The Goliath Sea Thess

The oceans of Aether host a wide array of life, the polar circles are of course, no exception, it is there that some of the largest lifeforms can be found, supported by some of the smallest. Filter feeding is a strategy that involves sifting the water for your prey, often relying on some form of hair or bristles, it as evolved innumerable times across many different branches of the evolutionary tree; still the goliath sea thess provides a unique example. Because the polar circles are subject to eternal sunlight for half the year, they are a zone of primary production, hosting a variety of different algae that are happy to take advantage of the abundant sunlight, those algae are in turn fed on by small planktonic animals which swarm en mass due to their seemingly limitless buffet of food. This forms the bases of the food chain in the arctic reliant on algae due to the lack of complex plants, as most are unable to survive half the year in darkness. With such large amounts of plankton in the waters, squims that typically avoid filter feeding niches have reluctantly accepted the lifestyle.

The goliath sea thess is a filter feeding titan, the largest of all squims rivaling the size of some earth whales. Bizarrely the thess utilizes only its pectoral fins for locomotion, its lateral undulating fins extremely reduced only serving the purpose of oxygenating its gills, this strange method of getting around is due to its largely peaceful lifestyle, while it is certainly less agile it is much more energy efficient allowing it to more quickly outgrow any predators. Many squims have found safety from their predators by schooling, swimming as one they can occasionally deter predators and enjoy safety in numbers, despite its size the thess requires safety too. As juveniles the thess somewhat resembles other squims lacking the disk shaped body found to adults, however it retains the adults slow swimming method and as such can be vulnerable to predators. To cope with this the thess has made several unique adaptations: rather than dispersing their eggs throughout the water, the thess retains them inside its body until they are just about to hatch around the beginning of spring, the thess then schools in the polar circle for all of summer giving their young time to grow taking advantage of safety in numbers while they are still vulnerable. During the six months of darkness thess will abandon the arctic and abandon their school, seemingly wandering aimlessly, this is an adaptation to reduce competition as the tropics will remain more produce more plankton than the arctic in darkness, yet not enough to sustain their entire population, at least not if they are all in one place. Once they return to the arctic in the spring they are ready to spawn and begin the next generation.

Found swimming close to the goliath sea thess, cleaner squims are seen pecking away at dead excess skin, unlike most squim they only have two pairs of eyes, an adaptation that saves energy as three pairs of eyes to scan your surroundings is simply unnecessary when you have the worlds biggest bodyguard. While these cleaner squims aren't the only ones that feed on the debris produced by the thess, they are the most successful, thanks to a special form of symbiosis. While the relationship between the cleaner squim and the goliath sea thess may seem mutualistic, and in some ways it is, the cleaner squim is not as it seems. The cleaner squim lives in such close association with the thess that it exclusively will lay their eggs in their reproductive gills, laying eggs in specific locations is uncommon for squims, however laying eggs inside other squims is unheard of. Luckily for the thess in most cases this is not harmful for both the thess and its offspring. Although in some cases if cleaner squim populations grow to high they can pose significant harm to the thess, not only may cleaner thess feed on healthy living tissue in the absence of dead tissue, cleaner squim may jettison the eggs of rivals to and some cases even the thess's own eggs from within its own reproductive gill to make space for its own eggs, reducing the chances of survival for thess's next generation. However as the cleaner squim rely so closely on the thess, their populations form a natural balancing act, push and pull of their populations preventing harm to either side.

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