Rustslider

The Rustslider has replaced its ancestor, as it has refined a few oddities of its predecessor. The Rustslider still uses chunks of magnetic metals as makeshift cilla to row its body across the ocean floor, helping it move despite lacking true legs. They are guided by three organs on their head that detect smells, which lead them to decaying matter, iron, and others of their kind. They also have developed magnetoreception, to better track hematite down.

When starving, their bodies will begin to cannibalize their own iron shells rather than eat their fake cilla.

Underneath their body they have pairs of simplistic jawless mouths every few segments. Below their front chemoreception organs they have a true brain, but their mouths each have a lump of neurons to better taste their meals and feel the terrain they slide across. Because of these traits, the Rustslider can reproduce by fragmentation, if a Rustslider gets cut into pieces those pieces can regrow into an adult. This is a possibility as while they have an iron shell they have a large number of segments, giving it weak points.

For more traditional reproduction, the Rustsliders are hermaphrodites, and reproduce by spawning. Once they detect enough of their species, they will release a cloud of gametes, which will combine into zygotes. Their young will spend time as plankton, using their lighter bodies and tails to swim through the water. At this point their sensory organs have not fully split, so they have less precise awareness of the location of food. They also have not fully developed their hematite shells, so they are fairly easy to eat. Thankfully they are r-strategists, so the large amount of deaths do not endanger their species survival.