The Last Resort Social Network

[Public]
[Ben is in the lab attached to the museum, holding the video feed pickup not on himself but on one of the research cages. It's better than up to standard for animal treatment standards; Ben figures it's his responsibility.

Inside is mesh netting, and a brick frame from which hang ... what look like two lumps of wet leaves? One's larger than the other.]

It just goes to show that you can't predict what will happen when you introduce new life to an ecosystem. Mostly that turns out to be pretty catastrophic, but sometimes the native species actually adapt.

Take this little creature. [Ben dons a thick glove and reaches carefully into the cage, stroking the smaller of the two bundles. It reveals itself to be a small bat, making a distressed sound at being woken but settling down once its small brain clicks in and it recognizes Ben, bringer of food. It even lets him get the video pickup close to its face before it's had enough: it flaps and flails to a new position.] Native species: Quadratan bat. Small, sharp, even teeth, highly mobile, not very aggressive toward anything that's not a small arthropod. Like other Quadratan animals, they're hermaphroditic. They're also, in their credit, the main predator of the Quadratan silverfish.

It's well adapted to hunt silverfish; as you may've encountered, silverfish like to hide in loosely fractured or joined stone. Well, the bats have a pretty clever way of driving them out. They use a high-frequency signal-- adapted from the echolocation they use to fly-- that agitates the stone and drives their prey out into the open. They're not aggressive, get confused in bright light, and shouldn't be a bother to you.

Now-- for the other specimen.

[He cautiously puts his hand near the larger hanging form, a thing bigger than his fist-- he doesn't even touch it before it burst into motion, pouncing on his hand and trying to get its two large teeth into his glove. Ben lets it savage the thick leather calmly, using its distraction to film it.]

Hylian Keese, not even remotely native to this planet-- looks a bit like a Terran bat, but it's a scavenger as much as anything. See that dentition-- those two large teeth? Not only a wicked bite, but it uses them as a threat. This girl and all her species have a very effective instinct to kill even large prey by driving it out of cover in front of larger predators, or into landscape hazards. Highly aggressive. And some sub-species have adapted to secrete a flammable oil that they ignite by flying near lava-- or any open flame-- allowing them to catch fire without being harmed themselves. It's quite the deterrent to predators or anyone encroaching on their territory. They're dangerous, and if you find one, call the museum. Don't try to wrangle it yourself.

Now, the Keese don't have the adaptation to their sonar that lets them shake silverfish out of the rock around here, but they've started flocking with the native bats who do. Conventional wisdom holds that the larger, more aggressive species would win out, and we'd see a decrease in bat population.

Instead, every bat population we've observed has increased after mixing with Keese. They can't breed with one another and it's not a boom in births-- but individual bats seem to be living longer after they start rubbing shoulders with the Keese. In a literal sense-- they actively socialize with their new neighbors. There are a few theories about why that is, but we'll need more data to pin down the big contributor.

It's a positive story-- especially since the silverfish population seems to be breeding enough to make up for the new predation and we aren't losing an important rung on the Quadratan food chain-- but the lesson to take away is that you can't predict what happens in these situations. And that life is wonderfully adaptable.

[Filtered to Una, Jade]

While I'm thinking about adaptation-- I was looking over some of the survey scans, because I'm researching silverfish along with everything else, for my sins. They thrive in old stone structures-- have you seen these GPR images? Regular, rectangular cavities-- potentially buried ruins. I'm heading out to take a look, and I thought a photographer and an archaeologist might be interested.

[Private to Narvin]
Do we know yet what damn fool set off that spawner?

And are you doing all right?