#but for me its a catch-all term for a side effect of sloppy genetic modification resulting in a byproduct self reproducing rogue cells

[gay-artificer]

Sorry if this is too out of nowhere but ive been thinking about how most of the normal slugcats arent really carnivorous outside of eating eggs and certain insects, exept for like gourmand (minimally) or saint (cannot digest any meat wether by design or evolution) and of course artificer and hunter. This makes me kinda theorize that yknow, slugcats arent normally carnivorous, and only gain the ability to eat meat through artificial means (exept for gourman they just do that i guess).

It also makes me theorize that maybe the reason why the two are able to do that is that they have some really corrosive acids/substances in their stomachs, for Arti those being in the form of garbage wastes microorganisms that make them explosive in general.

As for Hunter, well, maybe the reason they turn into the rot is because of the fact that they have the rot in their stomach if that makes sence? Like maybe they were made to have/grow some early stage rot growths in their intestines to be able to digest things they normally couldn't, or parts of their insides were given some rot genome, but wether intentionally or not, that system becomes unstable fast since it can become cancerous with the rot overtaking the body after some time.

My guess is that they're highly adaptable omnivores and lean towards various levels of severity based on environmental factors- It should be noted that insects and eggs are carnivorous food sources as much as meat is, its just a more accessible source. (And if you've ever seen the teeth on insectivores you would not doubt them. Look at the chompers on a shrew. A crickets worse nightmare) In fact if you look at the bulk of the basic slugcats diet pre-downpour its actually mostly small invertebrates- blue fruit is actually insect pupae, making the only vegetative parts of their diet bubble fruit, popcorn plants, slime molds. (Downpour added dandelion peaches, lilypucks, gooieduck (another mold), and glow weed. Its worth noting that many of these are added not just for world variety but to add items into the environment as tools- such as gooieducks not just being a substantial food source but providing a counter to wormgrass) (In this sense even saint can stomach some meat, as they can eat the blue fruit pupae and bug eggs) So thus the question is why pushes a slugcat to seek meat. It could be simply that its high energy payoff- most of the meat-eating slugcats get less energy (food pips) from eating small prey sources like batflies or blue fruit, so they turn to hunting larger prey. You have the higher energy cost of being an active hunter offset by payoff of actually being successful. It could also be that some slugcats simply lack the physiology (strong enough teeth, jaw strength) to tear into corpses and can only effective use small prey, even if they could eat meat successfully as scavengers. Tough hides can actually be a huge problem for scavenging animals if something else hasn't exposed the softer parts of the body, and this is why the first things lost on a corpse tends to be accessible and easy to take things like eyes, things like ravens need something with actual teeth to break the skin.

Buuuuut personally I think its a developmental shift- We see something like it in amphibian species. Its actually really neat stuff- basically, for a lot larval amphibians like tadpoles or salamanders they're naturally herbivorous and feed mostly on algae. However these young are generally limited in how much they can disperse until adults, which means competition for food can be very intense. As a result, in this developmental stage some will turn to predation- or to cannibalism. They grow larger then their vegetarian siblings, and in some species will grow larger jaws or new sets of teeth. They actually see this even behavior in species that are strict carnivores- some of the young are carnivorous but hunt unrelated prey, others specifically engage in cannibalism. Depending on what type of prey they target, the actually animal develops differently. Since we have the slugpups as a basis- who follow a diet pattern in line with Survivor and Monk, that can be assumed to be the 'basic' diet. But some individuals (likely ones in high stress, or low food environments) develop more intense predatory behaviors and physiology in adolescence. Genes can be environmentally flexible (polyphenism and epigenetics) and 'turn on and off' under certain cues, so for iterators it would probably be fairly easy to 'force' a specific type of slugcat.