Hypnotizer Waxface

Hypnotizer Waxfaces are an intelligent species, roughly on par with crab-eating macaques. Their use of tools gives them an advantage in taking down large prey or splitting apart meat from a carcass, though its advantages are limited due to its poor ability to actually craft tools.

Diet
Similarly to polar bears, their preferred foods are fatty, large fauna that get their food from the sea, but it's adaptable enough to eat all sorts of things. Tilepillars, Sayronts, Acucravats, Flumpuses and Gentonnas are its favorites, which aren't necessarily the most common in its diets. Gentonnas' thick blubber, starvation resistance, cold resistance, anti-predator adaptations and unique diet among large Fermian fauna mean they are, deep into winter, often the fattiest, otherwise in good condition, and the most available of all its suitable prey.

Tools
Their solitary lives seriously constrain the spread of new ideas, much less any community culture. Indeed, the only way their ideas spread much more than a genetic trait would is when one Hypnotizer Waxface is the model for a behavior to its mate, and the mate may, if their offspring are grown and its mate dies, take another mate and demonstrate that behavior to another.

Hypnotizer Waxfaces use spars of wood as tools. These tools are separated into two types: sharp-spars and broad-spars. Long, sharpened spars are used for hunting large prey or scaring off would-be competitors, though it is occasionally used for stabbing at the limbs of especially large and durable carcasses, functioning as an inefficient way to cut apart meat. Smaller spars with broader tips are used to uncover food in the sand or silt, to flip over stones, and occasionally to scrape sand off a carcass. Other than sharpening or narrowing the tips of spars using their tusks or mouth-ridges, Hypnotizer Waxfaces have little ability to modify tools and often takes them pre-made from local Shrogs.

Though the species as a whole can use various tools, some tools or techniques are limited to the populations that first came up with them, due to the lack of cultural spread, so any individual Hypnotizer Waxface only uses, on average, to 1-3 kinds of tools on anything approaching a regular basis.

Lacking a language, or even a sophisticated body language, they learn only by direct observation or experience. This is typically limited to young 'watching" (actually echolocating) their parents closely as they show how to use tools. Due to the limits of how many tools they use and how they learn how to use them, they cannot figure out how to use completely novel tools they find.

Dexterous Physical Adaptations
Lacking fingers or even a typical trunk, it manipulates objects using the back of its "neck" (actually a proboscis), the underside of its head, its mouth, mouth-ridges (similar to the beak-ridges of a goose) and tusk-jaws, a thumb-like spur on its back, and its toes. Changes to various parts of its body make manipulating objects somewhat easier than for its ancestor, if still awkward.

The back of its neck, or neck-palm, is bare and rough, and is used as a sort of crude arm when holding large tools. It is used roughly equivalently to a human carrying a stick by curling in an arm towards the chest. The young's neck-palms sport more feathers, but the feathers there are loose, and easily fall off as they handle large tools. The underside of its head, or "chin-palm", is sensitive. It something like a human palm, though much less sensitive. A Hypnotizer Waxface uses the sensory information from the underside of the head to adjust its grip when holding staffs, since its jaws themselves aren’t very sensitive.

For small objects, it simply sucks up small tools into its mouth, holding them by a combination of its mouth ridges and tusk-jaws. A lifetime of handling tools this way rounds down the points of its mouth ridges, but it is no threat to survival due to its use of various tools for killing prey and slicing apart meat.

A tough, calcified, somewhat bone-like spur grows like a horn from a small bare patch on its back, and early on its life grows within its body and fuses with its internal braincase, or "sauce". The spur is a sort of inflexible thumb that stabilizes the spars it grips.

Hypnotizer Waxfaces carry tools on their backs, amid coarse feathers. The feathers are softer and denser in the winter and when a female is carrying her offspring. The denser feathers may interfere with grip on their neck-palms and chin-palms, making them a little less dexterous.

Behavior Between Mated Pairs
When a female is carrying offspring, her mate is likely to pick up and carry her tools. More intelligent females will proactively, unwittingly use their mates as “pack animals” by loading tools on his back while she’s carrying offspring. However, they are not quite so intelligent they easily adapt to this unusual behavior: they have no language to convey the necessity of one of the pair carrying tools while the other carries the offspring. Usually, the female of a mated pair must add tools onto her mate's back surreptitiously so he doesn’t shake off the extra weight. Similar stealthiness may be used when filching spars of wood from Shrogs, when abandoned Shrog nests are unavailable.

Their mating ritual involves prolonged observation, or "staring" (via echolocation, as they have no eyes) and “holding chins”, where they brush the undersides of the jaws together. Mated pairs periodically "stare" at each other and hold chins as a bonding ritual. They can select a new mate each year, although they commonly stay with the same one.

Relationship with Gentonnas
Hypnotizer Waxface often live near populations of Gentonnas, who do not fear them. Hypnotizer Waxfaces protect Gentonnas only inadvertently: predators that would eat Gentonnas are also threats to Hypnotizer Waxfaces' young and have overlapping diets. On the whole, living near Hypnotizer Waxfaces reduces predation on Gentonnas overall, especially for their young, and so fearing Gentonnas has not proven useful.

As much as Hypnotizer Waxfaces like the taste of Gentonna flesh, Gentonnas flee into the water too readily when frightened in warmer seasons, whether by a botched slaughter or predators other than Hypnotizer Waxfaces approaching. Gentonnas are also somewhat difficult to kill and dismember due to the process requiring trickery and tools.

When food is scarce (usually during winter), it lures a Gentonna away from the herd, sometimes with Mangot fruit-leaves, beyond the ability of other Gentonnas to see it, such as behind a rock. It slaughters the selected prey with a large spar (or spear filched from a Shrog) to the underbelly, usually after knocking it over first. It preferentially picks late-born juveniles or runts; they are easier to knock over, kill, and dismember.

It is more effective at luring away just one Gentonna from the herd and preventing the herd from noticing when another Hypnotizer Waxface is distracting the herd by repeatedly adjusting its neck shape on a staff in a rapid, conspicuous way. This “dance”, called “the hypnosis dance” or more humorously “the distraction dance”, varies among individuals, and even among individual occasions. For mated pairs, one may do a “group choreography” with several of its offspring (half-grown or more) all distracting the Gentonnas at the same time. Lacking a language or much ability to communicate, the sequence of pulling out and killing a Gentonna while another distracts it is often fumbled in some way.

It will attack any predator that gets too close to its Gentonnas, but especially Shrogs: their intelligence, use of spears, and good swimming ability make them the biggest threat to their "favorite foods". Populations that more frequently encounter Shrogs almost universally carry long, spear-like tools, which may be filched from the Shrogs themselves.

Other Details
Their waxy, waterproof feathers allow them to swim. Though their broader toes help them swim faster than their ancestor, they are not especially fast nor agile in the water.

It takes time to learn how to run without having large tools fall off its back, though, in a hurry, it will permit the tools to fall.