Terra 2: A Second Tree Of Life

Ants, Termants and Lesser Kiwis

15 Million Years Post Establishment

Symbiotic relationships have existed on Terra 2 for upwards of 13 million years, with some of the most unexpected clades coming to work together. Roses and tranboo, ophids and wormwoods, and, rather strangely, ants and kiwis. Or rather, a modern representative of both, those being the termants and lesser kiwis in southern Darsi. Together, these two wildly unrelated organisms have become a bizarre example of symbiosis and planted the seeds for a strange, strange lineage of future species.

Ants

Ants as a whole have been doing exceptionally well on all of Terra 2's landmasses, but on Darsi especially they have thrived, creating massive super colonies that stretch for upwards of a hundred miles. The ants that remain unchanged, or at least closely resemble their ancestors, are common in Darsi and all of Terra 2 for that matter; most are herbivorous, travelling in massive hoards above ground to climb tranboo and lavender descendants (in Darsi, lavenders are the primary flowering plants opposed to dandelions in Okiina and Almara), shredding their leaves and satisfying their insatiable hunger. A small but very noticeable few species have even chosen to become predatory, attacking and overwhelming small mammals and birds, dragging their corpse back to a new, special chamber in the nest; the slaughterhouse. Usually adjacent to the queen's lair, the slaughterhouse is a large room (compared to ants) that so called "ravager ant" colonies (indigineous to southern Darsi) store, kill and butcher their prey. The ravager ants, along with many other species including the termants, are distant relatives of ancient kiwi ants that formed an initial symbiosis with kiwis around 1 or 2 million years after Terra 2 was abandoned, though ravagers and more have now given up on this ancestral relationship. After being swarmed by ravagers, prey will either die from the many bites that the worker ant's enlarged mandibles inflict, die from being ripped apart inside the slaughterhouse or be stored and guarded by soldier ants until the colony is hungry, ultimately starving to death, as the ravager ants have yet to figure out that their livestock also need feeding. For the victims of the ravager ants, it is death by a thousand cuts. The ravager ant's large size of around 1.1 inches has resulted in them living in smaller colonies with fewer ants, numbering at around 500 in small colonies and upwards of 5,000 in larger, super colonies. These colonies, while small, engage in frequent combat with one another over territory or food, with patrols of soldier ants (the ravager ant soldier is the largest ant on the planet besides their queens, growing to 1.4 inches) traversing the land in organized lines and infiltrating other nests, dismembering and killing as many enemy colonists as they can, stealing their larder of meat. Different, unrelated colonies can also often team up against common enemies who, too, have allies, culminating in wars that span hundreds of square miles and last years, decades even. These wars are intense and full of blood, resulting in full-scale destruction of tens of supercolonies. War tactics in the ravager ant population are amazingly sophisticated, involving complex pheromone trails to communicate with allies or smell enemies, visual indicators such as small structures made of pebbles, constructed by workers, to identify friendly territory and even so called "outposts", small temporary colonies used by travelling soldier ants to rest and feed before continuing into battle.