EVOLUTION ATTEMPTS: Senses- 4
(the dice gods are still a bit reluctant, but you got something)
After many generations of being totally blind, the ghoulish swimemone... is still blind. However, it now has an almost-supernatural ability to find prey within a metre or so of its tentacles (from the electric sense), and its keen sense of smell and its symbiots let it get that close. It can send out bursts of electricity, not enough to be useful on its own, but it can recall its guidelets or send signals to others of its kind. This has made it vastly more effective than any other large swimemone.
The hive nestblob has also evolved. It uses a hive system, with one large sessile nest/mother and many guidelets.
The biggest threat to the swimemone's reign, though, is a massive one-and-a-half metre long predator that has appeared. Known as the giant jawshell, it bobs along with its rock-hard shell and spears nearby animals to consume them. It appears to be mostly immune to our toxins. Its scent and electrotouch are disturbing the swimemone and disrupting their hunts, or attacking and eating the nestblobs.
GENERATION 6:
Ghoulish swimemone
A dark-grey-and-white tentacled fish-like animal that swims over the surface of the reef, hunting for food. They swim with their finned foot, and use their fanged tentacles to attack and kill their prey. They grow up to 50 centimetres long, and their offspring are called tentaclets.
SENSES: It has a sense of touch that lets it figure out if it's touching food, and a fair sense of smell/taste. Symbiotic guidelets help it find live prey. An electrical sense lets it find creatures that are close to it.
REPRODUCTION: It lets out male cells when they form swarms, and growths grow on the area of the body derived from the bases of the tentacles. Younger animals are mostly male, and older animals are female, due to the pressures of swimming while pregnant. Tentaclets follow their mother until they can be dropped off at a hive nestblob. They eat mucus that the nestblob creates (although the nestblob sometimes takes either type of larva to supplement its diet) and, when they are large enough, swim with a suitable guidelet to form a territory. Pheremones cause the guidelet to develop into a hive.
MOVEMENT: They move by rippling their foot, swimming like a fish. Sacs of carbon dioxide keep them buoyant. They also have simple jets on their side-gills.
EATING: It impales nearby blobs and digests them by drawing them into the tentacles. After many generations, they are finally able to reliably prey on fast swimmers, and their poison has changed to a venom. They still have the rather inefficient absorbing-via-tentacle feeding method.
PREDATION: Jawshells are the only hunter of adult swimemones. Some species of jawworm are able to feed on the tentaclets. Most smaller creatures are on the menu.
COMPETITION: Swimemones are hunters of large animals, and so stay out of the niche of the jawworm. They have little competition for their niche, other than the jawshell.
ENVIRONMENT: A shallow sub-tropical sea. Layers upon layers of various types of blobs have built massive networks of reefs. Tentablobs grow above the rest, filtering food from the open water, while crawlers of various species create ditches and clear space. Aciblobs fill the majority of space for animal life, burrowing and swimming and crawling on the seafloor. Flapworms have migrated from the open ocean, and are efficient filter-feeders and danger-avoiders. Jawworms have also arrived recently, and hunt free-swimming animals. Hive nestblobs are armoured animals two metres or so wide, and form the base of the territory of swimemones.
Author
Topic: Competition- An evolutionary suggestion game (Read 107676 times)