The Ornate Flowerjaw

Order: Toxicopinnia

Suborder: Dactyloichthyoidea

Family: Cryptognathidae

Genus: Cryptognathoss

Over the quiet sea floor, a small juvenile pelagys swims. It is a juvenile groveprober (see Anatomy of Pelagys to see an adult), and it seems to be warily looking for food. And out in the distance: a little white streak in the current. The groveprober juvenile recognises this as food, probably a small larval organism. Nevertheless, it is hungry, and will take any chances for food. It swims over to it, positioning itself to snap up the little organism. It heads closer, and then...

Snap.

In a blink of an eye, that little groveprober disappeared. It is now nowhere to be seen. The culprit? The ornate flowerjaw, one of the most well-camouflaged pelagys in Alladoras, which does not chase prey, but lures it to their demise in its jaws. The flowerjaw is part of a clade of ambush predators, including spongetails and walkabout stingers, defined by their specialised fins, in which the first two rays are not attached to the main pectoral fin and instead are repurposed as 'legs', which they use to travel on the seafloor without swimming. All members of this clade are ambush predators, which the flowerjaws being the most specialised of them, digging out sediment with their tails in order to settle in. So called due to their extremely long jaws, which they spread in a flower-like pattern over the seafloor, the flowerjaw uses its specialised tongue, which is thin and rod-like with a fleshy extension at the end (called an ilicium), which acts as a lure in a form of aggressive mimicry, with the fleshy ilicium mimicking a free-floating worm or larval organism which are seen as prey by numerous small pelagys which the flowerjaw sees as food. This is not the flowerjaw's only evolutionary adaptation to hunting prey; they also possess fleshy lobes on their jaws which help break up its silhouette and thus decreases the chances of it being found, which added up with its cryptic colouration, makes it near impossible to find by an unwary pelagys.

Ornate flowerjaws rarely move locations due to their hunting strategy, but if they do move, they do so in unusual ways, scuttling across the sea floor with their 'fingers' with their tail curled up over their body, occasionally stopping movement in order to reduce the chances of being spotted and found by predators. During this process, which is either done due to reproduce or as a response to reduced prey availability, forcing movement. Even so, flowerjaws are still extremely locally tied to certain islands, in which they can only spread to others through reproduction, in which their free-floating eggs and larvae travel through the current, hopefully to coastlines with large amounts of sediment, areas largely free of carpgrass, such as deeper areas with little underwater visibility, but also hosts a wide variety of exotic life not found elsewhere, such as juvenile pelagys and all kinds of invertebrates and benthic pelagys. Flowerjaws are among the most common species found in such habitats, taking advantage of the mostly barren sediment to hide and take refuge.

The ornate flowerjaw, so called due to its brightly coloured pectoral fins, is mostly seen in the western coast of the Eden islands and employs pheromones in order to attract mates, with males often competing each other for more advantageous locations and territories in the seabed in order to mate with more females to spread their genes into the next generation.