Spinysnout Skwimmer

A swimming skuorc with a sensitive snout, the spinysnout skwimmer loses its land legs and makes its home at sea.

Stable, healthy oceans in the early hothouse lead many semi-aquatic groups to return home, even as productivity remains lower than before the collapse. Skuorcs join burdles and dolfinches in this venture, as the skwimmers evolve - otter-like fish-eaters that closely mirror related but now extinct squotter species of the ocean age. Thin paddle-like tails and webbed feet now propel these streamlined animals through coastal waters as they hunt small marine life. Spinysnout skwimmers are a wide-ranging species that occurs on coastal regions of both Serinarcta and Serinaustra, where it occupies a variety of freshwater, brackish, and marine habitats including rivers up to a hundred miles inland. They are strong swimmers and are able to cross long stretches of open water, especially when dispersing as adolescents, but they hunt in shallow areas where they can dive to the bottom and pursue their prey, being far better adapted to corner it against crevices than to chase it in open water at speed.

Skwimmers still resemble their ancestors, but have lost most of their feathers - useless in warm water and slowing them down - so that their bodies are now covered in smooth skin. Their eyes are large and their eyesight very good, being their primary sense and how they locate food. Yet touch also serves a role, especially in turbulent waters with lower visibility, and a novel structure has begun to evolve along their snouts from the scales that were present there in their ancestors. Thin, bristle-like scales attached to small nerves just under the skin have taken on a role as sensory organs, letting the hunter pick up on movements in water nearby even in dark or murky conditions, and to probe between stones and through vegetation to snag small creatures hiding there.

Skwimmers now hunt almost entirely in water, though they will haul out and rest on offshore rocks and sandbars away from land carnivores, and may gather in small groups here in contrast to more territorial, solitary ancestors. Webbed feet make their movement over land more cumbersome now, and they limit such excursions to only absolutely necessary circumstances such as to flee from aquatic predators or, rarely, to catch some small land animal lingering too close to the shore. Even their small, live young are born in water now, able to swim immediately and take cover in coastal vegetation where predators - including cannibalistic parents - cannot easily chase them. Young travel in groups for safety in numbers, but become less social as they mature so that adults only occasionally swim together. Even so, these animals are no longer aggressive to conspecifics, and occasional communal feeding, in which several indivisuals surround a shoal of fish at once and unintentionally trap them, leaves room open in the future for more cooperative behavior to appear.