>>5415709>Far in the perilous expanse of ice and darkness, an elderly Flounder Feeder treads water alongside a fat newborn, the last of a once-thriving pack of eight. It’s a birther, old enough to be sterile, wracked with autoimmune disease, and sunken in with starvation but trudges on in search of food, not for itself as its mind grasps that death is near, but for the other. The offspring of its offspring, a grandchild, the last remnant of its genetic legacy. They are the closest either has to a companion and stay close to avoid the waves flinging them apart. They are the last living Flounder Feeders in ten leagues.The Flounder Feeders have further refined their stomach to increase the ratio of flesh-to-blubber, and this has helped them survive. On its own, this stomach, their filter, their bulk, and their intelligence could’ve helped them survive but a radiation-induced tweak of faulty pheromone gland caused the onset of overwhelming scent confusion, leading many to swim in circles searching for prey that wasn’t there. This was selected against but with their biological efficiency, the gene-carriers weren’t wiped out soon enough to prevent them from spreading their mutation throughout the population in a period of sunlight. When the ash returned, the overwhelming majority starved and what they managed to consume in a bid to stave off oblivion only scraped the stone clean for the few, healthy Flounder Feeders that remained.
The Flounder Feeders have fallen farther and faster than any other species in the history of their homeworld’s biosphere has. Where millions once swam assured of their supremacy, now, mere thousands scramble in a desperate search for each other. This handful of survivors are the most cunning, stubborn, and cooperative of their species, who’ve spent millennia getting by each reproduction cycle on the barest tips of their pincers. The narrow band ecosystem has begun to recover and in the haze of death, a tenuous path to salvation rests. They are the last of their evolutionary lineage. If they fail now, millions of years of strife will have been for nothing.
>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>11/11 