Age of Snarks

In a thawed world, life gets a second chance. Strange creatures inherit this new world in Serina's final age - among them the snarks. Sidelined for millions of years, this group reaches its greatest diversity in the hothouse era.

Dawn, somewhere along the northern coast of Serinaustra. An atrocious brute is drawn from the inland swampland by a tantalizing aroma from the coast. In this new, warmer age, these avian predators are doing exceptionally well, with little competition for their role as the continent’s apex predators. Huge burdles like these hunt the nigh endless herds of land sealumps and large seraphs that roam the vast, unbroken marshland and newly reappearing forests, but occasionally they are drawn to the shorelines by gifts from the sea, and today’s wafting scent could prove to be a particularly fortuitous find, merely by the strength in which it permeated his nostrils. For nearly two hours, he’s walked towards the end of the continent, drawn by an invisible trail stretched for miles.

The brute finally reaches over the crest of the hill that separates vegetation from shoreline, and catches first sight of his prize. Its splotched, ragged hide is unmistakable against the sand, but the smell alone has already attracted dozens of ring-necked sea ravens, picking away at its flesh. The body is huge, easily over three-thousand pounds; in life, its huge fins would have stretched over five metres across. It’s neither bird, nor fish, but in fact a colossal marine gastropod: a snark. More specifically, a huge filter-feeding shimmershiner. Shimmershiners were one of the very few larger marine animals to survive the end of the ice age and in the time since, with little remaining competition, have become extremely successful, growing enormously in size. Out there in the ocean depths, there are individuals more than twice this size. For the first time in hundreds of millions of years, a snail is again the largest animal on the planet.

By the burdle’s great luck, no other large predators have yet appeared on the carcass; it beached only last night during a violent sea storm. However, it understands this will not be true for very long, and wastes little time descending upon the snark’s body. A fearsome display of snapping jaws and growls sends the sea ravens hurtling back into the air as he barrels across the dune. Although there is more meat here than him and a hundred sea ravens could possibly eat at once, it’s a manner of principle; it won’t be long until he has to defend this carcass against more formidable scavengers and he has to eat all he can before competition arrives and spoils his meal. Much smaller sandlubbers, also drawn by the wafting scent, also begin to gather to rasp the flesh with eversible mandibles, beneath the attention of the burdle. These too are a variety of snark, which have also grown larger and diversified greatly in the past five million years, but are only distantly related to the oceanic shimmershiners.

The gathering scavengers have little interest in where the boon of flesh arrives from, what processes created it, or the knowledge that beneath the waves, in the vast expanse of deep blue, strange life is evolving in the vast sunlit waters, like nothing that was ever lived upon Serina before.

Midday, somewhere within the Equinoctial Ocean. In the millions of years since the end of the ice age, life beneath the waves has rebounded. Once more, vast shimmering shoals glitter in the endless blue, shifting the waters for planktonic life. However, these are not fish, nor even eargills, but great schools of pelagic snarks. Snarks were among the greatest oceanic survivors, surviving in reasonable number and diversity at a time when nearly all other macroscopic aquatic life in the seas was decimated. Among the most numerous of the many snarks which radiated in the emptied seas were these, the escardines, evolved from a species of streamertail snark, which have begun to dominate the ocean waters during the Late Ultimocene.

Their bodies became compact, heads pointy and streamlined, fins thinning, and their long, multi-lobed tails turning into a stiffened tail fin, propelling them through the water just like a fish (although with up-and-down movement rather than side-to-side). A life constantly spent on the move, as one uniform mass, they have lost the sexual dimorphism and vibrant patterning that once distinguished them, as survival became dependant upon cohesion, blending into one another to make picking out an individual more difficult. This strategy has lent them great success as their numbers exploded; shoals such as these can number many millions strong and stretch for kilometres. They spend their entire lives constantly on the move, not even stopping to breed, travelling thousands of kilometres over their lives feeding on the periodic plankton blooms near the surface; some species like these crowd near the continents where productivity is higher, while others species make voyages across the barren Unbroken Ocean for survival. For many hundreds of millennia, they had few competitors or significant predators to keep their numbers down, but now, enemies have appeared that specialize to hunt them; one of their own relatives.

They trail silently from beneath, virtually invisible against the blue abyss, their skin responding to the light reflecting off the waves to almost perfectly imitate the moving shadows. They fan out around the shoal completely unnoticed until their success is all but assured. In an instant, they appear simultaneously from nothingness, suddenly undulating in dazzling stripes. The hunters strike in unison, taking turns snapping up stragglers at the edge of the shoal, their disorienting bands causing disorder and panic among the smaller gastropods, causing their uniformity to break as they scatter and dart about. The predators crowd them along the continental shelf, giving them little room to maneuver, and each manage to snap up dozens of swimmers in long, snaggletoothed mandibles.

These evolved from another variety of marine snark, the eel-like sandgrabbers. Like the escardines, they were modified by countless centuries of natural selection from benthic organisms into fast-swimming, pelagic denizens. But these are an entirely different breed from the escardines, with torpedo-like bodies, two pairs of thick, triangular fins, and most importantly, a primitive form of endothermy, the ability to warm their blood by muscular energy, allowing them to maintain higher levels of activity for longer periods while hunting. These are the calacarna, now the undisputed apex predators of the seas. Packs of these ten-foot long carnivores roam the seas virtually unchallenged, keeping in contact with one another using a sophisticated visual language, with complex organelles in their skin allowing rapid changes in patterns and colours, allowing them to signal one another in mere milliseconds. Intellectually, they are unrivalled by any other invertebrate group.

In this early period of the hothouse age, life is good for them, as the shoals of escardines are virtually limitless, the warm global climate allows them to range across the planet, and there are few competitors to their reign. Tracking down and picking off the vast shoals periodically, they do hardly any damage to the numbers of their prey no matter how they eat. However, life will continue to evolve and life beneath the waves will begin to change, as animals from the continents begin to trickle down beyond the shores and their prey develop defenses against them. Already, some packs of calacarna have started hunting the huge shimmershiners that were previously free of predators. The days of tranquil waters are long gone as the different varieties of snark turn upon one another. In this new age, food chains begin to form which will drive the evolution of strange new life for millions of years to come.

Autumn, somewhere along the Northern Soglands. Although the weather hardly variates throughout the entirety of the year, the day length changes dramatically between seasons at the higher latitudes. The dwindling sunlight signals the breeding cycle of an aquatic colossus. Pushing its way through the clogged underwater murk with its wide, bony head, this bottom-dwelling beast dwarfs nearly everything else in these waters. It is a huge snark, a giant freshwater spikeray; this mature female is over six feet wide and two-hundred pounds heavy. The species are well-adapted for life in these murky waters, with sensitive antennae and pores along its face to detect faint scents and minute disturbances in the water column. Pivotable, stalked eyes are carefully attuned to the shadows of moving prey, usually comprised of freshwater crustaceans and other bottom-dwelling animals.

Rather than actively swimming, the spikerays push themselves along the riverbed by a pair of muscular back fins. They have the ability to take in oxygen from the air to survive low-oxygenated waters, or occasionally to haul themselves out onto land in search of neighbouring bodies of water. As the night length grows, the spikerays are compelled to migrate to larger ponds and lakes to mate, temporarily abandoning a sedentary life to congregate in numbers that may be hundreds or even thousands strong.

Even before arriving at the traditional breeding grounds, a small caravan of males eagerly follows behind the female in hopes of being the first to mate with her. The males are less than half the size of the females, and flush patterns over their skin to try and attract her attention. As is common amongst spikerays, males possess venomous stingers to defend themselves, but females grow large enough as adults to not require them, growing too large for most fishing predators to tackle. When the night falls upon the soglands, the females will be descended upon by huge numbers of eager males; females are able to take in the sperm of multiple males at once, and usually give birth to litters with different fathers.

At the same time, the mating season begins for another, much smaller type of snark. They are present on the backs of several of the males already, being carried towards the mass spawning. This is a parasitic snark species, feeding on their larger, distantly related cousins like huge leeches. Although far less evident than the larger snark species, the parasitic forms are actually among the most diverse of the group, having evolved multiple times. These are aquatic ectoparasites, with hook-like teeth and a proboscis-like radula to periodically drain blood fluids through the skin. Their skin changes colour to match that of their hosts and sucker-like pads keep them securely anchored against the current. Usually, the only time they detach is to breed, and the annual mass mating event of the spikerays is a perfect opportunity to do so, as the smaller parasites are inevitably congregated together as well.

In freshwater ecosystems, fish, such as the mollyminnows, are still by far the most evidently numerous aquatic fauna, as insular underwater ecosystems such as rivers and ponds were far more sheltered from the dramatic climactic upheavals at the end of the Mid Ultimocene. With fish remaining in relative numbers, snarks only thrive here in more specialized niches, such as the parasitic species and flattened spikerays, unlike their more evident dominance in the sea beyond. Nonetheless, these unique forms have a bright future ahead of them in this warm and wet climate, as do many snarks in many ecosystems across this newly flourishing Serina.