The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 8 Digestive juices and venom glands
  The insect blood spread, and at the critical moment of death, the Poseidon Helmeted Shrimp burst out with an astonishing desire to survive, struggling violently, but the ferocious long thorns on the sickle-shaped appendages of the feather-winged horseshoe crab had penetrated deeply into its flesh and blood. , Such a violent struggle only made the wounds on its body widen and deepen.

Facing a giant insect of this size, the tail spine of the feather-winged horseshoe crab can only play a very limited role. The main output method is still the pair of ferocious sickle-shaped appendages.

The large spines clustered on the inside of the appendages can cause considerable damage to the soft torso of the Poseidon Helmet Shrimp, but they are still difficult to kill in a short time.

In later generations, there is a saying that centipede insects are dead but not stiff, and the Poseidon shrimp, as a pan-arthropod, also has tenacious vitality.

After struggling for about dozens of minutes with the horrific injuries, the fin-like structure on the side of the torso stopped swinging weakly, and the two-meter-long body slowly fell downwards.

Seeing the huge body slowly falling in the sea, dragging a wake composed of insect blood and carapace fragments, Lin Yi felt unprecedentedly relaxed for the first time.

One of the most massive creatures of this era, the filter-feeding behemoth named after the Poseidon, was successfully hunted by him and became the nutrient for him to multiply more individuals.

Thinking about it, he didn't stop moving. Five individual feather-winged horseshoe crabs dragged the body of the huge prey and swam laboriously toward the mother nest, trying to transport it back to the mother nest.

The dozen or so modified short-winged horseshoe crabs also quickly approached, using two pairs of pincers and a pair of small claws near the mouth to tear up the flesh and blood at the hideous wound made by the sickle limb of the feather-winged horseshoe crab.

The fastest-reacting Sakaban turtle has already come over, opening its small mouth to suck in the floating food scraps. Some boldly approached the individuals of the feather-winged horseshoe crab and the short-winged horseshoe crab that were tearing flesh and blood, trying to take advantage of the reaction speed brought by their nervous systems to drink some hot food.

However, the individuals controlled by Lin Yi have now upgraded their nervous systems. After catching a few Sakaban turtles that were unable to dodge, the rest of the individuals dispersed in a rush.

After dealing with these troublesome little fish, as is customary, a large piece of Poseidon Helmet Shrimp meat is cut off and stuffed into the honeycomb-shaped holes on the surface of the mother's nest, allowing it to absorb the Poseidon Helmet Shrimp's genetic sequence.

While eating, Lin Yi also began to review the hunting process, thinking about the next step in editing the horseshoe crab gene sequence.

The genetic sequence of the horseshoe crab has not been significantly modified except for the myelin gene fragment of the Sakaban soft-shell turtle embedded in it.

Except for the flaws that Lin Yi was clearly aware of, he was not sure whether his sudden changes or the results of natural evolution were better. What he was waiting for was an opportunity to experiment.

This time, the individual feather-winged horseshoe crab was mainly exposed to the problem of insufficient ability to execute large creatures. This problem is particularly acute for giant pan-arthropods such as the Poseidon shrimp.

Because the body structure is different from that of later vertebrates, except for the head, which is protected by a thick head shell, there are no vital parts that can be fatal in a short time.

During the battle, the Poseidon Helmet Shrimp, whose torso was pierced and torn by Lin Yi with numerous scars, still struggled for a long time, which is proof of this.

Since pan-arthropods use an open-tube circulatory system, body fluids flow directly through the intercellular spaces during circulation. There are few centralized large blood vessel structures, and consumption through bloodletting is also unrealistic. However, this recycling system structure has low removal efficiency and is not without its weaknesses.

Once a foreign body invades the body, it can quickly spread throughout the body through the circulatory system, killing a large number of cells and tissues. This also means that toxins are terrifyingly lethal to organisms that use open-tube circulatory systems.

Although the feather-winged horseshoe crab has a long scorpion-like tail and a stinger at the end, this stinger is solid and can only be used as a means of physical output. There is no poisonous hook connected to the poison glands of later scorpions.

With Lin Yi's current gene editing capabilities, it is impossible to evolve a poison gland structure out of thin air.

To obtain this structure, the mother nest can only absorb a creature with a venom gland structure, and embed its gene fragments about the venom gland into the gene sequence of the feather-winged horseshoe crab.

But in this era, at least within the range of organisms determined by later studies, the only species that may use toxins are jellyfish and other primitive animal groups.

However, the structure of the toxins released by these creatures was not very compatible with the structure of the feather-winged horseshoe crab template, so Lin Yi had no choice.

In desperation, we have to control the individual to lower its head and continue to eat, or tear off the flesh and blood for the mother's nest to digest and absorb... Wait, digestion? !
  A flash of light suddenly flashed in Lin Yi's consciousness. Although there are no poison glands in the strict sense, his existing genetic template does not lack glands that secrete lethal liquid-digestive juice. It can also be injected into an organism to kill its tissues!
  Later generations of spiders used specialized venomous fangs on their chelicerae to inject digestive fluid into their prey to kill it. The same structure has also been convergently evolved by some species of the order Diptera and Hemiptera among insects, proving its effectiveness.

Thinking about this, he controlled the brood and immediately started editing the genetic sequence of the feather-winged horseshoe crab. The gene fragment related to the digestive juice secretion gland in the digestive system was selected and tried to be combined with the tail stinger of the horseshoe crab to form a structure similar to the scorpion stinger of later generations.

This time the changes involved internal organs, which were quite large and took a while.

After some fiddling, Lin Yi installed a new sac-like organ edited using the stomach as the template on the hind body part of the feather-winged horseshoe crab template.

One end of the organ is connected to a large number of digestive juice-secreting glands, while the other end is connected to a modified tail needle. Its inner wall, like the stomach, has a lot of peristaltic muscle tissue, which is responsible for squeezing out digestive juices. The new tail needle is modified using the template of the chelicerae to form a hollow structure that can be used for injection.

This organ was simply and crudely called the poison sac by Lin Yi. In addition to the poison sac, there is another change in the tail of the new template - in order to meet the needs of both swimming and hunting, the tail of the feather-winged horseshoe crab has a crescent-shaped gap at the end of the wide and flat last telson to accommodate it. The tail spines and the crescent-shaped gap are actually composed of two pieces of exoskeleton armor.

This time, Lin Yi added joints and muscles to the ends of the two exoskeleton plates so that they could be opened and closed, forming a pincer-like structure like an earwig's tail clamp in later generations to better clamp prey. The body is steadily injected with more digestive juices, causing damage.

The new template was also simply named Poisonous Winged Horseshoe Crab by Lin Yi. Thinking about it, the latest product of the brood's gene editing ability - the poisonous feather-winged horseshoe crab, began to be produced under his control.

　Finally the process is over, you guys can vote if you have monthly votes or something like that (escape)
  　　
  　
  (End of this chapter)