Scavengundi

The scavengundi split from its ancestor the diggerundi and evolved a whole new lifestyle and diet. Like its peaceful ancestor it lives a colonial lifestyle. A scavengundi colony can consist of hundreds of individuals. Unlike its ancestor they only have three castes: workers, soldiers, and the queen. The workers mostly collect the dung at raids and from the ground, dig the tunnels, and raise the young. The soldiers, which are all males, protect the nest, raid other nests, and sometimes even hunt for small fauna. The queen mates and gives birth.

The workers are all females yet they are not fertile; this is because of the hormones in the queen’s urine-sweet. This is only temporary though and when the queen dies one of the workers will replace it. The soldiers on the other hand are all fertile males. Each week a group of chosen soldiers fight each other to death and the winner gets to mate with the queen. After the mating the soldier is killed by the queen’s workers and fed to her. The queen gives birth every week to about 10 babies. They are altricial, and need much care from the workers.

Like their ancestor they house themselves in deep underground nests, containing many chambers. Some are resting places for workers, others are for raising young, one is for the queen, and most are for storing food. Their main food is the dung of macrofauna they gather. Another way they gather this is by raiding nests of other scavengundis or even diggerundis for their shroom-farms there they keep all their dung. Now that they no longer tend to shrooms and the shrooms compete with them on their dung, they have learned to kill the shrooms; this is done by a special workers’ class that does this as well as other tasks. It is possible that this sub-class evolved from the diggerundi farmer class. They now use their puffy cheeks to store the dung they gather back to the nest, since they breathe through their rears they can hold is without having to hold their breath.

In physical changes the warrior and queens grew slightly bigger in order to pester their smaller relatives with ease. One of their back toes evolved into a scythe-like wooden razor that the soldiers use for raids and the workers use for better digging and shroom pestering. Their trunk has grown slightly larger and the trunk horn of the soldiers is even sharper and deadlier. Their squeaks are ultrasonic, and hence inaudible to larger animals. In order to survive in the colder biomes the scavengundis there are often darker, absorbing more light.