The Culling

It was possibly the most drastic measure I have ever taken to lower the population of a wolfling run.

I am pretty determined about making sure that when I cull, the culling method is avoidable, so that the intelligent and/or genetically superior norns are the ones most likely to survive and breed. But maybe this was a bit too harsh.

I used an agent that flooded the hub, so each and every newly hatched norn had to pass through the waterlogged hub if they were to eat, survive, and continue breeding.

Well... that did the trick. Eventually, the population went down from over two hundred to about thirty. I drained the hub and let the run continue as normal.

It's been pretty thriving since. They're still breeding a lot but there seems to be a bit of an antigen 0 epidemic going around that's keeping the population in check. The pair of banshee grendels are still bumming around in the workshop ready to smack around the newborns if they don't run for safety fast enough, and the stinking stump plant sits in the hub offering glycotoxins to foolish creatures.

At one point, however, I discovered a surprisingly effective culling method: one of the banshees survived to adulthood and apparently went on a complete rampage, practically wiping out the population. I had to import some old norns and clone them to keep the population going-- twice. Finally they managed to wipe him out and the population is returning to normal, but that's something I'll need to keep in mind for the next time the population explodes. Maybe I'll start a grendel wolfling run for the purpose of having some killing machines on hand. It seems to be their weakness-- while the run has managed to survive disease epidemics and a flooded hub, it was nearly wiped out by a single, very angry banshee.

The run is up to generation 59. The population has completely homogenized-- all norns have zebra heads, arms, and tails with chichi bodies and legs. Shame that bondi body never dominated the run, it really was very pretty. I am hoping for some color mutations soon... now that the population is smaller, color mutations will be more likely to work their way into the dominant gene pool.

I sort of miss my norns in my Girls Night world... but I have been extremely busy and that's the wonderful thing about wolfling runs-- they don't require much maintainence at all.