Our Tundra is an inhospitable^[1] environment. The only significant food available to herbivores is Lichen, which has a tiny nutritional value of 1. The Tundra is cold too. Staying warm requires the cold tolerance adaptation, which costs +2 size.

An organism must expend 20% of its energy just to survive. A herbivore foraging for lichen cannot have a size greater than 5 or else it will expend more energy in metabolism than it is possible to acquire from eating Lichen.

All organisms have base size 0.1. The cold adaptation (+2) plus the Lichen digestive tract (+1) costs a total of +3 size. A Tundra herbivore has a minimum size of 3.1. A herbivore with size 5.1 is untenable since it expends more energy (1.02) than is possible to obtain from Lichen (1.00).

Players submitted 39 species native to the Tundra. Only 4 of them were viable herbivores: Micropas, Arctic Slug, Northern Nibbler and "lichen" (not to be confused with the foragable "Lichen"). (Multicore's Arctic Fox was a carnivore.)

These species could support little in the way of weapons, armor and speed. They were defenseless. In the first 8 turns, all four of our viable foragers are eaten to extinction.

After the viable herbivores were eliminated, total ecological collapse was inevitable.

The Frostwing Snipper

An honorable mention goes to Nem's Frostwing Snipper, a Speed 10 species that could digest both Lichen and Seeds. The maximum speed made the Frostwing Snipper immune to predation which let it survive the initial carnage. The ability to digest seeds meant that the Frostwing Snipper did consume enough energy on average to more than replace itself.

However, "on average" is not enough. The Tundra's carrying capacity of Frostwing Snippers was too small. Random fluctuations eventually knocked the Frostwing Snipper into extinction.

Winners

None

Eratta

Simon notes that I used 50,000 instead of 1,000 for each species initial energy. Using the correct value of 1,000 doesn't really change anything except everyone dies faster and MatIsk's Porostozer Mamuci (which eats Carrion) takes the place of Frostwing Snipper.