The Platyporp

A little dolfinch in the soglands is doing something remarkable in the early hothouse age. The platyporp is finding its land legs again.

The smallest living dolfinch and the littlest one ever to live is the platyporp, which is also the most terrestrial. This diminutive little creature, evolved from the hardy surf scooter, weighs only four pounds - the size of a kitten, and is found in the inland wetlands of Serinarcta where some of its ancestors swam 5 million years ago to flee the dying ocean ecosystem as the single surviving dolfinch species at the end of the ice age. Platyporps are now more omnivorous, with flattened duck-like snouts useful to plow floating water plants from the surfaces of ponds and to dig through muddy sediment to find tubers and invertebrates. They are quick swimmers, but much less streamlined than their oceanic ancestors, with longer and more flexible necks and knees that have become free of the body cavity, allowing them to truly walk on land, albeit awkwardly.

The platyporp is now exclusively restricted to freshwater environments and strongly prefers muddy substrates, though it can sometimes be found foraging in clearer rocky streams. To breed, however, it needs calm, still waters in which its nests will not be damaged. Platyporps still raise their young above water, for their tiny size means newborn chicks are highly susceptible to predation from wading birds and fish. To protect its young, born in unusually large litters of up to six, males and females both work to build a floating nest or rotting vegetation upon the waters' surface, usually entangled with emergent vegetation for stability, on which the mother keeps her young for as long as two weeks before they are strong enough and big enough to start swimming and keeping up with her in the water. Because the chicks do not have to swim early, they have lost the ability to do so and are highly defenseless at birth. Yet this also allows them to be born sooner, and to grow more rapidly by directly feeding themselves earlier instead of absorbing nutrients from the mother's body in utero, and so growth after birth is very rapid. With the mother sitting with her chicks upon the nest to protect them and the father bringing abundant mouthfuls of insect prey and small fishes to feed them, by the time they start to swim they will have grown from about 2 ounces to 10 ounces in weight, and by then are far less vulnerable to predators. They stay with the adults for just three months, but are nearly full-sized by that time, at which point the parents abandon them and begin another nest. Though in polar regions with dark winters they may only nest twice a year, in the summer, in coastal areas where daylight remains all year they may have four litters annually. Their lifespans are however truncated by this fast growth and frequent reproduction, and adults only live four to five years.

Dolfinches are now relics of a time gone by, and they will no longer dominate the oceans completely as they once did. Yet despite all that has occurred time and again to change the seas since their lineage first arose in the early Pangeacene, in the form of increasingly derived species the clade continues to persist against all odds.