Swarmhunter

Swarmhunters split from the ventrappers in order to pursue their prey, whereas their ancestors were simply forced to feed on young vent darkswarmers that happened to swim by their tubes. They now feed mostly on rearing swarmers, moving along the sea floor for traces of their prey.

They have coincided their mating season with that of the vent darkswarmer, for dubious reasons. To properly exploit this, they have developed eyespots that are only really useful to detect bioluminescence, and it is used to locate the darkswarmers that they require for their mating cycle. When they locate one, they will swim to it and cement their eggs onto its body before swimming off to continue their own lives.

When the young finally hatch, they do so from the egg side attached directly to the host's skin, and burrow into the swarmer. They will eat small bits of their prey as it continues to live, slowly destroying the host from the inside-out. Almost always, the swarmer will die in the process of growing the young of the swarmhunter, and by the time it has died, they will burrow out of its skin and begin life in the open water. Larvae will continue a semi-parasitic lifestyle for a time, feeding on the same rearing swarmers that their adult forms will, only due to their size they will only initially take small chunks from it, but as they grow, the amount of flesh they take will get larger and larger until they are consuming entire swarmers.

Much of their brain is dedicated to deciphering their prey's bioluminescence, to keep from heading towards an incorrect species. In the same aspect, they have developed certain bands of segments to become clear, appearing black naturally due to the darkness behind them. These are used to produce complex-looking displays that swarmhunters communicate with. Despite their seemingly-complex nature, there is only two "words": one showing willingness to mate and one to indicate feeling threatened; the latter of the two will cause all other swarmhunters who happen to see the display to move away from the area, hopefully allowing them to survive.