Caliga

The caliga is a burrowing carnivore that lives 200 to 340 meters below sea level. It uses two contrasting methods for getting food. One is waiting for a bottom-feeding frabuki or scuttler to pass by. Once the frabuki or scuttler is close enough, the caliga will suddenly snap out, mash the prey against a rough, calcified palate, and then swallow it. It uses a calcified palate instead of teeth because the teeth of its ancestors are nearly microscopic studs on its jaws. What appears to be teeth are merely interlocking jawbone protrusions. The other strategy is eating whatever food falls from above. Two of its eyes are fixed upwards, always looking for prey above it, and its mouth is pointed upwards too. Even the gills on its snout are are pointed up, so it can detect any food that happens to fall outside its range of vision. Only one pair of eyes is focused on food on the seafloor, but, considering it is helped by the caliga's electricity-sensing chin strips, it is sufficient. Caligas make a burrow with their fins, jaw, and mouth. The fins are shorter and broader than that of its ancestor, helping it dig. The caliga shoves dirt with its strong jaw, and may relocate stones by grabbing them with mouth and placing them outside the burrow. While its chin-strips help stabilize the caliga on as it lays on the seafloor, it may also use them to sweep fallen dirt back to its fins. When it does so, it alternates: left strip pushes dirt to left fin, left fin pushes dirt to the outside, then left strip goes back to stabilizing and the right strip pushes dirt. It almost never swims, giving its lower tail fin opportunity to specialize in something else. The lower tail fin has split at the tip, forming another stabilizer. The three points of its stabilizers (the right chin strip, left chin strip, and lower tail fin) make the caliga tripod-like. However, most of the time the caliga's tail is hidden within its burrow, with only the caliga's head poking out.