Winners and Losers in the Game of Life

Winners and Losers

It is hard to imagine a creature less like us than the little fork-tailed babbling jay, but though our lives and appearances are very different, there is no reason to suspect that the babbling jay was any less intelligent than we were. In response to harsh and changing environmental conditions, the jay adopted complex social systems, a spoken language, and tool use in order to survive.

Unfortunately, no matter how bright it was, the babbling jay was a species crafted by evolution to survive in a single sort of habitat which was rapidly changing. The life-giving rains became more frequent and the environment formerly occupied by the babbling jay turned from scrubland to rainforest over several thousand years. Though the jay was behaviorally adaptable, it was poorly suited to survive against disease. Evolving in a very dry climate, it had evolved no resistance to bacteria and viral diseases that thrived in damp forests. The climate was changing. The desert it found refuge in was being claimed by grassland and rainforest, and as the climate became increasingly humid, the fork-tailed babbling jay's days were numbered.

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The sapient fork-tailed babbling jay existed as a species for a very short time, just 4,000 years. However, it was virtually identical, except in behavior, to an earlier form of babbling jay which evolved ten thousand years earlier and split into three distinct populations. Their common ancestor was a desert bird, like the modern fork-tailed species, but two of its descendants split off roughly 8,000 years ago, moved northwards, and successfully adapted to wetter environments, giving rise to the black-breasted babbling jay and white-wing babbling jay. The fork-tailed babbling jay never truly left dry climates and adapted particularly and exclusively to the conditions present in the rainshadow desert. Unlike its relatives, this population never radiated further northwards, to gradually adapt to wetter climates. As the climate around it changed, the interior desert receded southwards and rainshadow desert which was once attached to it became an isolated strip of dry climate surrounded by forests. While it began a generalist and remained so behaviorally, it now evolved into a specialist in respect to a weak immune system owing to its relative isolation, which prevented its wider dispersal into other environs. As long as their small patch of habitat remained, the fork-tailed babbling jay's future was secure, but as the supercontinent of Serina continued to break apart and new weather patterns emerged, even the rainshadow desert eventually gave way to forests. Forest were not inherently problematic to the species so far as finding food, but in this case it would not be an inability to adapt behaviorally to change that would catch up to the babbling jay, but the ability to adapt physically in time. The babbling jay simply was not adapted to the different pathogens present in a tropical climate, and was unable to do so in the very brief span that the climate abruptly changed. A new seaway formed to the north, which introduced frequent torrential rains. In a matter of centuries, the entire desert climate shifted drastically, to one wet and humid - and very well-suited to pathogens.

The fork-tailed babbling jay evolved to survive in an almost sterile environment with very few diseases. As the desert was displaced, the fork-tailed babbling jay suffered severe population crashes over several centuries as a result of several overlapping plagues of illness, namely a complex of aggressive pox viruses causing severe respiratory lesions and several strains of an aggressive bacteria which infected the digestive system, both spread by jungle birds. Though their numbers would recover for a while, they would never reach their former level before another wave of illness tore through the species like wildfire. Eventually, the species had too little genetic diversity to reproduce successfully and suffered fertility issues and birth defects, further compounding the problem. Within a very rapid time span, the species' population was left too broken up and the survivors too infertile to continue reproducing successfully, and the sapient babbling jay went extinct. It made no difference in the end how clever they were, when their bodies were simply unable to adapt in time to a rapid change of conditions.

The more primitive population of less behaviorally complex babbling jays that gave rise to the three modern species had a stronger immune systems and were able to adapt to these disease-causing agents, while the more intelligent but highly desert-specialized fork-tailed form subsequently lost much of its immunity due to its isolation. It will never be known whether religion or mythology, as we know it in our own species, would ever have developed, or if there would ever be an advanced society of little jays one day, playing on little handheld computers allowing them to read pages just like this one. What wonderful things - or disastrous ones - would they have done if they had made it? Serina's global biosphere could have been devastated if the babbling jays were like us, or largely unaffected if they weren't. They could have one day colonized space, perhaps even seeding their own Serina-like world in the cosmos. They came closer to it than any other creature on Serina so far, but in the end they simply didn't get that far. In the end, we can only speculate on what could have been.

The more adaptable black-breasted and white-winged babbling jays not only survive to see the end of the Pangeacene, but will have produced descendants spread across the world within another few million years. However, none will ever again be subjected the exact conditions which led one population of their kind briefly to the level of sapience. Neither will their opposite counterparts, the bludgebirds, destined to remain static in their cognitive development for the next five million years, eventually to die out just as quietly as a result of changing climate and competition as well as predation from increasingly specialized pack-hunting predatory wheeljaws that will have become almost cosmopolitan across Serina by the time its super continent finally splits apart.

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The rise and fall of the sapient babbling jay is simultaneously fascinating and tragic, and demonstrates very well the fragility of all life. There are no creatures - no matter how large, abundant, or in this instance clever they may be - that are totally immune to extinction. Nature plays no favorites, and in this instance, the babbling jay's evolutionary bet didn't pay off. The conditions that led to their high intelligence also led to their being especially sensitive to disease agents common to different climates, and in the end, they lost the game of life. Just decades after the last fork-tailed babbling jay passes away, virtually any trace of their existence has vanished. All that remains are a few flint knives that can occasionally be found in the leaf litter of the forest, and a few faded, carved patterns in the trunks of a few old, dead trees. Within a few centuries, even these last relics are mostly unrecognizable, the last of their stone tools hidden under new layers of rich forest soil that have come to cover what was once the dry scrub, the trees themselves having fallen and broken down into it.

In the span of evolutionary time upon which life operates, their existence at all was forged and finished in the blink of an eye, while life for the more fortunate goes on as we come to the end of the Pangeacene.