Toxilixo

If one were to travel to the bottom of the vailnoff ocean, every so often they might see a startling flash of light, the source of which then slithers out of sight never to be seen again. Such an odd sight may be the defensive mechanism of the toxilixo, a strange denizen of the depths of the Vailnoff Ocean.

The toxilixo probes the seafloor using its tentacles, letting it find dead plankton and marine snow that has been buried under the seafloor. A thick covering of skin has developed to protect the eyes from silt or sand, though this lowers the toxilixo’s field of view. A keen sense of smell helps the toxilixo to detect sunken corpses, with their chemoreceptors being particularly fine-tuned to the biosignatures of dead devorators. A fresh filter chad which has recently sunken to the ocean floor will quickly become a feeding frenzy, which also provides the toxilixos with a chance to mate. Other than this, the toxilixo does not exhibit the social behavior found in centilixos. Toxilixos are mostly solitary, and do not form monogamous pairs. Instead, males simply mate with any nearby females, with little sexual selection involved.

The key adaptation of the toxilixo is its toxicity, hence its name. Instead of simply filtering out toxins from the body and excreting it as waste, certain toxins will accumulate in special deposits within the skin. If a predator were to bite into a centilixo, it would immediately regret it, as a dark cloud of noxious chemicals such as urea would spill out. This grants the toxilixo a chance to escape. Bright warning colors would not usually work in the deep sea, but glowing bioluminescent spots lining the toxilixo’s body help to illuminate its stripes of color. These spots can still be switched on and off, but are not sexually dimorphic, being the same brightness and size in both sexes.