The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 28 Graptolite and Floating Brood

In the sea area where the mother turtles had been attacked by the snails before, among the coral reefs, the compound eyes of the soldiers could already see the black figures of the second-generation soldiers breaking through the waves in the distance.

Naturally, the Straight Snail that was still patrolling the periphery also saw it. With a wave of his tentacles, water sprayed out from the funnel, pushing his body across a white line in the water, and swam towards the direction of the soldiers.

A gray-white shell with dark red lines like blood streaked across it. The long and narrow pupils of the straight-horned stone swept across the group of soldiers with contempt. The tentacles swung, and the tip of the conical shell was slightly offset, like a lance. It stabs a soldier with the help of a water jet propulsion system.

The soldiers swung their paddling feet and tail to avoid the fatal thrusts, and then swarmed up from all directions. A pair of sickle limbs covered with thorns revealed their sharp edges, and they directly attacked the waving soft body of the Straight Spiral Stone, which had not yet dissipated its momentum. part.

Zhihejiashi is indeed an individual under the hive mind consciousness cluster. He did not choose to stop fighting, but turned on the water jet propulsion system with all his strength. He waved his tentacles and accelerated out of the soldier group, bypassing the group of soldiers. The huge The shell drew an arc in the sea and retreated toward the rear.

Presumably, an adult Heliconia is also relatively precious to the opponent's nest, and it is not worth dying here.

After driving away the adult helicots, the soldier swarms spread out to guard, while the pioneering and filtering hens in the "fleet" slowly operated their water jet propulsion systems and stopped above the mother nest in the coral reef. Immediately, a large number of nutritious eggs are discharged from the abdomen of the mother flies and thrown downward.

Below, the workers walking among the clusters of sea ringworms stepped forward one after another, using their chelicerae to pick up the supplies "dropped" by the mother's nest, and stuffed them into the holes on the surface of the mother's nest for them to digest and absorb, preparing to produce more. Many soldiers.

The brood nest in this sea area will be used as an important frontline base when fighting against the Straight Angle Stone Nest Group. At this time, the supplies dropped by the air will better help the brood nest develop and multiply to a larger size to produce more soldiers. Continuously replenish troops for friendly forces ahead.

But this mother nest alone is not enough - after "airdropping" the supplies, the filtering mother cockroaches temporarily stayed in place to rest, while a few pioneering mother cockroaches swung their paddling feet and slowly surfaced on the water. Then, under the guard of nearby soldiers, it gradually stopped moving, which was clearly a precursor to pupating into the mother's nest. But his body was still floating in the water, showing no signs of sinking.

After a while, the mother nest began to take shape, but it still floated on the water - the sides of the honeycomb-shaped main body had some differences.

It was a circle of spherical vesicles, filled with air like an air chamber inside a hornstone shell, allowing the main part of the new brood to half float on the water.

A small part of the honeycomb body located above the water surface is covered by an exoskeleton that can withstand ultraviolet radiation, while the part below the water surface has the same holes as a normal mother nest, which can absorb nutrients or produce individuals.

At the connection between the vesicle-like structure and the honeycomb-like body of the mother nest, there are structures shaped like quills hanging downward. The fine whisker-like structures extending to both sides of the rod-shaped body can be seen at a glance as being designed to filter plankton.

Lin Yi was inspired by the floating mother nest of the Orthospermum community. He also used existing genetic templates to edit the genetic sequence of the mother nest and create a similar mobile mother nest.

But the difference is that the source of the gene fragments related to the floating water surface of his floating mother nest is a creature called graptolite.

That's right, it's the graptolite in the name of the giant graptolite. They are hemichordates, close relatives of echinoderms, which had considerable diversity during the Ordovician.

Later studies speculated that they would use the vesicle-like structures on their sides to float on the water, drift with the current, and use the feather-like structures under their bodies to filter plankton in the water. When the fossil of Limulus was first discovered, due to the incomplete preservation of the fossil, its sickle limbs covered with spikes were mistaken for filter-feeding structures hanging from the body of the graptolite, so it was named the giant graptolite.

Therefore, the Hao clan nest group with individual feather-winged horseshoe crabs as the main body is, in a sense, related to the graptolite species.

When Lin Yi inserted the genetic fragment of the graptolite into the genetic sequence of the floating mother nest, he retained the filter-feeding structure of the graptolite and replaced the clusters of ringworms in the ordinary mother nest, allowing it to still ingest food in the water on its own.

At the same time, those vesicle-like structures have been adjusted. Now, they are connected together by air tubes like the air chambers of corner stones. These vesicles can be controlled through the mother nest body to inhale or expel air and seawater to control the ups and downs of the mother nest. .

The number of plankton on the sea surface is the most abundant, which also allows graptolite, a special floating filter-feeding organism, to be extremely prosperous in this era.

Lin Yi is also unwilling to miss these rich plankton resources. His previous strategy was to exploit and filter out the mother flies, but now, inspired by the right spiral stone nest group, the floating mother nest came into being.

In the vision, the floating brood will serve as the core of the fleet, continuously recovering the remains of dead child entities on both sides to replenish troops. It can also produce nutrient eggs to easily supplement nutrients for frontline soldiers.

……

Behind, in the field of vision of the spy worker adsorbed on the surface of a certain helical stone shell, after the group of helical stone around the coral reef was driven away, the adult and sub-adult forms of helical stone concentrated around the enemy's floating mother nest. They all waved their tentacles, sprayed water from the funnel, and headed towards the direction where the soldiers were attacking.

The Orthospermum group seems to be aware of the threat, or has discovered a large number of potential prey. From time to time, more adult Orthospermids who are hunting outside return, stuff the prey into the holes on the surface of the floating mother nest, and join the queue.

Six conical hornstone shells protrude outward, forming a hexagram-shaped floating mother nest. Only a few adult hornstones and a large number of larvae are left, and the young bodies take care of the mother nest and eggs.

At this time, nearly a hundred huge adult Helical Stones have gathered. This is probably the entire "force" of the Helical Stone nest group in this vicinity, all gathered here.

Figures more than nine meters long came through the waves, leaving traces in the water. Bing Hao's well-developed compound eyes could already vaguely see the cold light flashing at the tip of the gray-white shell among the waves.

A nest composed of such a large number of helical stones would have been considered invincible in any era before humans invented thermal weapons in the history of life on Earth.

But those who will fight them are not ordinary creatures. Under Lin Yi's control, hundreds of second-generation soldier swarms also gathered again, spread out their sickle limbs, swung their tails and paddling feet, and rushed towards the direction of the right-angle stone nest group. Perhaps the earliest group fight in the history of the earth broke out.

(End of this chapter)