The food web along the Ioma starts microscopic, but it never stays small. Thermal leeches and heat-tolerant midges thrive where most creatures would cook, and their swarms become the moving foundation of the ecosystem. Snails, beetles, copepods, and tiny crustaceans sort themselves by temperature band, each one reading the chemistry better than any instrument I own. When I scoop a handful of water, I can usually tell which vent it came from just by the invertebrates wriggling inside, a trick that lines up with the isotherms mapped in Mist-Engine Weather and the contours on the atlas.

Fish and amphibians treat the rift like a sanctuary that’s always open. Thermal minnows and sticklebacks hold territory in warm channels, pike lurk in the cooler sloughs, and migratory species slip in during winter to escape ice-choked rivers. Frogs call weeks before the uplands thaw, and the thermal newts never really stop hunting. In the right pool, amphibian eggs glow against the steam while snow still crusts the bank.

Birds turn the mist into architecture. Ravens larger than any I’ve seen elsewhere nest on vent-warmed ledges, grouse vanish inside fog-thick berry stands, and owls drift through the vapor hunting the vole tunnels that never freeze. Summer piles on ducks, rails, warblers, and swallows that gorge on the insects the heat keeps hatching. Winter replaces them with migrants who should have fled south, but stay because open water and food never entirely disappear.

Mammals stack on top of that abundance. Thermal voles churn the soil year-round, foxes with red coats hunt where tundra cousins would still be white, and elk carve trails through sloughs that would drown heavier animals. Bears shorten their hibernation, wolves split into tight packs that shadow the herds, and lynx stalk the hare that forgot what a deep freeze feels like. Every predator here knows the same truth I do: the fracture never really sleeps, so neither can the life that depends on it, and that ceaseless motion feeds straight into the cultural rhythms in Seasons Along the Rift and Stewardship of the Rift.