'Member the eusocial swarming carnivorous zap rats I mentioned a while back? Well what if they're not just eusocial, but a quasi colonial organism? They're physically stuck together in a manner similar to a rat or squirrel king, perhaps with tree sap, which is how it often happens to squirrels. They learn to not just survive like this, but thrive, coordinating moving, hunting, and feeding.

They don't have a hive or borrow, rather the entire colony, queen, young and all, moves in unison. The queen is at the center of the swarm, constantly popping out little zap ratlings. They're nurtured near the center of the swarm and gradually migrate to the edges of the mass as they age. Food and air are transported inward via vacuoles that form at the periphery and work inward, ditto for waste moving out.

The fittest and strongest members of the swarm form the outer shell, and are responsible for coordinating movement and engaging in combat. Prey is engulfed ameba-style, stunned by the rats' biocapacitors so it can't struggle, and devoured by thousands of tiny mouths.

Wow that went places I wasn't expecting when I started writing this.

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