The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 16 Wide-angle Snail

But just as the pioneering mother flies continued to swim forward following the bag-corner stone group, a new situation occurred in the mother nest at the rear, in the most fertile territory.

The number of plankton here is the most abundant. Lin Yi also controlled the mother nest to extend a large number of sea ringworm clusters, and controlled the workers to remove all the passive filter feeders that were originally fixed near the coral reef seabed, allowing the mother nest to expand into the sea. Ringo clusters can obtain more resources to supply the mother nest.

But recently, the output of some sea forest plants has begun to decline. At first, Lin Yi thought it was due to the decrease in plankton density in some areas, but then he discovered that the scope of the decrease in output gradually began to spread until a certain area The output of the Ringo clusters has been greatly reduced.

As an echinoderm, Ringo has almost no nerves and no sense. After merging into the mother's nest, Lin Yi did not add any additional equipment to it, so he did not know what happened.

The workers did not find any obvious problems during their daily inspections. The surface was almost completely normal. The body of the sea forest plant was still swaying in the water waves, using the fine whisker-like structures on its wrists to filter plankton in the seawater, forming a mother nest. Provide nutrients.

The control workers went to the cluster area where the yield was reduced, used their chelicerae to clamp a Heliconia plant, and examined it carefully next to the compound eyes.

The sight in front of him made Lin Yi's eyes widen - if the compound eyes of arthropods had a similar structure.

I could see some strange spiral protrusions on the calyx-shaped body of the Hailinju plant near its mouth.

Their color is almost exactly the same as the shell of Ringo, and it is indeed difficult to spot without careful observation.

The structure of the spiral protrusions is somewhat similar to the snail shells of later generations, but the position near the tip of the shell is somewhat twisted. It is deliberately designed to fit as closely as possible to the shell of Helix. However, the soft structures faintly protruding below are still exposed. They are not from He Ringo. The main body structure is a special type of snail attached to the surface of the main body of Heliconia.

Lin Yi had the impression that in the Paleozoic Era, there was indeed a special kind of snail that lived symbiotically with sea snails and sea snails. To be precise, it was a parasitic life. This thing is called the broad-horned snail, which appeared in the Ordovician period, and continued with its host into the Permian period, and then became extinct with the extinction of the host.

In my memory, the fossil evidence of later generations shows that the broad-horned snail will usually lie near the excretory opening of Hailei or Ringo, inserting its highly specialized long mouth into the mouth to feed on their oligo.

Moreover, its parasitism often eats away part of the host's shell tissue and drills holes in the shell to hide the soft tissue. At the same time, the shell grows abnormally to perfectly embed into the host shell.

The digestive system of filter-feeding echinoderms is not powerful, and their oriole is often mixed with a large amount of algae and nutrients, which is enough for the snails to survive.

Previously, this coral reef was home to a large number of wild ringworms and sea snails, and the broad-horned snails also appeared in the nearby waters.

But when the mother nest chrysalises here and the original version of Ringo is plucked out by the workers and replaced by clusters of the mother nest version of Ringo, there is a problem.

Because the mother's nest digests more thoroughly, these kelp plants extending from the mother's nest do not have a digestive system, but are directly connected to the mother's nest through nutrient delivery tubes, sending filtered plankton directly into the mother's nest. Digestion. Therefore, the existence of the mother's nest version of Hailin Ju's body is a good fulfillment of the curse of "having a son without sex". The snail has also lost its main food source.

But they did not become extinct because of this. Instead, they changed their strategy and lay down at the mouth, another opening of the Heilinella plant, to directly seize the filtered food!
  In later generations, there was a snail that parasitized crinoids, the tectosnail, which had a similar habit of snatching food directly from the host's mouth. Unexpectedly, under the pressure of survival, the broad-angle snail, the ancestor of this ecological niche, also learned this. one move.

Unlike crops, the Heliconia cluster was formerly a special animal and is currently part of the mother nest. Theoretically, it does not require much care.

Therefore, there are far fewer classes of workers specialized in tending the clusters than there are in collecting corpses.

Moreover, the main task of these workers is to clean up the wild passive filter feeders in the clusters so that the ringworm clusters can better filter plankton. They rarely conduct detailed inspections of the strains of the ringworm clusters, let alone The tight fit of the broad-angle snails has caused them to go undetected until now, causing serious losses in production.

Fortunately, it was not too late to discover it. A large number of workers immediately stepped forward under Lin Yi's control and began to scan each ringworm with their compound eyes, observing whether there were any broad-angle snails attached to them, and trying to find ways to clean them off.

At first, Lin Yi wanted to break through violently. However, although he had installed extra chelicerae on the modified version of the short-winged horseshoe crab template, neither of the two types of tools had any good solutions when facing the shell of the wide-angle snail.

The meat-cutting tool with four claws has a pair of chelicerae with large conical spines and a pair of chelicerae with fine teeth. It is good at cutting soft flesh, but it is not suitable for smooth and wide-angle shells. But there is no way to do it, and there is no good way.

Although the two claws of the grasping chelicerae can lock the shell of the snail, its chelicerae are not designed to break shells, and their strength is somewhat insufficient, making it more difficult to break the seemingly abnormal shape of the snail. , but very strong shell.

Then, he tried to pull it off, but it was like a barnacle attached to the hull, firmly attached to the hull of the sea ring. No matter how hard the worker tried, it was difficult to pull it off. Instead, it was stimulated and drilled holes in Hailingo's shell even harder, leaving Lin Yi helpless.

After thinking about it, Lin Yi still felt that it would be easier to break out of the shell directly and violently. After some thought, he urgently controlled the mother nest to produce a new worker, trying to use it to clean up the wide-angle snails attached to the ringworm clusters.

The new Gonghao template is based on the flesh-cutting type. It still has four claws, but the shape of its claws has changed. The first pair of claws is divided into two sides, one side has long spikes, and the other side has fine serrations, which integrates the functions of the previous two pairs of claws and is used to tear off the soft tissue of the broad-angle snail after the shell is broken.

The second pair of claws has become thicker and blunter, with hemispherical molar-like protrusions. This structure is the best choice for crushing hard shells. And it has a certain curvature, which can just catch the shell of the wide-angle snail, and its overall shape is somewhat similar to a walnut clip - it is used to break the hard shell anyway, so there is nothing wrong with it.

In this way, the first individual, which Lin Yi simply named the Shell Crusher, was born from the mother's nest and was about to start trying to clean up the broad-angle snails attached to the surface of the sea forest plant.

(End of this chapter)