Pygmy Lyngbakr

With a turn towards predation, the river lyngbakr found itself taking up the mantle of apex predator within the regions it inhabited and dominating a niche that previously had only been held in the open ocean by the hafgufas. No longer would they be content to dine just upon plankton and shoals of tiny gilltails like most other lyngbakrs, for instead they had turned to actively hunting much more sizeable prey, such as seaswimmers and scorpodiles. With time, as competition grew within the great Maineiac river, some descendants of these powerful predators made their way back towards ocean. They did not, however, remain the huge predators that stalked the riverways, but had instead shrunk in size. They were now pygmies amongst their own kind. While still fairly large for a scylarian, this rather dramatic shift in size came about as an adaptation towards hunting. Lacking a very hydrodynamic form - the morphology of most earlier lyngbakrs bore remnants of their ancient scylarian's serpentine form, and were slow, passive planktivores - their tails have begun the process of being selected towards a more lunate shape. Evolutionary pressure is selecting for thinner, taller tails, not unlike those seen in terrorfang hafgufas, but such a process takes time. While the shape would be poorly suited for fast-paced swimming in a larger organism, a much smaller one, meanwhile, would be able to better utilize it, and as such over the generations these lyngbakrs have grown smaller overtime. While they are unable to terrorize anything even close to approaching their own size, they are more than capable of hunting down a variety of smaller prey species, as long as they can either catch them unaware our outpace them. Forming pods of up to thirty members, they loosely group together in the search of prey, relying on their numbers to confuse and overwhelm prey while at the same time deterring would-be predators. Mating occurs year-round, with the resulting offspring being born after nearly a year-long gestation period. Said young will remain with the pod for up to four or five years, after which the males will head off to live on their own or form smaller packs of three to five members, while the females will remain with the original pod. The average lifespan for a pygmy lyngbakr, assuming it doesn't succumb to wounds, disease, predation or otherwise, is about twenty years, though some particularly venerable members may live as long as forty.