Treehook Tamow

The Treehook Tamow split from its ancestor and moved further inland, making its home in mixed, woodland, and rainforest habitats where the new giant obsidian trees are present. Its digging claws became more hooked, allowing it to become arboreal. It is smaller and it has lost its back spikes so that it may fit between branches more easily. Its dark, faintly striped coloration helps it blend in with the branches of the black trees as well as the dark leaf litter below. It has taken on a more stable semi-plantigrade stance. Similar to its ancestor, it is social and lives in big groups, or colonies, which work together to construct nests.

To the Treehook Tamow, the giant trees with their many branches are both food and habitat. It consumes their leaves as well as the parasitic flora growing on them, and it will construct complex communal treehouses from sticks, leaves, and mud deep in the branches. The mud is obtained by climbing down from the trees after rain, gathering a mouthful of it, and climbing back up. The mud is mainly used to plug up gaps in the walls; the Treehook Tamow is capable of building without it, but it can serve as some protection from water damage in the rainier parts of its range. The treehouses have multiple floors and can have entrances leading off to different branches. The exact appearance of the treehouse can vary somewhat, but the most common appearance consists of sticks woven into a roughly spherical shape as much as 10 meters across and connected to other such spheres by either branches or more woven sticks. This nest structure is based partially on instincts inherited from the Treehook Tamow’s ancestor, the Pickaxe Tamow, and its more distant ancestor, the Marine Tamow, but elaborated on by learned behavior.

A given colony of Treehook Tamows will consist of several families of parents and joeys, but the breeding female of one of the families will be the leader of the entire colony. The reason for a female leader is connected to construction of the communal treehouse. As safe nests are required for raising joeys, female Treehook Tamows are naturally anxious about any potential for catastrophic nest failure (that is, the nest falling apart and dumping its inhabitants out of the tree), so therefore a female leader will be quicker to notice dangerous mistakes than a male leader would be. Leadership is inherited by firstborn female joeys, but leadership can also change if a leader is too aggressive or lets too many catastrophic mistakes get through, causing the rest of the colony to “revolt” (that is, run her out of the colony). Despite female leaders being the default, male leaders still also occur fairly often. The Treehook Tamow is monogamous and does not fight over mating rights.

The Treehook Tamow, like most Shrews, has marsupial-like reproduction. It gives birth to fetus-like offspring no bigger than a grain of rice which must nurse in a pouch on their mother’s underbelly. As they grow larger, the offspring will eventually leave the pouch and start riding on their mother’s back until their tail hooks are developed enough for them to hang from branches. The insides of nests may have sticks embedded in the walls meant specifically for joeys to practice using their tails without any risk of falling out of the tree, an innovation made possible by the relatively high intelligence it inherited from its ancestor. Though the Treehook Tamow technically gives birth to as many as three dozen tiny offspring at a time, it only has 6 nipples, so only up to 6 offspring will survive to adulthood.

In the more open parts of its range, the Treehook Tamow will walk on the ground to new trees. It is more vulnerable to predation during this time, as it is when it walks on the forest floor as well.