ENEMIES & INIMICAL LIFEFORMS

SANGHA VARDH' ROOWLH (Swarming/Overwhelming - Enemy/Parasite)
What's worse than The Flood from HALO or The Vang from Christopher Rowley's books?

Sangha Vardh' Roowlh - Pre-History and Evolution
Unlike The Flood and more like The Vang, SV are a proper species, with distinct sub-species branching off. The SV achieved sentience in the warm oceans of their homeworld among reefs and barely submerged mountains, over time expanding and moving into ocean-based marshlands and swamps.

They evolved from predatory and parasitic Dinoflagellates with complex lifecycles that allowed them to survive under virtually any extreme condition. Eventually, they evolved to Mollusc-level and retained much from their past in their physical capability, making them extremely adaptable and lethally capable, assuring their place as the up-and-coming Dominant form of life, especially as they could parasitically exploit many other species in their environment as food or for other purposes as 'tools'.

Eventually, they moved onto land as well, yet retaining many molluscoidal and amphibious characteristics and began expanding into already occupied ecological niches and conflicting with land-based life that had preceded them. An evolutionary war began in earnest and the outcome was never in doubt as the SV adapted faster and more efficiently, surviving the changes in environment unscathed and rising again with superior numbers vs those of the species whom had their numbers diminished due to environmental shifts.

In the end, Invertebrates ascended to dominate this world.

Evolution continued and the Sangha Vardh' Roowlh achieved Sentience, and with it, tool-use and then tool-making. Reef-group conflicted in wars with other reef-groups and against those dwelling in the submarine mountains and across the land. Unlike other lifeforms, in this War period, the prize was not merely territory, but also the consumption of the rival group and it's DNA, allowing the victor to add desireable characteristics from the defeated to their own...and one subspecies group with a marginally higher intelligence and cunning than the rest exploited it's edge mercilessly, and emerged the victor, and became the Species.

Rise Of The Invertebrates
The Sangha Vardh' Roowlh began exploiting selective-breeding of lower lifeforms in addition to wholly synthetic tool-making. They discovered how to directly influence the genetic expressions in lower lifeforms and began using such to tailor lifeforms very specifically for specific reasons, snuffing out the developing sentience in several Primate-like species in the process as they were adapted to be more useful as Hosts and raised only domestically as livestock, including one Primate species very similar to Homo' Australopithecus from Earth.

Over time, technology expanded and advanced, as did their ability in manipulating and modifying genetic expressions in lifeforms, extending to even more lifeforms and greater degress of engineering lifeforms for tailored purposes.