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I dedicate this species to Bonosaber / Pithesaber, the first person to try to create intelligent Shrews.

Note, if this is approved, it will hold the records for longest species description (more than double the previous record-holder, which is apparently the Wrigglebob in Beta?) and most species spread by one species (beating Orbit Voltflora by 9).

Fun fact, this is the second version of the description! I got a little over halfway through writing it and realized, "hmm, this is getting too detailed to parse", so I rewrote it with distinct wikipedia-inspired headings.

This post has been edited by Disgustedorite: Jul 9 2020, 11:09 AM

It's not too bold at all. I really like it! May its sailing days be long and the bounty it gathers from the sea be plentiful.

(These are notes I was making while going through the description, so they aren't very organized.)

Right, there aren't any subtropical biomes here. Perhaps that will be rectified later.

Spearfishing: herons use bait to hunt, as well as fake safe spots.

Hang on, these got to Fermi? Land of the Fermisaurs?!

The underside spikes make mating difficult, true, but protective spines make mating tricky for spiny mammals, and hyenas have quite a difficult time giving birth. "Limited advantage" would probably not be sufficient reason to get rid of the spikes, unless it had some disadvantage as well. If it needed to lie flat on its nest and cling to the bark to avoid getting hurt in storms, it would be be able to lie flatter without the spikes on its underside. If female Seashrogs would preferentially mate with male Seashrogs with smaller underside-spikes (especially likely as they mate belly-to-belly) it's plausible the males' underside spikes would become tiny, and females' spikes would become smaller as a side effect of selection.

"Making noise similar to those of squeaky toys". That's hilarious. I'm just imagining these guys get the reputation of being super-dangerous and untouchable, so some tiny, delicious creature squeaks like one of these just to trick predators.

Not all mammals (and surely shrews) are prone to scurvy. Did it lose Vitamin C production?

"he leftovers are dried out in the sun and stored inside the nest." Do any animals specifically dry out food? If not, that might need to be tweaked.

"relatively the same" You mean "relatively unchanged".

You should elaborate on "basic language". Do you mean that as in "knows lots of tricks" or "communicates simple desires via a lexicogram computer" or "can use a lexicogram computer to accurately report a sequence of events that happened hours ago"?

It's interesting to see the Mangots, Gumjorns, and Hockels spreading more.

Most spiny animals simply lack spikes on their undersides; see porcupines, hedgehogs, echidnas, pangolins, and countless others. The only animals I can think of with full-body spikes are also creatures that spawn rather than mating directly, and even some of those lack spikes on their undersides.

I figured since it's descended from a decently long line of herbivores, it might have some form of dependency on flora. I threw in scurvy because its niche is basically "sailor" and scurvy is commonly associated with sailors. I'll edit it to be more vague.

I can't think of animals that dry food in the sun off the top of my head, but it doesn't seem like a difficult behavior to develop--just leave the food out before storing it away. Since it lives in an open habitat, it doesn't have to do anything special to accomplish that.

"Basic language" in this case means that it can learn some words (maybe even a lot of them) but not the full complexity of a language, kinda like dogs. It might be able to make some basic phrases if given a bunch of word buttons, like that one dog on instagram, but its language centers simply aren't developed enough to do much more than that. I'll see about elaborating on this in the description.

This post has been edited by Disgustedorite: Jul 9 2020, 07:17 PM

I don’t think the Mainland Fuzzpalm can outcompete the Fuzzpalm, as it’s more adapted to inland soil environments. It can survive on the beach fine, but it’s not a suited for it.

I based this on the mainland fuzzpalm being stated to replace its ancestor.

I got a little carried away / inspired by something Nergali said and already made a small-scale diorama featuring Seashrogs.

^ The conversation which inspired the above depiction was regarding use of seashrog nests to cross bodies of water (specifically related to short-range transport where a creature basks on a nest and gets carried across a small body of water; quoth Nergali, "Jump cut to a Flumpus somehow basking on it"). Already this gen there is a species of mine that spread with assistance from shrog nests, and tamjack and marine tamow nests have been used for similar in the past.

Seafaring shrews are unlikely to die out any time soon, so some kind of hard limit on how that can be used should be set. I think the best way to go about it for plausibility is to allow it to be done over flyway distances (landmasses that are very close together) as long as it's explained (example: Hockel), but that for fauna to spread greater distances by way of seafaring shrew nest they need to take on a behavior or niche directly related to the nest (see Cleaner Bovermid, False Cleaner Bovermid, Stowaway Harmbless, and the newer Kakonat).

This post has been edited by Disgustedorite: Jul 17 2020, 11:35 AM

That sure puts into perspective how huge Larlaps are. Yes, I think it makes sense to put up a hard limit on the use of seafaring shrew nests. I wonder where you'll put the supplementary image, for posterity's sake? On the Seashrog's submission, or in some kind of clade page for "Seafaring Shrews"?

I was thinking perhaps those and the diorama page once it's canonized, since it is a diorama. Since it's not meant to be representative of the ecosystem, though, it wouldn't go on the overview for South Jujubee Temperate Ocean.