Wub

Over millions of years, some Blind Wingworms split from the main lineage and began to lose their capacity for flight. As they already had few predators to worry about, outside of the occasional adolescent Signaltail on land or Vicious Volox in the water, this evolutionary transition did not prove to be too unfavorable, and was retained in future generations. Continued competition with their flying kin for grazing spots, however, would continue to put pressure upon this group of flightless mutants. As such, natural selection selected for those that grew to smaller sizes, as they would require fewer resources to survive, all awhile their population, though limited, slowly spread towards the entrance of the cave system. Inevitably, competition with their flying kin would lead to this group to split even further, forcing some of them to begin to migrate out of the Sublyme Limestone Caves in search of space and food. While the descendants of this group would go onto thrive, those land-bound kin who had remained within the cave system slowly died out..

Life outside the cave system proved to be an incredibly lucrative opportunity for the early ancestors of the Wubs. The warmth of the sun, compared to the cooler depths of their ancestral cave homes, helped to essentially kickstart their metabolisms into high gear. To satiate their newfound hunger, they needed to adapt their diets accordingly, and microbes would no longer do. With their numerous sharp "teeth", they no longer scrape away at patches of microbial colonies, but now instead utilize them to burrow through the outmost layers of floral flesh in order to reach the vital fluids hidden within. Gorging upon this treasure trove of vital nutrients, Wubs must consume up to twice their own body weight every day or else risk death by starvation. Thankfully, the continent of Drake is covered in vast forests of suitable food sources, as well as plenty of decaying floral matter and rotting corpses upon which the Wubs may feed.

With an overabundance of new, nutritious foods to consume, the growth rate of the Wubs is significantly faster than that of its ancestors, and their turnover rate, and thus population numbers, is quite high. This isn't without cost, though, as this rapid growth has also led to significantly reduced lifespans, with most Wubs rarely living beyond one to two months at most. Many instead only last a few weeks before being killed by one of the typical culprits, such as exposure, starvation, injury, disease, or predation.

To combat a high mortality rate, reproduction in the Wub needed to evolve accordingly. When two healthy Wubs meet, will engage in sexual intercourse with one another in order to spread their genes. As they lock their tails together, the sheathe that has evolved to protect their otherwise vulnerable reproductive opening will spread apart, revealing the slit within. After several seconds of direct contact, genetic material will be exchanged and the eggs of both Wubs will be fertilized, after which they will subsequently go their separate ways. Should both survive, they will go on to lay nearly a hundred eggs. While roughly 90% of the resulting babies will die, more than enough will survive to help carry on the species.

Morphologically, Wubs have changed in a number of ways. As they are flightless, their middle pair of wings are almost always covering their bodies except when they produce sound, and in function they are not unlike the elytra of earth beetles. The frontmost pair of wings, already adapted for echolocation, have developed a thicker coating of feathery hairs for picking up sounds. The third pair of wings have perhaps undergone the most extreme adaptation of all. Now covered in chitin, it is a stiff structure no longer utilized in directional flight but instead rapidly beat them against a similarly chitin-covered - and now eyeless - tail segment. This produces a series of sharp chirps, which helps the Wubs "see" the world around them as well as communicate with one another. But this is not the only way they see. As they are no longer cave-bound, their eyes have begun to function once more, though they are now only capable of detecting differing levels of light and shadow.

Locomotion has changed as well. While most worms have legs held underneath their bodies, the Wubs have evolved an extra set of joints in their legs which allow them to hold them by their sides. This allows them to better grip onto the surfaces of flora and such, as well as allow them to more quickly move about. This is not that dissimilar to how their distant cousins, the Janits, move about. A case of convergent evolution, though in the Janits the jointed limbs were formed by heavily modified wings rather than alternations to the legs like it is in the Wubs.

- - -

While Wub populations can be relatively stable most of the time, on rare occasions hordes of them may arise. Should conditions be just right, they can explode in terms of population numbers, leading to vast swarms of them crawling over every available flora as they seek to satiate their hunger. With so many of them, huge swaths of forest can be drained dry, leading to a lack of food for large herbivores for a period of time, though smaller hunters will often experience population booms of their own as they gorge upon the Wub hordes, which is often enough to return them to reasonable numbers.