The Banded Maw

The ocean age is a time of unparalleled biodiversity in Serina's oceans, but the specific conditions it features favor particular characteristics. A shallow matrix of heavily vegetated water is most amenable to animals under a certain size, especially if they feed on animal food sources. With so much cover, fish and other small prey species can hide from their pursuers, and so all those which hunt them best be small and agile enough to follow them into their hiding places. Conventional filter-feeders fare worst of all in the current habitat, for they have evolved to require immense expanses of open and unobstructed space to gather swarms of tiny, free-swimming prey and other food particles. Suitable habitat for them today is highly limited to what were once the ocean's deepest rifts and valleys, where the sea floor remains too deep and dark for rooted plants to take hold and the surface too turbulent to allow for floating vegetation. Some relatively young groups of large filter-feeding animals manage to survive and even thrive in the new conditions, such as the sea-sweeper which is able to graze, and some baleenbirds, which either feed by sifting the sediment for buried food or can adapt their behavior to hunt larger targets in addition to filter-feeding. Yet the ocean age and all its changes, beneficial for so much life on Serina at this time, has been a nail in the coffin for survivors of many older lineages, some with origins as far back as the late Pangeacene.

The banded maw is an example of an ancient family that has remained almost unchanged for tens of millions of years. A 'primitive' dolfinch only distantly related to daydreamers or porplets, convergent evolution has lent it to resemble in general form the birdwhales of the Cryocene, though its jaws are longer and more angled and as a bumblet it has no eggs to worry over: it merely gives live birth. A beautiful and impressive animal with vibrant black and white patterns, this gentle giant is currently the biggest animal alive on Serina at forty-five feet in length and 30+ tons, but it may not be for very much longer. For it evolved in a world that is rapidly disappearing, a world where the seas were endless and open and plankton swarmed thick. The last 10,000 years has seen a massive fall in its population, and with it its primary predators - the giant burdles such as the tortornca as well as the whaler daydreamers. A highly-specialized planktonivore that relies on ram-feeding to collect huge mouthfuls of food and then sift it back out of its mouth via baleen-like keratin teeth on its lips and tongue, it is unable to feed in any other manner and so can survive only in the remaining stretches of open water far from land. Even here it is faced with hunting pressure, and with food harder to find, the large and protective herds they used to rely on for safety have been forced apart, leaving them - and especially their babies - all the more vulnerable to predation. A social animal by nature but forcibly isolated from company by the current oceanic conditions, the current situation has left the banded maw nervous and high-strung, always looking over its shoulder and wondering if the noise it may have heard is some lurking threat. It has evolved in tandem with the daydreamers, themselves an ancient race, and so has familiarity to their tricks. Already, over hundreds of thousands of years, the banded maw and its related species have learned to keep quiet in the sea to avoid attracting attention. But to truly defend itself from such a smart foe required cooperation with its fellows, and there simply is not enough easily collected food to be found now in the remaining open waters to allow herds to still swim the seas together. All the maw can do now is run, because it has nowhere left to hide.

But hope is not entirely lost for this old lineage. It has smaller relatives that cling on in better numbers, and for the banded maw itself the rarer it becomes the less worth it is for its predators to seek it out. But as it no longer makes loud, carrying calls for fear of alerting its predators, it now struggles to even find a partner to reproduce. It may yet hold on a little longer and better adapt to these dire circumstances... but the Ultimocene and its wildly swinging climactic extremes has proven a difficult ride for most truly massive animals to endure, and the future will be no less unpredictable.