Species created by: TheiaTheGondia
The Terani ( VERY WIP)
The Terani were the dominant species of the milky way for a million years and will continue to be until the end of the 25th century. They are giant descendants of dobsonflies that use other species (often humans) as hosts during their larval stage which lasts around 50 years, they have build a massive presence in the milky way and farm humans that they transplanted from earth over the last 500,000 years.
biology:
The Terani evolved from dobsonflies on the planet Taurus in the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, Taurus was a planet the Vaalbarans seeded with life around 50 million years ago. The Terani originally evolved to use humanoid temnospondyls called Lepids as hosts but after they achieved space travel and jumped over to the milky way they moved on to humans as humans have a longer lifespan and so could be taken as hosts as adults allowing the Terani larvae to be more productive through its life.
The Terani only take on hosts in the larval stage during this time they bury themselves into a vertebrates back and fuse to their spinal cord and take control of their nerve endings granting them full motor control of the body, they also have long tendrils that tap into the vertebrates optic nerve allowing them to see through their eyes, removal of the parasite is nearly impossible without rendering the host completely paralyzed.
Then the larvae feeds on the hosts blood throughout its 50 year time in the larval stage, this is also very important for the terani because adult terani do not have hands so they can only make technology using a host with that has hands.
After 50 years the larvae will burry itself further into the host killing it, and eating the host from the inside and transforming into the Terani adult form that resembles a giant insect with huge mandibles, colorful wings and a tall stance, after this time it will live for another 20 years where it will find a mate to reproduce to create more larvae.
95% of Terani are male (drones) with the few Females being queens
Also unlike dobsonflies terani can eat as adults and thier mandibles are truely lethal weapons.
Society:
Being insects, Terani society is not very understandable to humans, they believe in the good of their hive and are very brutal not thinking twice about killing an unproductive member of their hive if it's in their best interest to do so.
They live in giant biomechanical spaceships called hive-ships, these ships are a mixture of organic and inorganic components, most of their technology they have they copied from other species such as the Vaalbarans.
They sometimes even augment their hosts with either cybernetic or biologically modified parts to make them better tools for serving the hive.
Each hive-ship has a single Queen along with a few drones exchanged from other hive-ships, the drones mostly wait around to breed with the queen sometimes aiding the larvae (which are inside hosts) with manual labor or defending the hive in case of invasion.
But the vast majority of the work is done by the larvae who maintain technology, fly the ship, perform scientific research and defend the hive. The larvae also sometimes disguise their hosts as normal members of the hosts species in order to infiltrate the societies of their hosts species.
History:
The Terani have been the dominant force of the Milky way ever since the Fall of the Vaalbarans and have seeded many worlds with humans to be used as a supply of hosts. They come back to their seeded planets once every few thousand years to get more hosts after the supply on a given planet has replenished itself. It was their arrival on Earth that alerted humanity to the state of the galaxy which motivated humanity to develop space-travel technology of their own, 25% of humanity was lost to the bugs in the year 2088.