Tolatongue

Under the cover of winter snow, an intruder breaks into the Switchfangs burrow. Undulating side to side, shifting the dirt with a fusiform tip, the intruder follows the strong scents and the slightest of shifting motions. A youngling squeaks in alarm, but it is far too late as it is pulled out of its burrow, hard wooden spikes digging into its flash. Within a thriving nest of communal Janits, a group of workers barely have time to react as they are picked in groups and one by one, devoured by a toothy oral cone, they are swallowed into a pit of hard wooden spikes, they are helpless as the thick muscular walls of the gizzard close in on them, crushing them together into a fine pulp. Up in the forest canopy, an Ikasaru picks up the vibrations of rustling between the branches. Following the source, the Ikasaru's eyestalks rest on the sight of a serpentine form, a long wormy figure with stretchy green skin between 4 rows of chambered wooden cuticles, expanding into a thick bulbous head at its tip, ending with a toothy oral cone. It has not yet noticed the Ikasaru, there's a blindness to its motion as it seeks the source of the scent, tasting the air within cracks along the cuticles. Its motion seems graceful, 4 long sets of muscles stretch between hardened blood-filled chambers for support, appearing almost like a graceful neck. But that illusion quickly breaks, as It is that very same blindness that makes it blind to the Ikasaru's camouflage, and as it zeros in on its prey, its motions become sharp and jerky, shifting from using blood-filled chambers as support for pull muscles to flooding different chambers to form the pushing force behind of the motion, it appears to advance towards its target in epileptic spasms. It just about misses, and the Ikasaru manages to crawl away, only to find itself captured by the oral ring of another. The two take joy in sharing the meal, they feast and play with it, one swallows it from its tail while the other bites off the limbs and eyes.

Emerging from the mouth of a large woolly biped, this is no worm or serpent, but the tongue of the Tolatongue. Splitting from its Blowtongue ancestor and expanding inland, the Tolatongue catches its prey with a cone of toothy cuticles around the opening of its ancestral tongue trap. Keeping the trap as a permanently internalized gizzard at the end of its tongue, it can devour multiple morsels before having to release its content, allowing it to feast within nests and burrows of hibernating animals, making the best of Drake's harsh winters. Using the muscles remaining from the ancestral internalized fingers to pull the rest of the cuticles inwards and not stand in the way of digging through dirt and snow, it was able to form segmented blood pressure chambers. These provide anchor points for the pulling muscles when full and a pushing force in the process of flooding the chamber, creating a very efficient internal support system for digging and sifting through dirt and snow. Crawling head first into the mouth under a flashy cheek flap hanging over the side of the mouth while its base is slurped in from the front, the morsel-filled tongue will crawl inwards through the cheek flap and reach into the back of the primary stomach, shifting through guano and pushing it out of the other cheek flap. It will squeeze out the freshly meshed food from the gizzard, and place it directly onto the blind gut's wall, helping them overcome the inefficiencies of a blind gut. The tongue quickly curls up like a snake within the throat pouch and positions its tip as a mouth within a mouth, exposing its olfactory receptors to the open air and preparing to launch at a moment's notice.

Satisfied with the day's hunt, the Tolatongue will make its way to join with the rest of its banquet. Following the trails of familiar scents, while urine sweat from its throat pouch marks a new trail for the future, the Tolatongue tracks the area from which it came. Getting closer, it starts hearing familiar howling at a distance and responds with its own. Approaching with a swagger and swaying its buttstril side to side, its howling will sound like it is coming from multiple sources, confusing potential predators nearby. Using the shape of its face, quite literally all ears, leading into its ancestral dual tympanic membrane system, each specialized in its range, the Tolatongue can listen carefully to the soft crawling of potential prey and easily differentiate it from the distant howling of its banquet. Coordinating along the howl chain, they will gradually band together in mutual protection as they approach an approximate center between the sources of positive howling and further away from disappointed and fearful ones, often coming together in a new resting location somewhere in the middle, shifting the banquet's gathering towards higher resource concentrations and away from danger.

Back at the banquet, The Tolatongues joyfully rub their tongues on each other's throat pouches, an act of mutual recognition involving the tongue's olfactory receptors and the signature smell of the urine sweat pores. The banquet is no random collective, but rather an intricate network of relationships, bonds, personal reputations, subtle competitions, and occasional conflicts. They will groom and clean each other's tongues and wool using their prehensile tusks, and share food remaining in their tongue gizzard, an act critical for the banquet's survival during the cold seasons.

As springtime approaches and the thick covers of wool began to shed, the act of food sharing takes on a different meaning. Females are larger and will be more exclusionary towards younger females reaching maturity, leaving the banquet with a ratio of 3 to 5 males for every female. To secure reproductive success, the male Tolatongue will grab the tastiest mixture of morsels it can find, cover it with gametes, and fill the rest of the gizzard with a special type of milk, offering the mixture to a female as a nuptial gift. The milk, initially evolving as a secretion of sugary oils to entice females and augment the male's nuptial gifts, was quickly adapted to feeding the young. Filled with anthocyanin and acids that help the newborns regulate their digestion, giving it a color and flavor not too dissimilar to raspberry syrup. It is produced by two glands that expand from the back of the neck, connecting to a lamp of fat storage at the rear. The space between, or "cleavage", exclusive to males, formed an ideal nest for newborns and has since evolved further into that role, with male head crests expanding backward to cover the nest.

Females will spend most of the warm seasons pregnant, giving birth to 3 or 4 litters a summer, while each male will carry its litter on its back for a little over a year. While the male-to-female ratio might seem unusual, it has allowed the banquet to maximize its reproductive opportunities without sacrificing the investment into each young, forming an efficient K-selected reproductive unit. As the young mature, they will increasingly spend more time outside of their nests, learning from their fathers, exploring their environment, and memorizing the locations their survival might depend upon, for a Tolatongue would never forget the location of a promising Switchfang burrow.