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Being a sessile organism has its disadvantages, you're wholly dependent on environmental conditions for life and very limited with your ability to react to stimuli. The descendants of Pliaceps evolved eyes allowing them to react to stimuli to protect themselves or become predatory; Despite this, they remained anchored in place completely immobile. However, a unique clade of anthoceps lost the ability to secrete the glue that anchors themselves in place yet retained the sessile life of its ancestors, a deleterious mutation, but not one condemning them to extinction. In response to their new handicap populations that lived in exposed conditions died off, while populations limited to the coastal rocky crevasses persisted. With time their mutation became beneficial, their feeding arms could be used to lug themselves into more favorable conditions, providing an additional response to escape from predators other than retreating into their carapace: they could now flee. Through generations, they specialized further some of their feeding arms migrating lower to better maneuver themselves across the sediment and losing their filtering chaete on their ambulatory arms. Their arms, or rather, legs often became armored as they could no longer retreat into their carapace. This new branch of life became the walking lumpkins and with their wide diets and motile lifestyle they adapted and diversified.
The particularly mobile species of lumpkins lost their filter-feeding behaviors, adopting highly generalist diets. Dragging an armored body across the seafloor is an energy intensive endeavor, to remedy this the lumpkin adapted every other chamber of their stomach into a swim bladder, this lifted them off slightly above the benthos reducing energy demands and giving them gracefully slow walking gaits. Due to their slow speed, they are limited to predating on sufficiently slow organisms, supplementing their diet with anything edible that crosses their path. They evolved less bulky armor, with significantly more chitinous shells they became more flexible and less heavy.
This species of lumpkin is particularly specialized, its segmented legs possess unusual enlarged joints to act as muscle attachment sites. Its frightening teeth are actually the remains of its feeding arms adapted for its generalist diet. Its bright colors are a warning, for despite its mobility it is still a very slow creature making it a common target of predation, especially from larger squims; to combat this the many lumpkin species have become toxic, utilizing the toxic compounds that the fruiting xanthopyte xelp use to protect their nutritious spores from predators. Fortunately for the plant, the lumpkin seeks the toxin stored in the xelp, not its important spores, the spores quickly float away at the slightest touch preventing them from being consumed by the Lumpkin. This exchange surprisingly is not completely negative for the xelp as despite consuming the blade and incidentally some of the spores, the lumpkin helps with the dispersal of the remainder of spores, allowing them to ride the currents before germinating in novel locations.
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