>>5402472Has. Many light minutes away, the harsh sun pulsed in a particularly cataclysmic surge of radiation, and a sliver reached the surface of their homeworld, where a smaller sliver still worked its way beneath the ice. Once there, it caused a mutation in a scattered handful of Flounder Feeders. This is nothing out of the ordinary, but this mutation was anything but. A recessive trait that does nothing to impact a Flounder Feeder’s survival and is almost guaranteed to reach its offspring, where it, on expression then or in the next generation, causes a complete inability to produce a critical component of the Flounder Feeder releaser’s gamete. To take a Terran expression, for a fair amount of time, the Flounder Feeders were shooting blanks. This would’ve had less horrific consequences if it were confined to a small section of the species but unluckily, the initial mutants had incredible, doomed reproductive success and their recessive carrier offspring did likewise. On an evolutionary timeframe, this was a blip on the radar and eventually bred into obscurity by more consistently fertile Flounder Feeders but by then, the damage had been done. The Flounder Feeder population has been brought lower than even their graceless cousin, the Flat-Tail Crawler, and is hanging on by a thread. It’s doubtful they could survive another decline and with their current population growth static, they are in dire straights, curvature not withstanding.
>2/3 