Cryocracker

The cryocracker specializes in eating small, hard items. Its adaptations for this niche include a strong jaw, a short face and a beak-like mouth. The mouth is reinforced with beta-keratin, a kind of keratin also found in bird beaks. Its beak is quite effective at crunching chitin, but not hard enough to be of any use against the rock-hard shell of the umbrosa. (not that it would; it does not like the taste of blackflora) Though good at crunching chitin, it can't digest it. This is attested to in its droppings, which glitter with small fragments of undigested, glasslike cryobowl chitin. As the nutritive value of its glassflora and chitjorn-descended food items comes from the soft interiors, it will preferentially pick out the edible parts from the shells if the items are big enough. Its great chomping ability allows it to break open bones and feast on the marrow, giving it a unique niche among scavengers.

While it has specialized features that help it eat small, hard items, it will occasionally try to eat fermi chitjorns. They may struggle in finding weak spots or spots where they have decent traction with the object, but when they succeed, they frequently enlarge the hole and proceed to eat a large amount of the Fermi Chitjorn.

Unlike its ancestor, it does not lay its eggs in cryobowls. Doing so would put it into competition with several other kinds of thornbacks that also use thornbacks as egg-laying sites. Furthermore, since cryobowls are in its diet, there's the possibility it would accidentally eat its own young or the young of its own species. Fresh carcasses are a decent substitution, as they, like cryobowls, are moist and nutritious. The eggs are also protected from UV light in the shadowy innards of the carcass, and hidden from baby-eating predators. Unfortunately, scavengers may inadvertently or opportunistically eat the eggs or larvae while eating the dead meat. To minimize risk of being accidentally eaten, cryocracker larvae hatch and develop quickly. This is due to both the nutritious environment of rotting meat and changes in developmental timing. The larvae are approximately 20 cm long by the time they assume a land-adapted form. At this point, their growth rate reverts back to the level of their ancestor. Though they have adult form, it takes some time until they can reproduce.

Cryocrackers produce many young and have short "gestation" (egg production and hatching) times. This, along with their relative abundance and popularity among predators, makes cryocrackers comparable to rodents. In the Fermi Tundra, abandoned billdeka burrows are commonly used for shelter.