Both Tundra and Desert suffered from having too many predators and immediately driving all of the prey to extinction. In the actual world, herbivores evolve, and predators evolve and/or migrate into a ecosystem that already has an herbivore population at equilibrium. Would there be any way to do something like this in the future so that we don't see so many dramatic population crashes?
Our Desert is an inhospitable environment. Carrion, while nutritious, is hard to digest and there's not a lot of it. Species must be adapted to the heat too.
The most dangerous part of the desert is the predators. Two people submitted sandworms.
Only 36 organisms were submitted to the Desert. 23 of them could digest Carrion. Carrion is very nutritious so all 23 were viable foragers.
Generations 1 to 10
A few apex predators did well.
Generations 11 to 50
The apex predators did so well they wiped out all the foragers without maxed out speed or defense. Having extinguished the easy prey, the apex predators proceeded to starve.
Generations 51+
Most of these speccies are identical. They're carrion foragers with maxed-out defense (including antivenom) and nothing else. Everyone who isn't a maximally-efficient invincible forager dies by generation 61.
It's a random walk among equals from here.
Winners
Eratta
Simon notes that I used the wrong starting energy value of 50,000 instead of 1,000. Basically the same thing happens (except faster) when I use the correct energy value.
"Shai-Hulud" is what the Fremen call sandworms. ↩︎