As challenging as arthropods are to draw, I wanted to create a detailed look at one of my two uplifted which I call the Sprites. I actually imagine a story line with these and the other new uplifted the Scurachin who will get their own dedicated post.
Like the rest of the uplifted from my Centauri Universe, the Sprites are hybrids of various Earth animals that possess human level sapience. In their case, the Sprites are a combination of ants, bees, and portia spiders. They consist of four main castes (workers, warriors, drones, and queens) and communicate primarily through pheromones, visuals, and vibrations. The workers, the most numerous caste, and responsible for constructing elaborate nests and communication systems (a network of vibrating web strands) as well as hunting and gathering. Like bees and ants respectively, Sprites are callable of making honey and growing fungi as alternate food sources. Though all castes have venomous vangs, the warriors are the only caste to possess stingers and can spray formic acid. Their role is to protect their colonies as well as assist in hunting more dangerous prey. In normal bee and ant colonies, the drones sole purpose is to breed with the queens (often perishing shorty afterwards). Sprite drones serve a similar purpose but have more individual intelligence due to their larger size they play some leadership roles along with the queens. Being the largest caste members, the queens have the most individual intelligence as their size allows larger brains and more neuron density. Due to this, they play major roles in leadership as well as breed. However, much like bees, sprites actually have a democratic system where important actions (moving locations, gathering spots, attacking targets, etc) are voted on by the other caste members with even the workers suggesting key actions.
As mentioned previously I'll do a dedicated post to my other new uplifted at some point in the future. I'm working full time now so my posts will unfortunately be a little less frequent.
As always, comments and critiques are welcome.
