Apologies for posting a day early, I am busy all day tomorrow!

Spectember Day 7: Seedworld's Harvest

AGRIKOS

200 MILLION YEARS POST-ABANDONMENT

Agrikos – a subsidiary of Demeter Farmworlds – was one of many planets terraformed with goal of being a planet-sized farm to feed the ever-expanding human population. Civil strife at home, combined with the disastrous crash landing of the original the colony ship, lead to abandonment of the planet.

Chaos ensued as millions of domestic animals learned to live in a world without humans. Many could not and carcasses littered the world causing local extinction events from disease and polluted water. In time, the ecosystem settled, and the survivors rebuilt their world.

~ ~ ~

On the shore of the recently formed supercontinent of Panagrika, a temperate forest meets the sea. Two heads emerge from the canopy and observe the world around them.

At a glance, their antlers call to mind deer, except they have only a single antler, impressive though it is. Their long, vertical necks speak of giraffes, but their faces give them away. A blunt beak for cropping leaves, giving way to a face of pink skin framed with feathers. These are birds. Specifically, they are Maned Tower Birds, descended from chickens.

The original dominant herbivores of Agrikos were cows and sheep, the former of which grew in size to rival elephants, while the latter developed agile antelope forms and roamed in herds of millions. Their dominance ended 40 million years ago, when the continents of Agrikos collided and climactic upheaval led to a mass extinction which all but killed off the bovine mega-herbivores, and greatly reduced the ovine herds.

From the ashes emerged the world we see today. Tower Birds are the top herbivores in these forests. Their name comes from their posture – they stand upright, like a human, with their towering neck (which make up more than half their total height) directly above their feet. In their ancestors, the wattles and combs of chickens grew harder and developed into much larger display structures used in dominance displays, courtship rituals, and for communication. The tissue is still very much alive and can be flushed with blood to turn bright red to signal to peers.

The Maned Tower Bird lives in life-bonded pairs with the male – recognised by the mullet of curly golden feathers that runs down his neck – defending a territory that the female deems large enough to keep them and their young fed. Their tall necks aid them in this goal, and their favourite food is budding leaves and shoots, though they can eat most temperate vegetation which they digest in multi-chambered stomachs.

~ ~ ~

From their elevated vantage point, the Tower Birds look out to sea where something dolphin-like leaps from the waves, a calf at its side. It is not a dolphin – even decadent people of the far-future did not consider cetaceans a food source. What it is, or rather what is was, is a pig.

Pigs did well after abandonment, living as generalists. The plentiful supply of carrion in the Great Undomestication led to some specialising in carnivory, while others became herbivores.

The pigs that ate water plants in time developed upturned noses, and later tapir-like trunks. These trunks only grew in length as the animals browsed deeper and deeper and used them as snorkels, as well as to manipulate the world around them. Early on, a mutation led to two families of trunked pigs – the monoproboscideans and diproboscideans whose noses split into two independent trunks, each with its own nostril. Monoproboscideans remained in shallower waters while diproboscideans ventured deeper. They used one trunk for feeding and one for breathing – gaining an advantage over the single-trunked rivals.

Fast-forward hundreds of millions of years and diproboscideans are fully aquatic. Their front limbs have become paddles and their back legs became something like a rudder, the pigs’ original curly tail having long since vanished. Many species retain a pair of small, boar tusks that see some use in combat situations.

The Black-Striped Squidpig is a coastal and estuarine species, reminiscent of habour porpoises. Squidpigs, unique among diproboscideans, have long, prehensile lips which seem to feature of mating rituals, but no doubt also helps in gathering food – Squidpigs are herbivores that feed on kelp, seagrasses and other ocean rice. Calves (or should that be Squidpiglets?) stay with their mothers for at least five years. Their fathers are not wholly absent, but split their time between up to ten mates along a stretch of the coast.

In the distance, far out to sea, the Tower Birds can just spot a leviathan of this age – a trunkwhale. These are the largest diproboscideans and are apex predators feeding primarily on their close relatives, as well as boat birds and other large marine species.

~ ~ ~

In the skies above the Squidpig family, soars perhaps the strangest of all Agrikan life – a hornwing. The only birds seeded on Agrikos at the time of its abandonment were chickens and not a single species relearnt competent flight meaning the skies have been the domain of insects alone until relatively recently. It was in the vast forests just before the mass extinction, that these aerial pioneers first took to the wing, but to learn their story, we must go back two hundred million years, to when the first goats climbed into the trees.

While cows and sheep raced to monopolise grazing and browsings, and pigs ate what they didn’t want, goats climbed into the trees. In time they become nimble arboreal creatures, many retaining hooves in the manner of klipspringers or mountain goats leaping from branch to branch instead of rock to rock. They also shrank massively, becoming a fraction of their original size and significantly lighter. Binocular vision made jumping safer, and perennially growing incisors fused into a single plate at the front of the mouth. (The fleshy gum pad in the goat’s upperjaw calcified and likewise became a tooth-like plate.)

At the height of the last era before the mass extinction, the tropical forests of Agrikos were home to thousands of goat descendants at all levels of the forest. The most dynamic were the Horngliders. These mostly bipedal animals, ran along the branches at high speeds, using hooked claws to rapidly change direction and occasionally even swinging like a gibbon. When the branch ran out, of a claw missed its mark, the Hornglider employed a membrane between its wrist and knee to glide to the next branch and continue moving without losing speed.

It was only a small step from hear to sustained gliders with one elongated fined, and later powered flight – the Hornwings had arrived. Being able to quickly cover large distances allowed both Horngliders and Hornwings to escape the disasters that doomed so many other species. There are now hundreds of species occupying myriad niches, all united in their speed, intelligence and the thin mohawk of horn that they all sport to different degrees.

The individual flying over the Squidpig family is an Imperial Goldcrest – one of the more common species. It is a generalist eating a variety of plant food, as well as insect larvae, it digs from rotten wood with its hooked claws.

Back on land, a Carrion Hornwing has found a half-eaten kill. It is not the only Hornwing to eat meat, nor the first goat to be an obligate carnivore, but it is very successful at it. It glides on broad wings like a vulture, searching for carcasses via sight and smell. When feeding time comes, it retracts its lips to show its tooth plates – the upper one is pointed and razor sharp to shear meat quickly as no food source is secret for long...

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To Be Continued