The Seastriker and the Porplet

The Ultimocene is a very long, diverse period in Serina’s history now defined by many things, yet rising intelligence among many animal lineages is one of the major recurring themes. And now an entire group of animals living in Serina's seas have all reached a very advanced level of cognitive ability. The complicated aspect of it all is that they include both hunters and hunted.

Descended from burrowing bumblets that took the water during the early Pangeacene, dolfinches are well-established clade of marine animals that have been shaped well for life at sea, with four strong flipper and sleek, hydrodynamic forms. For most of their existence they have been quick and nimble piscivores, feeding on small fishes with long toothed beaks and in turn preyed upon by large predators. But the dolfinches are now diversifying. All highly social and very clever, they work together to survive.

Two new clades are now becoming clearly defined, descended from the long-beaked fish-eaters. A plump, short-billed form which is increasingly herbivorous and lives in large herds that swim leisurely over the underwater meadows like cattle… and large, robust, pack-hunting predators with serrated jaws built to kill them. Descended from a common ancestor from which both inherit their intelligent and social natures, they have found themselves in a race of life and death as they go down increasingly disparate and opposing evolutionary paths.

Porplets are one genus of the herbivores, and now among the most common dolfinches. Growing to about seven feet, they gather in shoals numbering in the hundreds of thousands across shallow coastal waters, where they feed on sea bamboo. Such herbivores as these are the first bumblets to return to a diet of vegetation in almost 200 million years, since their ancient ancestors, the plant-eating vivas, first began moving underground and feeding on insects. Ancient vivas were notable for evolving a complex, novel chewing arrangement by grinding a barbed tongue against the keratin spines of their upper beaks. This structure was never fully lost even in the long timespan since, and bumblets still do not chew with their jaws but rather shred flesh in their mouths with their coarse tongues against a plate in the top of the jaw before swallowing. Porplets return to their primordial roots when they re-adapt these structures to chew plants once again. Their tongues become broad, armored with sharp cutting spines on their sides, and rasp against the roof of the mouth against another similar structure to pulverize vegetation, improving the speed and efficiency of their digestion.

The porplets are, as expected at this point, highly intelligent animals that rely deeply upon social bonds for survival. They are, indeed, near-sophonts, among the smartest of any animals to have lived since the babbling jays, and are thus extremely emotionally-developed, with lifelong bonds with others and incredible memories. Their primary protection comes from their numbers, but these gatherings are so much more than random assemblages of strangers. Porplets live in a tiered social system, the smallest subset being that of matrilineal families; grandmothers, daughters, all of their mates and all of their young. Males disperse at maturity, preventing inbreeding, while females never leave their mothers. Over generations such groups become so large that they gradually break apart into smaller units in order to forage throughout the day, but relatives remember one another and remain in contact late in the day when they all are at rest so that each herd, no matter how large, is composed of families and individuals that are related always stay closer together than those which are not. Cousins might not travel in the immediate matrilinear family group, but will not stray too far in the hard, and will keep in touch with their more distant relatives throughout life, feeding together throughout the day, never knowing shortage of food and so also having abundant time for play. Individual porplets are thus required to memorize potentially hundreds of relatives in their communities, as well as their specific relationship to each of them, and have evolved especially massive portions of their brains dedicated to memory to do so. But this peaceful, social life, every day a family reunion, hides a dark side to porplet society.

Porplets are defenseless if by chance they lose their groups, and so they stick together tight like sardines at all times and above all else. They are shy and timid animals; they rarely defend one another from attack and instinctively cluster together if threatened, effectively relying on the predator picking off someone else. If one is caught, they will grieve later but do not look back upon it in the moment. Social instincts are stronger than protective ones, and mothers will even ignore the cries of their young as long as the rest of the group is making its escape. They have evolved a rapid reproductive potential to counteract losses, and it has simply proven more successful to let a certain percentage of the young, sick and old to be picked off than to risk the life of healthy, reproductive adults defending them. Effectively, porplet social groups always operate on the principle that a certain percentage of young will be lost. It can be a hard dose of reality for their young, which must learn from a very young age to always stick close to their mothers, an education exemplified by examples made of other young that didn’t do so, or maybe just couldn’t keep up, and were left behind and torn apart by the wolves. Maybe their mothers’ next young would be stronger.

~~~

The wolves of the porplet’s world are called seastrikers, and they too are extremely intelligent, social dolfinches that live in matrilineal groups, though theirs are by necessity smaller. They are cooperative hunters found across the entire ocean, with varied diets, some favoring one type of prey and others another. Their jaws are robust and adapted to rip and tear apart large prey - and a common favorite entree is porplet, and the seastriker is excellent at using their herding instincts to exploit them. Even sticking close to mom no longer guarantees safety.

Operating like sheepdogs, the hunters approach from behind and panic the herd into a tight ball, then dive through, splitting it up into smaller and more manageable clusters which grow increasingly frantic as the rest of the herd escapes. When a small enough group is cut off, they are kept at bay by the group as the strikers circle them and look for the weakest links. The seastrikers at this point could easily subdue and kill every individual in the group, young and adult, and most other predators would. These, however, have learned the value of foresight. They systematically go through, pull out the mothers, but don’t harm them. Instead they take the calves, rending and eating them in front of the parents helpless to do anything but watch. The sea strikers share the calves with each other and their own young, passing the calves around like slices of cake at a birthday party as they squeal and squirm. The young seastrikers just play with them, practicing future hunting skills until they eventually remember they’re supposed to eat them. After the young are all taken and the water’s stained red, they let the adults go. They will breed again, allowing another harvest in the future.

Seastrikers are not less intelligent than porplets. Both species are approaching the threshold of sapience, and both are self-aware to a degree, capable of communication with language similarly complex to dolphins.The porplet only eats plants, so their life is simple. The seastriker, however, must contend with the hard life of a predator, cutting his teeth on other’s blood just to eat a single meal. He has a strong impetus to learn any trick to make his days simpler, and now he has effectively learned, through trial and through error, the first principles of domestication. And he has begun practicing them on a relative who just happens to be stuck lower down the food chain.

But that chain quickly becomes an ethically uncomfortable system when everyone involved is well on the way toward crossing that hard to define line between people and animal. Helpless and demure, the porplets now seem destined to become little more than sheep for the seastriker’s table... and there may be nothing they can do.

And as dark as their dynamic seems set to become, it is only the first of several similar scenarios which will occur as life upon Serina becomes ever more increasingly smart... both low down, and high up the food chain.