Trench Spectrestar

In a fashion similar to the abyssal striderhorn, some greater spectrestars made their way deep into Tom Trench as some of the organisms they parasitized drifted down into the trench, dead. Though some couldn't handle the crushing pressure and left, others stayed behind and adapted. At the bottom, those who stayed behind found an untouched, but relatively small bounty of food in the form of marine snow, and thus had to eat that to survive the long periods of time when food wasn't drifting down from above. These lost individuals changed over time to adapt to their environment, giving rise to the trench spectrestar.

An adaptation that it has accumulated over the years of evolution is its lack of eyes and pigmentation, common in deep sea-dwelling organisms. Its concave scale-gills have become larger, allowing it to collect more oxygen in the relatively oxygen-poor waters of its habitat. Its outermost ring of teeth is rimmed with receptors that allow a trench spectrestar to sense a carcass from a mile away. While they don't form schools, large hordes numbering in the thousands will gather to feast on a carcass that has fallen from above, especially those of filter chads. When food in the form of carcasses from the world above is scarce, the trench spectrestar will decrease its metabolism as it subsists on marine snow, which it can do for months. Aside from the various adaptations and behavioral changes, the trench spectrestar is otherwise much like its ancestor.