Super-colonies have begun to form, combining their efforts to produce the largest single colonies of any insect ever documented with likely populations reaching into the trillions, each and every one of which is a member of a single cohesive colony providing food for a series of underground fungus gardens that might extend 100 feet bellow ground.
Underground, colonies of the insects now extend for hundreds of miles in all directions under the ground. The domain of the leaf-cutter ant, innumerable billions of these insects still scurry in hordes throughout the forest, gathering leaves and shoots at a rate only surpassed by the incredible growth of the grass they feed on, with shoots rising from expansive rhizomes at up to four feet per day. Among the fastest growing of all plants, they spread and filled in a world otherwise without trees at a phenomenal rate, by now growing in dense and often mono-cropped thickets from pole to pole wherever sufficient soil moisture allows, leaving expansive grasslands only where precipitation is too minimal for the growth of bamboo woodland. It did not take long for the prairie grasses that initially covered the world to be pushed back by their distant relatives, the hard-wooded bamboo, as they rapidly spread and shaded the land of a world which offered them no competition. The brief age of insect dominion begins to wane as a growing diversity of birds begin to displace them.įive million years after the first canary birds were freed upon a world of endless grassland and meadow, the world of Serina has already undergone several major transformations.
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