Tusked Arrowhead

Splitting from its ancestor, the tusked arrowhead has become a bottom-dweller, living its entire life sifting the sands for food. Slowly moving along the ground, it releases hundreds of spores every 2 weeks, from which only 10% may reach adulthood, once it has mated with another individual. These young will spend their first week drifting through the twilight zone before eventually settling down on a suitable substrate.

As its sifts the sand with its numerous mouth tentacles, its lower jaws, which have morphed greatly from its life style, are now little more than tusks which it now uses to dig up the sediment or hold onto a dead carcass. Because of this, its secondary brain has now moved into its first body segment and now sits directly in between its two bio-electric sensitive organs. These organs, along with its sonar, are now used primarily for sensing potential predators. Should it sense one, it will go into the defensive, digging itself into the sand and rearing its tail which has evolved with a sharp spike on it. With reflexes overshadowing those of more advanced life forms, its tail strikes forth at anything that should attempt to grab onto its back, giving a painful stab in a single motion that is almost impossible to see with the naked eye.

Their tusks serve another purpose. When two tusked arrowheads meet, they will use their tusks to position one another so that their underbellies come into contact. After a brief transfer of genetic material, they will leave one another and then be able to reproduce for the rest of their three year lives.

Highly skilled detrivores, they can find even the tiniest scraps of food. To compliment their diets, should they pick up the chemical markers of a dead organism they will swarm upon it. It is not uncommon to find dead gilltails and such with over a dozen individual tusked arrowheads feeding upon it. However, should food prove to be too scarce, they will stop reproducing and instead conserve their energy.