Back to the Kyrans in the End of Days

Back to the Kyrans

Since we last checked in upon them twenty-five million years ago, the Kyran Islands have undergone dramatic change - most dramatically, they are no longer islands, having become a land bridge between the now interconnected eastern and western hemispheres. They have subsequently become not simply invaded but literally the bridge across which invasive species from both directions have been steadily spilling over for the last five million years. The result has been catastrophic to the islands' endemic flora and fauna, the great majority of which has proven poorly competitive in the face of more vigorous mainland counterparts.

On top of this, the Kyrans' equatorial location is now leaving them among the most harshly affected regions on Serina by climate change, as what remains of the formerly forested islands now experience increasingly intense heat, prolonged drought and subsequent desertification. Among the hardest hit groups are the browsers, as forests shrink back rapidly at a rate of several tens of miles per year, until they occur only along the very edges of the sea where storms and ocean fog support some patchy stunted trees. Additionally, the "naive" trees of the Kyrans evolved without any ant symbiosis, meaning that they carry no defenses against ant trees like those on the mainland had developed, either in the form of their own protective colonies or sticky resinous sap that serves to gunk up the insects' mouthparts. Leafcutter ants decimate the sparse remnants of the Kyran endemic forest, with the increasingly few places suited for tree growth at all being colonized by invasive myrmecophytes and largely insect-immune gluetrap trees. The result, unfortunately, is the extinction of the browsing elefinches.

Grazers would initially be suspected to survive the drying conditions better as savannahs came to dominate the region, but as their endemic native grasses are quickly displaced by toxic assassin grasses which leave the naive grazers with a potentially fatal instance of high blood sugar if eaten in too great a quantity, they too begin to die out, starting with the young, which are more rapidly intoxicated and require less of the grasses' poison to experience illness. Having had no time to adjust to the grass's defenses as the birds from mainland ecosystems did, the Kyran's endemic grazers too will vanish with their former food plants by the end of the Thermocene - a splendid example in evolutionary design, but one unfortunately not suited to such significant change.

The Kyran's endemic predators will follow their prey to extinction, for though they will feed successfully on new colonist species such as vivas and tribbets for a while, their young will be too vulnerable to other predators in the end and their populations will die out, unable to reproduce after the last adult individuals age out.

Even the Kyrans' smaller inhabitants, the soft-bill birds - the snuffles and their kin - suffer now as they lose their cover with the loss of the forests and their main food supply of worms and invertebrates dwindles as the ground becomes parched and dry. Smaller species still hold on in grassland burrows, but they now face an even greater threat: new predators. Formerly, the snuffles were safe from predation in their burrows, their only predators being large skulking birds. Once the islands collided with Wahlteria, a new group quickly moved in to take advantage - a group of large, advanced tribbets. Capable of following prey down their burrows or if that failed digging them out with their claws, these mammal-like predators filled a niche totally absent on the Kyrans before, meaning that the snuffles have no natural defense against them. The tribbets which have moved into and through the Kyrans are a new breed; to be referred to from here on as tribbetheres, they are agile, cat-like hunters with upright gaits, warm-blooded metabolism, and a fuzzy hair-like pelage derived from individual highly elongated scales. Their skin is watertight, their need for water is low, their large gill plate-derived ears serve well to radiate excess heat, and they give birth to live offspring, not to eggs which are vulnerable to desiccation or predatory assault, meaning they thrive in these new harshly competitive and hot and dry conditions. Some of the first animals to colonize a newly peninsular Kyran Islands, several members of this new tribbet group exploded in size here as a result of a lack of competition. Some species now grow up to thirty pounds - a thirty-fold increase from their rat-sized ancestors - and can thus now subdue quite large prey animals, including adult snuffles, which they easily dig out of their burrows or ambush in the night when both species are out hunting. Smaller forms can simply slide down their burrows and kill them as well as destroy their nests from within. Having reached far larger sizes than they ever were able to on the mainland where they evolved, they were now substantial competitors and predators in their own right by the time the large flightless mainland birds reached the Kyrans and were able to compete right alongside them, not being restricted to the undergrowth any longer. In addition to devastating the various defenseless ground birds evolved on the islands, these new and larger tribbetheres which evolved in the Kyrans have now begun moving back east as well as into the west, taking new niches that before were not feasible for their ancestors forced to remain small by large predatory birds.

above: a desert tribbethere catches a snuffle.

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For the humble tribbet, things are starting to look up. For the native life of the Kyrans, though, as for many charismatic megafaunal animals across Serina, the future is largely bleak. Of all their beautifully bizarre diversity, in the end only two species will make it through to the end of the Thermocene. They are each very different creatures with histories separated by countless generations, yet they will both follow a similar path to survive what will be, for most of the rest of life on Serina, the end of days.