EVOLUTION ATTEMPTS: Hives out of water- 2+1=3, Hive tracking- 5+1=6, Better climbing- 2, Hive senses of us- 5, Parasitise trees- 4
Forest slicers are the newest species of slicer. They have a keener sense of hearing and smell, to find their hives below the dense canopy. A few other adaptations include shorter, more rounded wings, for dodging through branches.
Hives can now detect our sonar, and can listen to pheremones as well. When this happens, runway guidelings (guidelings with large and excessively bright lower tentacles) help us find our way home by providing both a visual, audio and smell-related message. This helps us use valuable time that would have otherwise been wasted on finding the hive. As a side note, the hive itself can now pierce the roots of the trees (or the corpse of some creature that's been killed) and use digestive acids to devour it.
The forest is only becoming denser, both with the sky version and the ground version. The tough wood means that the frongi that digest stuff like that are unable to digest it, resulting in massive, slowly-rotting piles of dead trees.
GENERATION 21:
Forest slicer
A mottled purple-and-green bird-like animal that hunts above the swampforest. They use their fanged tentacles to attack and kill their prey. They mostly fly. They grow up to 40 centimetres long, and their offspring are called tentaclets. They use two claws on their back to snatch prey from the ground or air.
SENSES: It has a sense of touch that lets it figure out if it's touching food, and an extremely good sense of smell/taste. Symbiotic guidelings help it find live prey. A keen electrical sense lets it find creatures that are close to it, and it can feel vibrations from moving creatures. Its hearing is superb, and it can echolocate.
REPRODUCTION: It 'kisses' a mate it approves of, passing male cells to it, and growths grow inside of the womb. Tentaclets follow their mother until they can be dropped off at their hive. They eat mucus that the hive creates and, when they are large enough, find a suitable guideling to make a nest with.
MOVEMENT: They fly by using their large pectoral fins as wings and their thorachic fins as engines. They have two legs on their underside.
EATING: It impales small animals and digests them by drawing them into the guts. They are able to prey on fast swimmers, and they use venom. Most of their food is from grazing worms and the dense vegetation. Other prey include land-dwelling spearfaced worms (slitherers) and other flappers. We can use a precise jet of neurotoxin, laced with silica shards (to pierce the skin), to kill prey.
PREDATION: We are mostly unpredated.
COMPETITION: Larger aerial predators sometimes compete with us, but we're generally fine.
ENVIRONMENT: A massive swampy forest, with torrential downpour and balloons filling the sky.
HOME TERRITORY: Swamp forest
NEARBY ENVIRONMENTS: Montane forest, saltwater swamp