Tutel

Order: Spathospondyliformes

Family: Thyreoichthyidae

Subfamily: Testudoichthyinae

Genus: Testudoichthys

Swimming through the carpgrass prairies, one of the largest and heaviest animals in Alladoras swims through the water. Its thick skin and tough, bony armour nearly totally impenetrable to predators make them some of the most largest and heaviest pelagys in the ocean, the mighty tutel.

Part of the spathospondyliformes, the tutel is a coastal species, surprisingly, related to the small hoverfish, which possesses the same tough carapace and armoured tail segments, which is homologous to the ones shown in the tutel, albeit the tutel presents a more ancestral, generalised form. The tutel averages 3 metres in length and weighs around 2 tons, which is due to its exceptional plated armour. Its armour is noticeably derived from fused osteoderms, fused together in order to create a massive carapace, which protects vital organs, but still leaving the gills and the ventral side of the pelagys exposed. The limb girdle is exposed, but still covered in remarkably thick skin, and the tail is separate from the tutel's carapace, but still retains the thick armour, but now is segmented to allow movement in the tail, similar to Earth pegasid fish. They are naturally very slow swimmers, relying on their pectoral fins for movement, with the rhachis on the tail only meant for display, with a cyan colour. 

The distinctive carapace is derived from osteoderms from under the skin, which are now fused together. The thick plates covering their body covers the snout as well, with distinctive slits to allow the mechanoreceptors to still be exposed to the water and sense stimuli. Not only consisting of bone, the carapace also consists of a keratin-like material which covers the osteoderms, with the bones being covered by a thin layer of skin. The skin layer sheds and grows with the carapace, repeatedly shedding the outer layer, or cuticle, as the tutel grows older, or to remove parasites or algae off the skin, which it forcefully sheds off. Shed cuticle may be eaten to regain the lost nutrition and energy from the initial shed. In younger individuals, with a less thicker shell shed more often in order to accommodate their rapid growth, eating their shed skin more frequently, until they reach their adult size, in which their growth slows and eventually stops, in which they only shed infrequently, either to remove parasites or when ill.

These herbivores possess drastically different lifestyles from most grazers, instead consuming floatkelp and floatpeat as opposed to the extremely bountiful and common carpgrass, which are plants that live suspended in the water column, with floatpeat consisting of many small plants connected together with a scaffold of roots, while floatkelp have bushy leaf-like appendages with sacks full of air, keeping them suspended in the current. The tutel uses its specialised beak in order to bite off pieces of the plant with surprising precision, tearing off individuals from others by tearing off the roots. While primarily a herbivore, the tutel can also eat meat, feeding on carcasses or other pelagys on occasion, not being picky in what it eats, which makes them extremely generalist in behaviour, granting to their success.

Quite uniquely, the tutel is one of the few pelagys that do not have any known predators, due to their defensive capabilities, with their nigh-invincible armour protecting them from predators, with few vulnerable areas for predators to attack. This would seem that there is no way to control their populations due to their thick armour making them virtually unharmed by any attack, but the same cannot be said to their young. 

Tutel are r-selective species, which means that they tend to foster lots of young in which they care very little for, instead taking their chances at least one of their young will survive and grow, which optimally selects for stronger individuals. The babies start off small, but quickly grow into juveniles, which are fast and live in brackish environments, in which they are among the most common pelagys, and are primarily carnivorous. As juveniles, the tutel are particularly vulnerable, only beginning to develop a cartilaginous scaffold that eventually ossifies into the carapace, which grows quite rapidly, and many are picked off quickly by predators such as crescentjacks and grapsharks, with over 90% of the original clutch dead due to predation. The few that survive and eventually grow their carapace out move out into saltwater and keep growing until they reach their adult size.