The Box-Headed Bloat Squim

In the mild costal waters anthoceps grow readily feeding on the plentiful planktonic life as well as any dead decaying matter that happens to land in their maw. A lonely anthoceps filters its arms through the water before dark shadow casts over its simple eyes. It responds and quickly retreats into it's unique and intricate shell protecting its vulnerable feeding arms from the creature that lurks above. Moments pass and the lowly squim searches for a smaller victim to pray on, its jaws are far to small to crack open its desired meal. For a long and quiet time this is how anthoceps made their living, especially with those that make it past a certain size completely outgrowing their predators. This resulted in a lack of selective pressure for large anthoceps consequently, diversification ensued. In some cases, they remained similar to their ancestral form only growing larger, in others, their shells became more intricate with few species even losing their radial symmetry, these species, however, seldom grew large. This is because as size increases for a more intricate shell structural weak points become significantly more liable to damage. In smaller species these shell deviations made it harder to grip and remove them from their rocky holdfasts, these species, while initially less successful than the larger anthoceps, became long term players in the game of evolution. Anthoceps distribution mirrors the concentration of other life, this is what makes them so numerous in shallow costal regions, where photosynthetic plankton as well as other life is populous. 

But the dominion of large anthoceps was soon to be usurped by its once feeble predators.

Squims, adaptable as ever, often predate on smaller anthoceps, however after a certain size threshold no squim has powerful enough jaws to break them out of their shell. It took time but with such high concentrations of life in the tropics there was great interspecies completion between squims, crushing, grinding jaws were inevitably selected for as well as somewhat larger sizes of squims. These pressures created many different species suited to a variety of niches, such as crushing up small anthoceps or breaking open the operculum used to conceal their soft bodies. The culmination of these traits exists in the box headed bloat squim.

Larger than a human toddler the box-headed bloat squim consumes the entirety of the anthoceps body, crushing up even the largest species before transferring the remains into its mouth using its grasping radula, derived from the inside of its throat, a development common to most predatory squims. Curiously, the bloat squim lacks a fifth arm to its jaw, an adaptation to better grip the stalks of the largest anthoceps. The lumpy appearance of this squim is due to the two adaptations that allow it to pursue this lifestyle, its large masseter muscles that allow it to crush its prey and its enlarged specialized stomach meant to execrate the excess of calcium carbonate it consumes digesting the shell. When the bloat squim consumes an anthoceps it leaves a broken stalk in its wake as the nutritious body of its prey lies only in the upper portion of its armored sheath.

Finally feeling the effects of selective pressures the largest anthoceps no longer tower in the costal regions yet their smaller relatives remain extant. Anthoceps with wide and difficult to grip shells begin to grow larger as despite their squishy appearance the jaws are rigid and outside their range of motion are very weak and incapable of crushing. Few species reach the size of their colossal relatives however certain slow growing species will grow larger, thanks to their far thicker and more convoluted shells.

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