Skulunker

The skulunker is another descendant of the spinysnout skwimmer which has evolved long, barbel-like feelers around its mouth, but has done so by taking the ancestral organs and adapting them in a different way. These structures are thicker than the related whiskerwhale's whiskers, and differ in being not a single hair-like rod attached to a nerve, but a flexible, fleshy organ made of keratin-infused skin, with many nerves along their entire length. This gives them especially good tactile information about their environment, and has allowed this species to become nocturnal - and most interestingly, to infiltrate the flooded underground cave systems that lie beneath the soglands. 

The skulunker is more primitive in shape than the wide-eyed whiskerwhale and is more amphibious. It hunts for fish and crustaceans in murky freshwater habitats, not by sight but by touch alone, and is common across the soglands many rivers and lakes. If necessary, it can and does still walk between waterways with sharp-clawed feet, but it is a strong swimmer with an eel-like flattened tail that serves more as a rudder than propulsion, and wide webbed toes, with webbing on the front paws that extends beyond the claws when paddling to provide even more surface area to push against the water. Holding its breath for twenty minutes or more the skulunker can sense its way around the bottom of the water and find small entrances into the caverns down below, where it hunts for pale, ghostly troglodyte organisms like crabs and worms in the pitch black environment that never sees sunlight, but can make use of the nutrient-rich water flowing down from the ecosystem above to achieve far higher biodiversity than other cave habitats. These prey animals never leave the cave - they can't survive in the light. But a few specialist hunters like the skulunker can reach them, and bridge two different habitats with very different species. It not only has a highly refined sense of touch but a large brain - for a skuorc - much of which is structured for spatial memory, which is critically important to recall the way out of a cave underwater without any visual input!

The adult skulunker grows to a little over three feet long, though most are slightly smaller. Excluding some longer eel-like fishes which weigh less, is the second largest regular visitor to the underwater caves, after the endemic spectral cave dragon - an occasional predator of it, which maintains a balance of give and take by sometimes eating the visitor from the outside that enters the caves to prey on its smaller animals. Skulunkers also forage extensively outside caves and occur over regions without underwater caverns, being mostly nocturnal and spending the days in permanent burrows dug into riverbanks, with an underwater entrance. Females also construct additional burrows for the purpose of giving birth, which are abandoned once the young are born so as to give them a safe shelter from enemies in their most vulnerable months. The precocious chicks will use them for a long time, returning to them after foraging, until they become more territorial as adults and most will be driven out by the most dominant sibling that will claim it as its own, requiring the rest to dig themselves a new home.