Tugansers

Tugansers are a clade of armored, aquatic burdles descended from the penguipus. These animals have evolved quickly, particularly in insular habitats like the great blue salt lake, where two of these species are endemic. Tugansers are active fish-eating predators with long, serrated beaks and armor-plating on their backs, which are somewhat flattened, as most species spend long periods of time on the bottom of the water when at rest, often burying themselves in sediment or hiding in vegetation. Only the seasoarer differs in this respect; it is one of the larger predators of the great blue salt lake, and is a pelagic, dolfinch-like animal that spends most of its life swimming or floating in the water, controlling its buoyancy by swallowing or ejecting air from its stomach.

 The most primitive tuganser is the longbilled penguipus. Like the seasoarer, this animal is native only to the great blue salt, and here fills niches otherwise more commonly seen from dolfinches in the open ocean. This animal is similar to the intermediate ancestor of the seasoarer, which evolved within only a few million years in the relative ecological vacuum of this lake, and so remains quite closely related to smaller species, despite having become highly modified for life in deep water, to the point it has lost almost all of its claws and rarely comes ashore except to lay their eggs, which are buried in loose, warm sand.

Smaller tugansers are widespread over Serinaustra's wetland environments, but absent from fully saltwater habitats. Red-eye turtleducks of inland freshwater are also close relatives of the ancestral penguipus, but are somewhat more inclined to rest out of water in the open, using sunlight to warm themselves and allow them to chase prey at faster speeds in freshwater. The red-eye turtleduck's merganser-like bill is very well-adapted to catch small minnows, and it can continue hunting while holding prey already collected in the back of its bill, letting it take food back to a burrow, where this species alone provides parental care to its chicks even after they have hatched; in others, the young are independent immediately after hatching under the brooding parent, and abandoned (and in seasoarers, they never meet their mother at all.)

The two-spined tuganser is one of the smaller species, and one which has evolved its armor plating of protective scutes to the highest degree into sharp spikes along the back, plus two on top of the head. These little animals, which favor wooded areas with many calm ponds rather than larger bodies of water, are also one of the least aquatic forms. Their defenses protect them from many predators, and so let them move leisurely over the ground in search of foods that are more often worms or insects than fish. Males are colorful with shades of red and yellow that serve to draw the attention of potential mates; females alone brood clutches of eggs in burrows dug into the earth. Two-spined tugansers are heavy and poor-swimmers; if they enter water at all, they stay near shore and walk on the sediment rather than float.