Bloat Fall

This guest entry was written and illustrated by Troll Man with some edits by the author.

Approximately one-hundred years have passed since the sea peoples disappeared from Serina. The ice age that has gradually swallowed the world for millions of years is coming to an end. A fire spreading gradually over decades across an entire supercontinent has completely reversed the march of the immense glaciers that have crept within a few hundred kilometres of the equator from both sides. For life on land, this is a miracle, as the quickly warming climate, newly exposed land, and vast quantities of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere will stave back the inevitable freezing of the planet for many millions of years to come. However, in an ironic twist of fate, what has literally renewed life on land has devastated those beneath the waves, as large-scale flooding from glacial meltwaters is drastically changing the circulation of global oceanic currents and greatly raising sea levels on a timescale far too rapid for most oceanic life to adapt to, destroying the fertile seagrass meadows and kelp forests which once spanned thousands of square miles and formed the basis of the most diverse marine ecosystem in the history of Serina.

As sea levels and temperatures rise, the deeper waters will grow too dark to sustain photosynthesis of plant life anchored to the seabed and the changing of sea currents will sweep away the flow of nutrients which life in regions had relied on for so long. Once more the ocean floor will grow barren, gradually covered by mucous fields of decomposing microbes and sessile, filter-feeding organisms like snails, hydras, and bivalves which do not rely directly on sunlight for survival and can tolerate the less than optimal conditions. More dramatically, this will follow with the extinction of all large marine vertebrates, those grazers and filter-feeders which relied on the algae-rich waters for sustenance, and the populations of predators which hunted them. Within a few centuries, the sea mittens, the marine dolfinches, seagoing pretenguins, aquatic molodonts, and oceanic sealumps will disappear as the aquatic food chain completely collapses. Already, populations are rapidly dwindling as sea level rise hundreds of feet and the remaining grazable area shrinks closer and closer to the coasts, but soon this will be depleted, and far more quickly than it can be replaced. This is an inevitability, as megafauna are always those most vulnerable to sudden changes in the ecosystem, and there is no fauna more mega than the gargantuan bloats. 

Two hundred and fifty years have now passed since the end of the Mid-Ultimocene.

Somewhere in the centre of the what was not too long ago the Icebox Seaway, but is now a deep and relatively stagnant stretch of open ocean, lays the skeletal remains of the last of the mighty oceanic titans. In life, it would’ve been over thirty metres long and one-hundred and thirty tonnes. Its skull alone is nearly nine feet long, but no animal is invulnerable to the effects of climate change. It was part of the very last generation of bloats, as necessary feeding grounds dwindled and their numbers shrank from tens of thousands to just a few isolated stragglers in only a few generations. That this individual’s size was nowhere near the maximum may have allowed it to survive longer than most, its growth stunted by continuous malnutrition and hunger. Many of the largest adults were wiped out in the first few years after the shift, as their immense bodies required far too much food, and made them too slow to flee from the hungering hordes of sea shoggoths that now plagued them without protection by their herders. This individual was luckier than others, finished off by starvation rather than being eaten alive by the devouring plagues, and managed to survive much longer than most, but eventually sustaining such an gargantuan body quickly became impossible. In its last few years of life, it likely struggled to stay alive, learning to avoid shoggoths, travelling thousands of miles to find the last bits of greenery, before eventually there was no more. 

With the species’ extinction is the death of the largest animal that has or will ever live on Serina. Already, few animals retain any memory of encountering a living bloat. This animal has already been dead for several years now, as the decomposing of a carcass this massive takes a very long time. Over the years, thousands upon thousands of scavengers gorged themselves on every bit of flesh, gristle, tendon, and viscera. Veritable hordes of sharkbirds, predaceous dolfinches, jetguppies, sea dragons, and other vertebrate predators gorged themselves on the immense corpse during the immediate period after its death, one of the last great feasts for millions of years. Now, only the larger bones of the animal remain, and still bone-eating bivalves boring through with corrosive enzymes, snails capable of consuming and digesting the protein-rich keratin, and scum-eating crabs gleaning the last fetid particulates of this decade-long meal in the sand work to clean these. A thick film of bacteria capable of extracting nutrients from the bones continue to eat away at them, and these themselves are grazed upon by detritivorous crustaceans. Too heavy to be pushed around by the currents, and now too far beneath the surface to be scavenged by bone-eating sea molodonts that never evolved to dive so deep, the skeleton of this bloat lies where it sank, a field of bones well over a hundred feet long, surrounded by much smaller bones of aquatic animals which have begun experiencing mass die-offs in this rapid global warming. A pale, faded outline of putrefying microbes surrounds the bones like the chalk silhouette of a murder victim, signifying where its flesh once was.

Vast fields of dead underwater vegetation have become a feast for decomposing bacteria, creating massive blooms of blue-green algae and toxic red tides that consume vast quantities of oxygen in the water, contributing to global oceanic dead zones that are killing off billions of marine animals. On shorelines across the world, scores of asphyxiated fish, eargills, and other aquatic animals have begun to wash up as vast regions of the seas become toxic, and it will only get worse  - much worse - in coming times. Only hardier, anoxia-tolerant species are capable of surviving these conditions, which consist primarily of bottom-dwelling invertebrates capable of subsisting on detritus. Across the mighty bones of the dead bloat, scavenging crabs and benthic snarks forage around the remnants; although there is not even a scrap of edible flesh or gristle left on the body, they can sustain themselves on the osteophagous organisms able to extract nutrients from the bones. Even many years after this bloat died and its flesh stripped bare, its remains continue to harbour life. So, an ecosystem of sort occurs subsisting on rot and decay forms from those few hardy enough to survive. Eventually, durophagodont bonebreakers - if they survive long enough themselves -  might find the last of the skeleton, hidden in deep and dark waters, and the bloat will have finally and completely ceased to exist. Because of these bone-eating scavengers, there may well be very little evidence that the largest animal to ever live on Serina existed at all. Yet it is possible this last endling's remains, fallen out of reach, will remain forever in the sea, buried by sediment. In the end, it will be no less forgotten.

Not all oceangoing species are suffering during this cataclysmic climate shift. Snarks in particular are surviving readily, as their natural diversity of burrowing and bottom-dwelling species lends itself well to such circumstances. Many fish and eargills, reproducing through planktonic young, are decimated as inedible cyanobacteria crowds the surface waters, releasing toxins into the seas which kill the more sensitive eggs and larvae en masse. And the few survivors are heavily predated by growing numbers of shoggoths, the only major seagoing predator which continues to thrive in the collapse of the ocean food chain due to their amphibious nature and scavenging specialty. Snarks, releasing relatively large, well-developed young live, often investing great care into their broods, could better weather the harsh conditions at all life stages. In some regions, they now make up three-quarters of animal biomass, as their vertebrate competition begins to dwindle. Even on the skeletal remains of this bloat, spikerays, sandgrabbers, streamertails, and other gastropods swarm in abundance. Although many marine carnivores are currently doing well as herbivores experience mass die-offs, providing a glut of bodies to feed on, this is a short-term boom; survival beneath the waves will be harsh for a long time before it gets better again. As the seas recover in the millions of years to come, snarks will find themselves in an ecological vacuum as virtually all large marine animals have become extinct. In this new era, it will no longer be ray-finned fish, nor bird that dominates, but molluscs.