Biat-Eating Flunejaw

The biat-eating flunejaw split from its ancestor. It is exactly what its name suggests--a flunejaw that eats biats. But under its generic appearance lies a hidden adaptation that allowed it to expand its range far beyond the river--it no longer needs to lay its eggs in water.

While other descendants of the flunejaw opted to evolve an amniotic egg, the biat-eating flunejaw instead evolved a method to keep its eggs moist even when they’re far from a water source. Like some terran frogs, a female biat-eating flunejaw will produce a secretion from her oviduct which she can then kick into a foamy froth, in which she lays her eggs. The production of this foam nest can take several hours, over the course of which many different males will arrive to fertilize some of the eggs within. When the nest is completed, the exterior dries into a papery sheet that protects the interior from desiccation, and the mother will hide it from potential predators using leaves and other debris. She then abandons the nest.

Upon hatching, baby biat-eating flunejaws resemble “hopper”-stage tadpoles and are kept moist by the foam. They eat any eggs that fail to hatch, and sometimes each other, until they finish developing into scaley miniature adults. Then, they claw through the exterior of the foam nest and switch to a diet mostly consisting of smaller fauna until they are big enough to start eating biats instead, which it hunts by stealth.

The biat-eating flunejaw is generally colored to match the soil in a given region, as its body is low to the ground, though melanism is common in the darker old-growth forests. It is solitary, though only especially territorial when there’s less food. In the colder parts of its range, it burrows underground to brumate over winter.