EVOLUTION ATTEMPTS: Sting- 4, Speed- 3+1, Senses- 4
(still may take you a while to get moving properly, but it's a start, at least)
Thornvines have since evolved into crawlers. They are still a leviathan amongst the lesser blobs of the reef, and every mobile blob attempts to avoid it. It is yet to evolve eyes, but viral gene-swapping is in abundance right now, so you might get lucky and grow someone else's eyes. Because of its lack of vision and its towering body, it rarely gets to catch a moving blob, and usually just grazes. They move by slowly crawling along the seabed with their enlarged, fleshy bases. Apart from the movement, the stalk is atrophied, as a fusion of the base of the tentacles has become a new, far more complex body that can keep the body far more active than before. This isn't much in the adults, but the offspring (with their new senses and stings) are now active swimmers that can hunt and catch acijellies, stinging them to death with the tips of their tentacles. In the adults, the stings have sharpened and become far more mineralised, as they don't have to avoid sinking.
New species are appearing all the time. Frongi (frond-less fronds) make a network of roots under the reef, the varied descendants of the aciblob burrow and hunt and swim, and there's even completely new organisms appearing. From our perspective, it seems as though these far more complex organisms (with eyes, fins, brains) are appearing out of thin air. They're putting up good competition and fights, so we may want to get prepared.
GENERATION 4:
Devil's crawler
A deep blue cnidarian-like animal that is found all over the reef, due to their moving base. Their long tentacles impale their prey with the sharp, hard stings on the end. They grow up to 40 centimetres tall, and their offspring are called tentaclets.
SENSES: It has a sense of touch that lets it figure out if it's touching food, and a fair sense of smell/taste.
REPRODUCTION: It lets out male cells in the current, and growths grow on the area of the body derived from the bases of the tentacles. These growths eventually move into the inside of the body, where they develop into tentaclets and swim free one day. Tentaclets are active hunters of swimmers like acijellies.
MOVEMENT: They move by rippling their bases.
EATING: It impales nearby blobs and digests them by wrapping the end of the tentacles around it.
PREDATION: The current apex predator. Ground-living blobs are what it eats.
COMPETITION: Crawlers still have little competition, even amongst themselves, due to their size and reproductive system. Fast moving aciblobs, though, are sometimes stealing our kills.
ENVIRONMENT: A shallow sub-tropical sea. Layers upon layers of various types of blobs have built massive networks of reefs. Tentablobs grow above the rest, filtering food from the open water, while the crawler dominates where it grows. Aciblobs fill the majority of space for animal life, burrowing and swimming and crawling on the seafloor. Flapworms have migrated from the open ocean, and are efficient filter-feeders and danger-avoiders.
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Topic: Competition- An evolutionary suggestion game (Read 101805 times)