The Floating Bloat

The lines between natural and artificial selection have blurred in the environment of the late ocean age, as intelligent creatures oversee the ecosystem through millions of years and guide the adaptation of its life forms. Greenskeepers’ cultivated underwater meadows are more productive than if the plants grew entirely untended, and likewise the carnivorous sophonts have encouraged changes to some of the native animal life. As the apex predators of this environment for the last five million years, these species have influenced the evolution of most their prey through both direct and indirect processes in some way or another. The largest marine animals have been left without any wild predators since the extermination of the large burdles, and the dominant presence of daydreamers and gravediggers on the sea has prevented the evolution of any new ones. The largest sea herbivores now tend to be exceptionally tame as a result, since their survival is ensured even if some are hunted and killed by their overseers. Smaller prey which are still threatened by many other types of lower-level predators like sharkbirds and the smaller dolfinches, in contrast, usually remain as wild as ever. As long as other natural dangers continue to exist in their lives, such animals have seen very little if any change resulting from the daydreamer or gravedigger’s presence, even if they are also hunted by them

One of the most extreme examples of a large species whose evolutionary progress has been shaped by the daydreamer and gravedigger’s predation and a lack of any other enemies is the floating bloat. A descendant of the sea-sweepers, herbivorous dolfinches closely related to porplets though larger, it is an herbivore which feeds on the extremely abundant aquatic vegetation in the shallow water now found over all of the sea. From an ancestor roughly thirty-five feet long, intentional culling of the smaller individuals in the population over time encouraged increasingly big specimens to have the most reproductive success, and so resulted in the increase in size of the entire population over the generations. In this way it was selectively bred for greater size, and for good reason; its body was an incredible reservoir of usable resources. It was meaty enough to feed a family of daydreamers and many more gravediggers for a while and its bones were large and sturdy, usable to construct oars and boat frames in a time where wood became extremely rare. Having domesticated the nop previously, the earlier daydreamers already had an innate understanding of selective breeding, and the foresight to allow the biggest sea-sweepers to go unharmed so as to perpetuate their genes. Artificial selection in humans’ domesticated animals can produce results rapidly, sometimes within a single human lifetime. But nothing humans have ever accomplished through artificial selection comes anywhere close to the timespan the people of the ocean age have lived through. With millions of years to work with instead of thousands, and a slower process overall that didn’t require significant inbreeding or forcing size increases before the animal’s body structure adapted to accommodate them, the floating bloat has been guided not only a few times larger than its ancestor, but to a staggering 140 feet in length and a weight of just over 210 tons. It is now the largest animal which is ever known to have lived, exceeding the weight of the largest blue whales ever documented and as much as forty feet longer as a result of its highly elongated body shape. Its shape is vital for its survival, as it is at the maximum size attainable for any animal and produces a lot of excess heat purely through maintaining its metabolism. Its long neck and narrow body provides the surface area it needs to cool off, even in an ice age world. Its size has been made possible only through the specific conditions of such a shallow and well-circulated ocean that allows for the vast quantities of plants needed to sustain it. Whereas the largest whales on Earth and the biggest prior Serinan birds were all filter-feeders, the floating bloat is a grazing herbivore and so is most ecologically akin to an aquatic sauropod dinosaur, rather than a whale.

The floating bloat is a semi-domesticated species in so far as its evolution has been shaped by sophonts' oversight, but it is free-living, managed as wildlife, and its breeding is not controlled except that certain sizes of individual are chosen to hunt at the expense of others. Indeed over its evolutionary history, selective pressures favoring larger or smaller individuals have fluctuated. When the species became too numerous and overgrazed, larger specimens were culled. When they became rarer, smaller ones were removed, and so the average size of the population has skewed larger or smaller by as much as 30% over increments averaging 10,000 years for more than a million years. In very recent times the species is very abundant, and so selective pressure has recently switched to remove the absolutely largest animals again. The bloat is now so large and fat that it is too buoyant to fully submerge itself but it doesn’t need to - with occasional pulses of its undersized flippers, it merely floats slowly along like a boat with only its elongated neck dipping below the sea to crop sea grasses and kelp-like macroalgae, thousands of pounds of it per day. Colored with varying spot patterns - but always light-colored because darker skin upon such a massive animal would absorb a deadly amount of heat from the sun - they are easy to locate as they bob along the surface like small living islands, and are frequently used as resting sites by other animals. They are less intelligent than their ancestors because they no longer need to escape many predators and their food is always around them, but unlike the now-extinct nop which the floating bloat has functionally replaced, they remain able to fend for themselves. Their primary defense against predation on their more vulnerable calves is to travel in herds, but if not kept moving these groups groups can strip the seabed bare in hours, and so daydreamers often still have to push them along before they overgraze entire meadows. A bite or two to the flanks is enough to send even a giant on its way.

Floating bloats are a major source of resources to the modern cultures of the sea which rely on their bones, skin, and oil extensively, the former being primary components of their tools and structures and the latter their main source of fuel for the fire needed to dry sea grasses into textile fibers and to cook certain foods to render them more edible. Subduing a floating bloat is not excessively difficult, for despite their size they are extremely docile, though it requires a number of people’s cooperation and tool use, as the Novan daydreamer lacks the massive cutting teeth and huge jaws of some of its ancestral populations to kill such huge prey unaided. The quantity of meat produced is sufficient to feed an entire mixed-species community for a week or more before it spoils beyond their means to consume it, at which time any scraps are finished off by scavengers. Adult bloats, while so useful for the other resources they provide, are so large that it is actually quite difficult to eat all of them. If too much is wasted it can encourage overabundance of mesopredators and scavengers such as sea shoggoths, to the point that when they are especially numerous as they currently are, their numbers must also be controlled with regular culls of young individuals well before they mature. While this is sometimes seen as a waste of the bones and oil, it is a much more manageable carcass to distribute without waste.