>>5398565>>5398567>>5398568>>5398579>>5398592>>5398593The whims of astronomy have caused the planet to roll like a gargantuan marble, just a tad farther from its sun. On one cracked pincer, this has slightly reduced the amount of radiation saturating the ocean. On the other, this has caused a major drop in the temperature, thickening the ice sheets and bringing their constant crashing closer to the narrow band. The chill in the water alone is a deadly killer for smaller species but the chunks of ice, breakaways from above or frozen from what was already below, have turned the wild tides into a far deadlier phenomenon. Now, creatures of all kind are regularly pummeled by ice flung by the water, as if the rockslides below weren’t enough on their own.
This has posed two obvious new challenges to the ecosystem. The temperature itself and the blunt ice, but there is a third, enormous implication to this change. Now that the planet is farther from its sun, the foundational Growth Lumps are getting less nutrients, making them slower to spread, and the Lump Grazers, the mainstay of every predator, have increased difficulty finding food and in surviving the cold with their tiny bodies. This has caused their population to drop and with it, the competition has reached a crescendo. This would be a terrible situation in the best of times but these are not the best of times.
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