Food web

Plants turn light and water into food. The creatures eat them in different ways, and each way needs a different body: grazers on open grass, berry eaters among the shrubs, swimmers on the algae of the lakes. Nobody assigned these roles: they appear when a lineage happens to be good at one of them. Some creatures come to eat meat too, from carcasses or by biting. The arrows are as thick as the share of creatures living that way right now.

A creature counts for a way of living by its genes: the diet gene (land or water) and the taste for sweet food. Many creatures sit in between and count for none. "Mostly meat" means the meat gene is above 0.6. Hunters from outside (Shades and Prowlers) are kept to a few by a fixed rule written before the world began.