>>5396081Besides the Flounder Feeder’s prey and its competitors, the environment itself poses an extreme challenge to its survival. The overwhelming majority of multicellular life on this planet exists in a narrow band where the radiation above is dampened and the pressure below isn’t too crushing to move. This narrow band consists of many mountain ranges and slopes that regularly suffer earthquakes and mudflows, both lethal to life. Worse, these generate large amounts of vibrations, which cause Flounder Feeders to flop towards them when they aren’t directly slammed into the rock by the flow. Even deadlier is the inescapable radiation that causes inevitable, lethal cancer in every Flounder Feeder that lives longer than two local weeks, or roughly eighty-four Terran days. The Flounder Feeder’s slow metabolism tends to cause very gradual growth but in most circumstances, this only delays death long enough to reproduce once or twice and fast growing cancers are common. The cold and gravity also cause regular deaths by frostbite and compression when a Flounder Feeder ventures too high or too low but luckily, neither are major problems in most of the ecosystem’s narrow band.
>4/5 