What Are Tikos?

The tikos make up the subfamily Ophidrakiae in the family Pescanguidae and the group splits into two genera and twelve living species across the world's seas. They've carried the name sea serpent since long before science came to them and the name traces to the way ancient sailors met them, since a group of tikos at the surface shows only the long snake-like necks and heads above the water and the sight gave them the look of giant serpents rising from the sea. The genus name Tikonnis comes from an old term for snake beast and the early naturalists paired it with deinos for terrible so the tikos went down in the first records as terrible snake beasts. The necks behind the name are the longest of any pescanguid and they're as flexible as they are long and bend and turn in every direction. That reach is what drew the serpent comparison out of so many early explorers. Where the neck doesn't give a tiko away the skull does since all tikos carry an underbite where the lower jaw runs past the upper by a clear margin. The splayed irregular teeth sit at uneven angles that look thrown together by accident though they deliver killing wounds to large prey and grip smaller prey once the jaws close. Tikos share the buccolactating extended dependency of the hemots and a pup is reared over years before it can fend for itself. The long dependency sets them apart from the dolos that send semi-precocial young off to forage early. Many Tikos are the great environmental modifiers of the family as many tikos root in the sediment, move rocks, dig, and reshape the ground they live on to a degree no other pescanguid matches. The kyber tiko ploughs the soft shelves and the perth tiko rakes the seabed with its tusks while the bowhead tiko breaks and stacks the polar ice and the arctic tiko builds the settlements that stand at the far end of the behaviour. The two genera divide the subfamily between them. The Tikonnis are the three social and human-engaging species that carry the cultural image of the tikos and they run from the small coastal andrean tiko through the long-necked common tiko that gave the world its first sea serpent to the huge arctic tiko that sits at the centre of the pescanguid sapience debate. The Thanatocharchara are the nine reclusive and mostly solitary specialists marked by the fatty crest atop the head. They run from the small heavily hunted Janet's tiko up to the huge and dangerously aggressive azure tiko with the deep-living haunter and bowhead and bumphead and the social pygmy among them. The tikos run through the folklore of every sea they share with people as the sea serpents of the open water and the siren singers of the ice edge and the ghost tikos of the deep and the blue devils of the inshore coasts. The size range across the subfamily is wide and it runs from the three-metre Janet's tiko to the fourteen-metre bodies of the arctic and azure tikos. The long necks of the Tikonnis carry their total lengths far past that so that an old arctic tiko measures close to forty metres from snout to tail.