The Bludgeonhead

Order: Remipinniformes

Family: Remipinnidae

Genus: Galeacephalus

The oarfins (Remipinnidae) are among the most widespread coastal herbivores on Alladoras. They boast bright colours, and are placid and inoffensive herbivores. While this is the norm for this group, it does not count for the entirety of its ranks, as some species specialise for radically different niches.

One of them is a predator, a species that strikes at the dead of night. The only thing it leaves you with is a fatal concussion.

Enter the bludgeonhead. 80 centimetres long, solitary and strictly nocturnal, it is a species that inhabits a very unique niche as a predator that does not use its jaws to hunt. Unlike nearly all other predators, it uses blunt force trauma to hunt.

Taking a closer look at this species, we can see that it possesses large, hardened scutes on its rostrum that, when together, form a structure analogous to the dome-skull of a pachycephalosaur. The bones of its rostrum are reinforced and strengthened, and are designed to absorb the impact without cracking. The brain is cushioned by fatty deposits to avoid damage. The rest of its body is streamlined, and its dorsal and ventral fins allow it to achieve high speeds in bursts: essential for its hunting style. Hunting at night, with its powerful eyes, dilated to allow maximum light detection, it locks on to a target. Locking on, it tends to stalk its prey for a while before accelerating to maximum speed.

Within seconds, its prey is either dead from the force of the impact, or knocked unconscious. In either cases, its prey will be eaten. Its beak is serrated with numerous, saw like pseudoteeth to process flesh of its prey and eat quickly. After the corpse is stripped bare, it leaves as if nothing ever happened.

The bludgeonhead's core menu consists of medium-sized pelagys that aren't too big to shrug off its impacts nor are too small to avoid its head. Species such as the snoff (red snoff pictured), slurpfish, small crescentjacks and if bold enough, the highly venomous and aggressive cowslinger. It strikes during the dead of night, and most of its prey don't even see it coming. Not until they are knocked unconscious.

Aside from its predatory habits, the bludgeonhead is actually quite behaviourally different from its relatives. Unlike most oarfins, in which the males lek at specified seasons of the year, the bludgeonhead is much more spontaneous and random in its breeding behaviour. Males and females show little to no sexual dimorphism and they are aggressive to one another regardless or sex; they are surprisingly antisocial, an anomaly for a group filled with flamboyant species that associate with others of their own kind, however their niche is an anomaly already — the rest of its clade consists of herbivores, and it is a carnivore that uses an enigmatic and strange method to hunt.

The bludgeonhead, being antisocial as it is, is rather uncommon. Finding one in its habitat is rare, and as well as spending time in coastal waters, such as reefs and carpgrass, they may range into deeper regions, with some being found at depths of around 150 metres, closely associating with the sea floor.