then part ways peaceably, and in several months, she will bear as many as ten small young which are independent from the start and retreat high into the forest trees before their own mother can eat them.

Though opposite-sex skunkatrices of the right mindset may not mind the scent, this species is so smelly that there is hardly anything else left which would still dare and mess with it. Growing to 60 pounds, it is a virtually unbothered species lacking enemies of its own, and though not especially large, it roams the shattered islands with impunity, eating whatever it wants with a powerful jaw that can handle almost any food - insects, smaller vertebrates, fallen fruit, and seaside refuse. It is especially fond of large carrion, which it readily usurps from anything it can harass into giving up its meal by flicking hostile-smelling secretions in their direction, driving away even much larger species that will take hours to groom the oil from their own bodies (and the scent will still linger for days.) But even the worst of the skunkatrice's offensive scent marks pale in comparison to its defensive ones. Younger individuals are more commonly preyed upon, but very occasionally an adult will find itself threatened by some foolish animal. Now the animal, having nothing to lose, will empty the entire contents of its scent gland with enough force to shoot up to 30 feet, targeting the mouth and eyes of its enemy. Though not fatal, and lacking any permanent effects, the odor of such a large discharge is incapacitating to even the most fearsome of predators and the oil the scent secretions are carried in temporarily blind them for hours as it dries and may bind their eyelids together until it can eventually be scraped away. The effect on the skunkatrice's would-be-attacker can be so powerful as to cause it to involuntarily retch and throw up its stomach contents. As it staggers away, the skunkatrice - an inveterate scavenger with very low standards of food - may happily eat what is left behind, gaining a meal in the process of self-defense. It must be cautious after releasing its entire store of defensive spray, however, for it takes a few days to regenerate in enough capacity to spray again. Thus, the skunkatrice does not typically use it except in urgent circumstances, for though it could gain some benefit in doing so at other times, it might be left vulnerable if it really needed the defense later on.

Great Polar Desert

Though the Pangeacene is a much more livable place than the world at the end of the Thermocene, remnant deserts still exist in the far south of the interconnected continent. The great polar desert is still a land of harsh extremes, a relict of a time that elsewhere has gone by. This is a landscape battered by seasonal extremes, from scorching summertime temperatures in excess of 115 degrees Fahrenheit to winter lows approaching zero at the south pole. This is a true desert where rain may only fall on most spots once a year, but form a deluge when it does come, transforming the land into short-lived prairies of annual flowers - but only after flash foods rip and rend the land as temporary rivers fill and overflow their banks. In contrast, the most arid stretches of all may only receive precipitation once in a decade. From Stehvlandea to Karii and as far north as the former Kyrans, the polar desert stretches some 3,500 miles east to west and 1,600 miles south to north. By area, it covers 15% of Serina's land. While plants and animals by necessity must live at much lower population densities than in more productive forests and plains, the great desert is still home to many species and far more individual creatures, supremely adapted to their hostile homelands, knowing no other life.

The desert is a place that is harsh for all life, but some groups survive better here than others. Large furred- or feathered animals struggle in the extreme heat of this climate, their hot-blooded metabolisms often resulting in a constant struggle to lose excess heat, while they need constant food to remain healthy - hard to find here, most of the time. In the central parts of the desert such animals as flightless birds or large tribbetheres with big appetites and bodies too large to hide underground are rare. But for species which don't need to warm themselves constantly, the ambient warmth of a desert day can be exploited. Tribtiles, the reptile-like grade of terrestrial fish from which tribbetheres also evolved, seem perfectly comfortable in hot, dry places such as this. Their scaly skin is a watertight barrier against evaporation, and though they cannot warm themselves in very cold weather via endothermy, they are experts at using their surroundings not just to warm up, but also to cool down.

The bark-crested bumpbeast, a plant-eater that can weigh as much as a sheep, may not live in the coldest reaches of the south pole, but in the north of the desert where it lives, it can still experience night temperatures that hover only a few degrees of freezing. It and its close relatives have evolved a large sail upon their backs, supported by ossified spines of their ancestor's dorsal fins and highly interwoven with blood vessels. At night, when temperatures drop, the sail folds down backwards, each spine jointed at its base where it meets the back, and there it lays over the body as a sort of blanket (though it serves only very minimally to retain body heat, as it will only cover a small part of the animal.) But by lowering its sail, it reduces its surface area to the cold, and so slows how its body chills overnight. In morning, when the sun crests the horizon, the bumpbeast is slow and still, drained of most of the heat it held the former day. It has hunkered down for the night in a shallow depression scraped out with its claws, always positioned facing due north or south. Now, though, it reawakens. It raises its sail like a flag, the broad surface facing directly into the rising eastern sun. It pumps blood into the tissues between the spines, flushing it a bright scarlet red color visible under the thin skin, and it cycles blood through the sail and back into the body as it is warmed. About an hour of basking is all it takes for the bumpbeast to become active again and regain its appetite. Ambling away over the desert sands, it will do the majority of its eating in the next few hours, before the sun becomes so intense that it will again want only to rest and wait for conditions to improve, then laying directly east or west so that its sail does not strike the sun directly, and prevailing winds will instead flow across it, helping to keep it cool like the large, radiator-like ears of an elephant. Generally solitary, and males especially territorial, female bumpbeasts care for their single offspring, uncommonly for tribtiles. They both shelter their infant from extreme heat in their shade, and share their own body heat by snuggling on cool nights, with these small two-member families staying together for up to three years. Infant mortality is thus very low, offsetting a low reproductive output. Life expectancy is long, averaging 50 years, occasionally reaching 70 or more if they can avoid conflicts with predators - rare in this region, but not wholly absent - or for males, fights with their own kind. Named for its characteristic lumpy head ornamentation, the male bark crested bumpbeast uses this irregularly branching keratin crest to fight while both sexes will also headbutt desert shrubs and stunted trees to knock them over so that they can reach their leaves. The bark crested bumpbeast is an herbivore, using numerous blunt peg-like teeth to crush and chew coarse or woody desert plants, even very thorny ones or species which are otherwise unpalatable. A favorite meal, though, is not a tree or shrub at all, but a succulent called the desert spineflower, a type of common cactus-like sunflower that is relative of the prehistoric pineflower trees, and a group which has been desert-adapted for over 150 million years; its very distant ancestor was the zucchini tree (and its far-future descendants are cactaiga and towertrees.) Desert spineflowers are widespread in the desert, and send down deep tap roots up to 100 feet to reach hidden water sources - though growth is very slow until they find one, once they reach water they spread aggressively though clonal shoots underground, forming expansive, almost bamboo-like colonies, some of which may live for thousands of years. Because they can reach water most plants cannot, the spineflower is one of few plants that can bloom all year round in the desert, providing important food resources for insects. For most other animals, though, the plant isn't very pleasant. The 8-20 inch long photosynthetic and flowering stems they shoot out above ground, each of which is only short lived, are spiky, bitter, and produce a caustic, excruciatingly spicy latex sap that no bird or tribbethere would touch. Only the bumpbeast doesn't seem to mind, and eats them by the mouthful. The resinous chemical responsible for the taste of the plant, similar to that which gives chili peppers their spice but more potently concentrated, has been independently synthesized in these species as in some entirely unrelated earth plants and for similar purpose of defense. Feeding upon the spineflowers for lack of other options, it seems that the bumpbeasts may initially push through the pain, but ultimately become immune to the effects entirely as the nerve endings in their tongues and lips eventually die from constant exposure, numbing them to their diet. As these chemical defenses become less and less useful as a result, most descendants of the spineflower will become less toxic. Producing chemical defenses, after all, is metabolically costly. When they no longer provide protection, natural selection will focus more on becoming physically harder to eat, with woodier stems and far longer, sharper thorns.

this post specifically looks really interesting to me with all the freaky islanders. i'll let someone else do all the other posts

The Three Eggs Islands off the coast of Zarreland make up a three-island archipelago which arose from the continental shelf as sea levels began to recede around 5 million years ago. This makes them one of the hothouse's newest regions. Their isolation by sea from the land has resulted in a unique environment lacking in typically dominant animal lineages; there are no thorngrazers here, nor any sawjaws, and especially no cygnosaurs. What does live here are chamarmotoos, some 13 species of them - about a quarter of their total diversity. These skuorcs are one of these islands' most successful and diverse animal groups, and there is nowhere else that they deviate further from the baseline, arboreal form typical of almost every species elsewhere. Every one of the species which now lives here diverged from a close ancestor of the widespread cliff chamarmotoo which rafted here just 3.9 million years ago, which is less time than the clown chamarmotoo has been diverged from that species by around half a million years. Yet because the environment of the three eggs islands is so different from other places, the species which evolved here often look much more dissimilar. This island group has scarce trees due to still having very little fertile soil deposited, so that grassland and cactaiga dominate over forest, and water drains away quickly even though rainfall is frequent. This is a region that is as distinct from any continental habitat in its flora as much as its fauna. (More on the Google Site)

The following two groups of hothouse animals may not seem very alike at first glance. A flying fish and a flightless bird, most species of both these groups are nonetheless allied by a unique set of habitat preferences and diets. They are all oceanic fish-eating predators which are dependent on coastal forests to nest and rear their young. (More info on the Google Site)

Longdark Swamp

Scuttling around the tallest trees of the longdark swamp is another taptracker very different from the jumping jaggedjaw. It is, for the most part, more typical in form; a parrot-like bird, weighing about one pound, with cryptic mottled coloration that perfectly matches the lichenous trees that it dwells in. Though it certainly can fly, and does so with agile skill, it is more often seen hanging, head-up, from the bark by its sharply angled bill-hook and its tiny paired wing claws of the exact same shape. It moves all around the tree in a rotating fashion, clambering always upward, never down, and to either the right or the left, so as to always ascend the tree in a spiral around its trunk. This helps it to keep an eye in every direction for predators, as well as to make it harder to ambush. Some of these birds remain in the south polar circle year-round, and so vary seasonally from diurnal to nocturnal. In more northerly Serinaustran regions however, the birds demonstrate a preference for dusk and dawn, roosting during the middle of the night and day.

This little bird is the treehugger, a gummivore taptracker that feeds on sap and little else. It does so in a unique and clever fashion. Sap does not drain from trees quickly, even when the treehugger uses its beak to dig a hole for it to flow from. And the treehugger, an active bird, needs a lot of calories to maintain its lifestyle. It can't afford to wait. So it makes hundreds of holes, all along the trunk of the tree in the same spiraling fashion as it climbs, and only returns to each one the next day after it is made. By then, the sap will have oozed from each cut in the bark and dried, forming a plug of dried sap, known as a gum exudate. This is the primary food source of the treehugger, rather than the fresh liquid itself, and having claimed a tree as its territory and filled it with holes, its day to day life is simply made up of visiting them all, removing this dried plug with the beak, and allowing the tree to ooze its sap and form another one the next day. Occasionally it digs out older holes that have run dry, so as to trigger new sap seepage. The dried gum has benefits over fresh sap: with much of its water evaporated, it is more energy dense, higher in sugar but also - unexpectedly - higher in protein, too. It is a complete diet, one to which the treehugger is strongly specialized, but it is not its entire diet, as it supplements it with flower nectar and small amounts of wood-boring insects.

The treehugger is an outlier among taptrackers in that its larvae are not parasites. Rather, they have adapted to consume the same diet as the adult, though in a modified way. Ancestors of the treehugger deposited eggs into the bodies of beetle grubs found burrowed in trees, but now the female merely lays a single egg in each of many of her sap holes. The larvae hatches inside, and is protected from outside predators as the hole seals up with dried sap, while inside it feeds on the freely-flowing liquid for as long as a year before being large enough to pupate. Chicks form their cocoons several inches below the bark, in a hollow space they carve out with their beak. This species is also unique for having some degree of parental attention; the survival of the juveniles counts on the mother remaining loyal to her single tree, which she defends from all rivals. When it has pupated and is ready to leave the tree, it emits a shrill peeping call that its parent detects. The mother follows the calls to their source and carefully chips away at the bark above them, freeing her young to fly away into the forest, needing nothing further from her. Though some chicks manage to escape on their own without parental assistance, many fail to do so in the event the female does not aid them, as most of the time they pupate too deep inside the tree to gnaw their way out on their own. As long as the parent is there to help the when the time comes, this keeps them safer from predators.

Adult treehuggers are hunted by several predators, but the jumping jaggedjaw is their most feared. It is one of the only ones that will observe their circling manner of ascending a tree, and follow them from the other side so as to remain completely unseen. Using their excellent sense of hearing, they pay attention to where their prey is as it climbs, always staying behind the tree and unnoticed until they swing around at the very last moment to meet their victim just as it is coming toward them. Snatching it in their jaws, once caught it can do little to escape. Sometimes, though, the treehugger can take flight just in time to flash vibrant blood-red feathers under is tail and wings and to emit a harsh screeching call, both intended to startle would-be attackers, biding it just enough time to make its escape.

okay, so basically everything from the hothouse age was just released today. that means we're finally getting some more final stretch stuff soon