📗A Compendium of Beasts, Bugs, and Botany

The Explorer's Guide to Surface Life

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This is Hanlon’s Reader, an independent author’s publication. Here you’ll find stories, books, essays, and other things. I’ll be tinkering away here for a while.

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📗A Compendium of Beasts, Bugs, and Botany
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

1. Lotus Wasp Queen

   

   The Lotus Wasp Queen is matriarch of her brood, an equally capable leader, warrior, and builder. Queens who establish new hives seek out areas rich with lotus fruit, which they feed on exclusively. Using chewed wood pulp, she creates a sturdy hive and lays her first worker eggs within—the new hive’s foundation.

2. Lotus Wasp Worker

   

   The first brood of Lotus Wasp Workers construct additional hive material by using their strong pincer-like mandibles to chew steeloak wood into a paper-like pulp. This is used to build walls around the initial structure and create additional hexagonal hive cells for the queen to lay eggs in.

3. Lotus Wasp Warrior

   

   Lotus Wasp Warriors, regardless of their sex, are born sterile. They spend their lives aggressively defending the hive and expanding into new territory, clearing the way for future queens to build hives in favorable locations. Like queens and sentinels, warrior wasps’ chitinous exoskeletons provide extra protection.

4. Lotus Wasp Sentinel

   

   Like the worker wasps, Lotus Wasp Sentinels are generally considered docile unless the hive is threatened, or alerted by a queen’s pheromone signals. In addition to specialized soothing pheromones, sentinel wasps control workers and warriors with vocal trills that are often mistaken for music or birdsong.

5. Octopider

   

   Octopiders, colloquially named for their Earth-based doppelgangers, are a pervasive species with wide evolutionary variety due to their adaptive nature. The planet Surface's unusual tendency for interconnected, globe-spanning river systems instead of large seas and oceans, combined with this creature's amphibious roots and innate curiosity, have enabled the octopider's many forms to flourish. They are often excellent hunters with voracious appetites.

6. Quillworm

   

   The Quillworm may look innocuous, perhaps even cute—but this creature has a deadly and insatiable craving for blood. Somewhere between earthworm and caterpillar, its sharp, needle-like fine barbs form a thick defensive “fur” coated in a natural anesthetic. Typically it is able to pupate after a single feeding.

7. Quillmoth

   

   The beautiful Quillmoth does not share its larval form’s thirst for blood. In fact, it doesn’t feed at all. These ephemeral bugs take flight for just one day before they die. Females retain their sharp needles, while the males shed theirs after pupation in favor of greater wingspan. Mating is almost always a fatal endeavor for the males, leaving the females to secure their clutch of eggs alone.

8. Bearded Mossy Croakbat

What might appear at first glance to be velvety, bright green fur is actually a clever disguise. The Bearded Mossy Croakbat spends much of its life hunting airborne insects, but water is an essential part of its reproductive cycle. They’re born in the water—but they are also conceived there. During mating season, they descend from the skies to find out who can grow the finest coat of sheet moss…

📗Compendium — 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

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