>>5402891>>5402892>>5402893>>5402894>In a particularly violent swell, a pack of Flounder Feeders are battered with broken ice and scratching silt. They haven’t eaten in nearly a local day and are dangerously close to the narrow band ecosystem’s searing upper edge. By all rights they should be in the throes of starvation and riddled with cancer, and yet... they are unphased. What they’ve eaten long ago, the blubber will provide.The Flounder Feeders have, in an astonishingly effective adaptation, grown a thick layer of blubber beneath their cartilage. This has had what could in the future very well be ecosystem-shattering implications. On the first cracked pincer, not only has their size effectively doubled, but their sheer, leviathan, if small, bulk has halved the cancer fatality rate, rendered it massively slower to progress, and effectively increased their lifespan twofold. On the second, all of this blubber has allowed the Flounder Feeders to gorge themselves the moment their stomach has vacancy and every nutrient their stomach can process that isn’t consumed immediately is funneled into the blubber, where it waits for hunger to set in. To extend this to a cartilage protrusion, their physical resilience has improved beyond what previously seemed possible.
Where they previously would’ve been lethal, even with their shells, all but the largest chunks of ice and sharpest rocks are bounced off of, their raw enormity has reduced all but the wildest packs of predators to a petty nuisance, and of what few newborns, so fat as to be nigh-gelatinous, are snatched by Ripple Trackers, many are lodged in their predator’s mandibles and starve them to death in hellish irony. What’s more, their added resistance to radiation and increased size has allowed them to go higher and sink lower than any life form of their status can. This hasn’t led to unknown ecosystems but has allowed them to extend their feeding to the scavenging Flesh Gnawers below and rise to wander the waves without risk of predators above. Lastly, their gargantuan immensity has not only rendered them far more buoyant and able to swim, but has caused natural selection to strengthen their core and tail muscles far beyond any other species but the Shufflers, allowing them to reap the benefits from their new, blubbery bodies without the slightest loss of mobility.
In short, the addition of blubber has rendered the Flounder Feeders highly resistant to most environmental hazards, reduced the death toll from cancer and predators to a relatively trickle, and left them in a highly extremely advantageous position to evolve, so much so that if they get any larger than they already are, they’ll need a more efficient circulatory system and internal supporting organs. Their population has once again doubled and they are now, owing to their raw strength, survivability, and nutritional fortitude, the undeniable apex predator.
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