The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 19 Glimpses under the Moon
  A worker expertly buries itself half-way into the seabed and begins the process of pupating into its mother's nest. A new mother nest was quickly born on the seabed, and clusters of sea ringworms began to spread around, filtering and absorbing plankton in the seawater.

The bodies of the Overlord and other insects were abandoned by the pioneer mother in an emergency during the previous attack. Now they have fallen into the abyss of the sea, and there is no possibility of recovering them.

Fortunately, the mother's nest has been supplemented with enough nutrients before, so that it can continue to lay nutritious eggs, allowing the mother's nest to develop faster until it can produce workers independently.

The workers spread out and performed the traditional art of the horsetail horseshoe crab suborder to which the short-winged horseshoe crab is the source of its genetic sequence - picking up garbage and eating it to supplement the mother's nest with as much nutrients as possible.

There is no shortage of strange brachiopods and other small creatures in the seabed in this area, which can also supplement a lot of nutrients.

At the same time, the soldiers also swim around, looking for other organisms that scavenge for garbage on the seabed, such as trilobites and wild horseshoe crabs, and kill them and bring them back to their nests for them to absorb.

One soldier even discovered a Poseidon shrimp that was filtering plankton in the upper waters, allowing Lin Yi to immediately control the nearby soldiers to concentrate and hunt it down.

One of the pioneering female's feeding appendages is broken, and it can no longer continue to efficiently filter plankton.

The limb regeneration ability of arthropods is achieved through molting and growth. In order to speed up the growth rate, the pioneer mother injected calcium into the exoskeleton. It does not need to continuously molt and grow, but also loses the ability to regenerate broken limbs during molting.

Therefore, Lin Yi planned to turn the pupa of the pioneer mother into a fully functional mother nest in the nearby sea area, and then use the obtained food resources to cultivate a new pioneer mother and continue to explore.

The two mother nests are located on both sides of the trench, facing each other across the trench. The huge body of the pioneer mother and the worker were slowly and half-buried in the seabed, and the process of pupation began.

A large number of fat cells stored in the body begin to grow into a honeycomb-like structure of the mother's nest as they pupate, and the ringworm clusters also begin to spread outward.

……

At night. The bright moon once again hangs in the sky under the guard of stars. The workers and soldiers temporarily stopped their activities. Only clusters of sea worms were still swaying in the waves, filtering the plankton in the water day and night.

But under the moonlight, between the abyss, the figure of something slowly emerged. Bing Hao's compound eyes immediately noticed the movement below, swung his tail and chased forward.

Several black figures streaked past, swimming on the sea illuminated by the moonlight.

There is a pair of leaf-like flat structures on the sides of each segment of the wide and flat body, which are fanning regularly to push the body. The three pairs of tail leaves at the tail are swinging, allowing the body to draw perfect arcs in the water. Two slender tails trail behind it, making its figure appear somewhat elegant - if it weren't for the pair of ferocious curved appendages on its head.

The oval-shaped head has a pair of appendages that curve toward the back and downwards. The shape is somewhat similar to the tail of a shrimp, but it is covered with spikes. On the top of the head, a pair of eye stalks protrude outward, and the top is connected with blood-red compound eyes. Combined with the pair of curved blade-like appendages, Lin Yi could be sure that they were the most likely ones to attack the pioneering worms in the abyss during the day.

This classic shape allowed Lin Yi to recognize its true identity at a glance - Anomalocaris. Unexpectedly, the first generation of apex predators in the Cambrian period was already in the late Ordovician period. In addition to the filter-feeding Poseidon shrimp, there were also large predatory anomalocaridids surviving.

Bing Hao surfaced and looked at the sky with a pair of well-developed compound eyes. Under the bright moonlight, the yellow-brown exoskeleton of the soldier crab and the jet-black exoskeleton of these unknown large predatory shrimps are reflected silvery white, making it impossible to see the original colors.

People today cannot see the moon of ancient times, but today's moon once illuminated the ancient people. For Ordovician creatures, the Cambrian relics represented by Anomalocaris are "ancient 'people'". The appearance of the large predatory anomalocaridids that should have been extinct also made Lin Yi sigh.

In fact, the diversity of Anomalocaris is quite high. They belong to the order Deinocris and the order Archodontida, and are divided into the suborder Anomalocaris and the suborder Hederi.

However, according to the fossil evidence discovered in later generations, Anomalocaris, the old group of dinosaur shrimps with orthodontic flags, did not live past the end of the Cambrian period. However, the Herd shrimp, a group of smelly foreigners, did have a very long life, and lived until the mud In the Penji, I shared a table with placoderms.

The huge Benmera Poseidon shrimp is a member of the suborder Hurd's shrimp. These anomalocaridids emerging from the ocean abyss have oval heads covered with a wider head shell, and they are most likely to belong to the class Hurd's shrimp.

However, in later studies, predatory dinosaur shrimps from the end of the Cambrian to the Devonian period have never been found. And the last species of Deinostriidae, Schendhans shrimp, is a small but powerful predatory Heard shrimp. This means that there is a fossil gap of nearly 100 million years for the predatory dinosaur shrimp.

But now, with the appearance of these large predatory shrimps, everything makes sense.

They hid in the deep sea and survived several extinction events. The traces of their existence were completely lost in the long river of time due to geological activities, and they were completely submerged by the long time.

Adapted to the darkness, they lurk in the depths of the ocean during the day, and come up to the shallow sea to prey at night. This reminds the creatures that also survived the Cambrian period of the fear of being dominated by the first generation of apex predators. It still has the power to fight against rising stars, and the severed limb of the pioneering mother is the best illustration.

But unlike the defenseless pioneer mother, although the soldier's body is not as big as the pioneer, it is born for fighting. It has sickle limbs covered with spikes and a tail spine that can inject digestive juice, not to mention it has swarm consciousness. The synergy advantage brought about makes the soldiers completely unafraid of the threat of these strange shrimps.

These anomalocaridids are half deep-sea species and have pressure-resistant exoskeletons. The related gene fragments are of some use to Lin Yi. He actually has the idea of ​​killing an anomalocaridid, extracting its genetic sequence, and then using it in Use the templates of the Soldier and the Pioneer to explore deeper waters.

But Lin Yi thought about it and decided not to provoke them at the moment. The number of soldiers that followed the pioneer mother all the way is not large, and the nutrients now need to be supplied to the nest group to produce the third pioneer mother and the other soldiers, workers and nesting workers of the "expedition fleet". Facing an unknown apex predator, he didn't want to cause any trouble.

And when the next pioneer mother and other supporting individuals are successfully cultivated, and enough soldiers are produced, Lin Yi will kill them in the trench, clean up these remnants of the previous dynasty, and obtain the information related to their water pressure-resistant shells. The gene fragment continues to move towards the deep sea.

(End of this chapter)