The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 15 Baghorn Stone and Starlight in the Sea
  The three pairs of appendages at the front of the female frog's body are spread wide, and the whisker-like structures connecting them form a large net, catching all the plankton along the way.

At the same time, the three pairs of chelicerae were still clamping the huge overlord insect that was killed by Cornerstone, using one pair to tear the flesh and blood and send it into the mouth.

Some of the torn food residues drifted with the water waves, attracting some animals with strong swimming ability to fight for them. Such as the Aranda soft-shell turtle, which is a close relative of the Sakaban soft-shell turtle. Compared with the Sakaban soft-shell turtle that unexpectedly became popular in later generations, their jawless mouths are larger and rounder, making their faces more expressive. "A little more surprised.

The tail of the Aranda softshell turtle is shorter, but the tail fin is wider, and the entire body is more streamlined. This gives them a stronger swimming ability and can swallow larger pieces of food in the upper layers of the water, such as those now torn off by pioneering females. It is also called insect flesh and blood residue.

The huge body of the female turtle is inflexible, making it difficult to catch these small fish swimming back and forth, which makes them become more and more unscrupulous. They even get close to the mouth of the female turtle and wait for the food residues to be torn off directly under its chelicerae.

Suddenly, a pair of sickle limbs stretched out violently, and the long thorns immediately stabbed the two Aranda soft-shell turtles that were too close to each other. It was the soldier turtle resting on the back of the mother turtle who took action.

Lin Yi has been doing fishing for a long time, and now he is naturally very skilled. He caught these two Aranda turtles easily. The workers who came later quickly stretched out their chelicerae, clamped them, and prepared to wait for the next nest. When it emerges from the pupa, it is easily absorbed to see if useful gene fragments can be extracted.

However, the fishes of this era did not have paired fins, and their swimming ability was limited no matter how strong they were. They could not cope with the wind and waves of the ocean. Even the tall Aranda turtle pulled out of the dwarf could only move in the waters near the coral reefs.

When the pioneering mother turtle swam far away, the Aranda turtle disappeared and was replaced by some small right-angled stones.

Unlike the huge corner stones and corner stones, the corner stones have a lighter and thinner shell and are good at swimming. They were the main organisms in open waters in this era. At this time, they are like the small fish that will accompany the shark in later generations, closely following the pioneering mother.

Also collected are angular stones, which belong to the order Piliconite. They are an extremely peculiar species of angular stones. Their shells are flat and diamond-shaped. People who don’t know it think that the Star Destroyer has become a spirit. Because of its unique Lin Yi also controlled the soldiers to kill two of them and clamped them in the pincers to see if there were any good gene fragments to extract.

……

Keep going until nightfall. The huge body of the female pioneer slowly surfaced on the water, with five pairs of paddling feet swinging, working together with the air bags in the body to hold up the body, while a pair of huge compound eyes looked towards the sky, shining with a thoughtful light.

Four hundred million years is enough time for the positions of celestial bodies to change significantly.

During this era, the moon was closer to the earth, resulting in a month with only 9 days. And tonight is a full moon night, so the bright moon hanging high in the sky will theoretically look bigger.

But Lin Yi didn't see it. On the contrary, the sky is filled with stars, which are extremely clear in this era of no air pollution. It is really like the Milky Way hanging upside down for nine days.

In addition to the compound eyes, the two light-sensitive single eyes of Binghao and Kaifengmuhao, which come from the feather-winged horseshoe crab, can also perceive some light that they could not see when they were humans in their previous lives, making the scenery in front of them more colorful.

Because the Horseshoe Crab is a bottom-dwelling predator, its compound eyes are located on the upper side of its head, and the pioneering female flies produced based on the Horseshoe Crab template also inherit this feature.

This makes it easy to look up at the sky, but somewhat difficult to look down at the seabed. Therefore, the worker who was standing under the mother's body kept rushing down with her head, and used her compound eyes to scan the bottom of the mother's body.

At this moment, the workers saw a dream-like scene in their compound eyes - dots of fluorescent light emerged from under the sea, twinkling and intersecting with the stars in the sky. They could not see the edge at a glance, making the huge pioneering mother At this time, Hui seemed to be a lonely boat. Lin Yi thought, and the soldier on the mother's back immediately swung its flat tail and swam downstream, ready to find out. But he soon discovered that the source of these fluorescent lights was also floating upward.

The familiar combination of shell and tentacles shows that they are still corner stones.

However, the shells of these corner stones are different from those of corner stones, rectangular stones and angular stones. The ends are rounded and blunt, and they do not become thinner towards the back. Instead, they shrink inward near the head, making the whole shell look like An eggplant.

Lin Yi recognized that this was a bag of corner stones, and it was a special type of corner stone. But at this time, their small bodies were flashing with light blue fluorescence, showing a level of evolution that far exceeded the times.

However, taking a closer look, Lin Yi discovered that it was not the soft tissue that emitted light from these hornstones, but their shells.

And these lights do not change and flicker like their soft-bodied relatives in later generations, but because their positions are constantly moving and their brightness varies, they appear to flicker.

They are probably some kind of microorganisms attached to the shells of the hornstones, allowing them to emit light at night. The hornstones may use these lights to attract plankton, which also means that they are organisms from deeper seas, but now they gather Yu Qianhai gave Lin Yi a guess.

The baghorn stones gradually gathered together, swimming opposite each other, and their tentacles were entangled in one place, confirming Lin Yi's guess that they were multiplying.

But then, the arrival of soldiers ruined the scene. The wide-open sickle limbs closed and penetrated the soft tissue of the baghorn stone. Then without even looking at the other nearby baghorn stones that were fleeing in panic, they returned to the pioneer mother's land with the prey strung on the thick spikes of the sickle limbs.

Returning to open up the mother's body, a worker immediately came forward to greet him and took over the body of Baojiushi with his chelicerae.

Lin Yi has developed the habit of first catching an interesting new creature to sample and extract its genetic sequence. Anyway, there is no upper limit on the number of genetic sequences stored in the brood, so naturally you should save more just in case.

……

After the short interlude, the body of the pioneer mother continued to swim forward under the starlight from both sides, exploring the direction where the baghorn stone might come.

Lin Yi speculated that these hornstones probably came from the deep sea and only entered the shallow sea to lay eggs during the breeding season, allowing the larvae to grow in shallower waters.

And as the morning sun jumped out from the sea level in the east and spread its light into the sea, the corner stones began to retreat in one direction.

Lin Yi immediately controlled the pioneering mother to follow closely, heading towards the ocean where they may have come from, or at least deeper waters, in order to explore a wider sea area and expand the territory of the mother nest and the nest group to a larger area. Inside.

　Thank you brothers for your support.

　　
  　
  (End of this chapter)