Snoodcish
As the Greenscale Cish dominated Coral Cish habitats near Dixon, the remaining Coral Cish fled into temperate, slightly fresher waters. While a poor habitat for oceanic species, they faced less competition there, and they yielded the Snoodcish, which replaced their ancestors. Much like a salmon, part of the Snoodcish’s life cycle is spent upriver, reducing competition with the Greenscale Cish.
Life Cycle
The young hatch upstream in Seal Temperate River, filter-feeding and eating Violetmellows and Riverstickers. Juveniles have washed-out, less orange-ish faces and tentacles, proportionately thinner tentacles, nubs of cartilage-rasps on their tentacles, weakly orange fin-tips and flatter, more almond-shaped bodies. They migrate to Dixon-Fermi Temperate Sea when about a third of their adult size, gradually adapting from freshwater to saltwater in about a month. They eat whatever they can catch en-route. In Dixon-Fermi Tropical Sea, they eat a very wide diet, and no longer filter-feed at the typical developmental stage of arrival.
By autumn, they have grown fat, and their faces, tentacles, and fin-tips grow more orange. Changing day length triggers migration up into the brackish waters bordered by Seal Marsh, where they presently have no predators. By then, they gain their distinctive fluorescent-orange fin tips, and one of the tentacles of a male Snoodcish becomes thicker with a spoon-shaped tip. The Snoodcish often rests this tentacle over the other upper tentacle, making it resemble a turkey's snood. Adults do not eat on their journey, instead relying on stored fat as they return to their spawning grounds. In the seclusion of the rivers, they make mating displays similar to a turkey strutting, flapping their bright fins. The males use the spoon-shaped tentacle to dig a shallow nest in the muddy bottoms of small, slow-moving rivers. Female Snoodcish (which look similar, but lack the snood-like tentacle) lay their eggs in the nest, which are then fertilized.
Most of the adults die soon after spawning. Those that don't die slowly return to Dixon-Fermi Temperate Sea, with a renewed appetite. The adults' rotting bodies can so fill a stream as to give the whole area the distinct smell of briny straw, due to the breakdown of certain chemicals in Snoodcish. The rotten bodies provide abundant fertilizer for Violetmellows and various microbes, ensuring a great food supply by the time the eggs hatch.
Feeding
Adults' upper feeding limit is roughly one-sixth of their body size. As it is unable to crunch bones and can barely digest them, it prefers targeting organisms with weaker skeletons. However, it can also rip out chunks of flesh from organisms with harder bones. Their primary predator is the Nektolixo. As Nektolixos mostly hunt at nightfall in deeper depths, Snoodcish quickly learn to retreat to shallower waters after close encounters with Nektolixos.
Adaptations and Miscellaneous
Snoodcish live much closer to the surface of the water than before, necessitating sun-protective pigments. The upper side of its body is colored by pheomelanin, while its face and tentacles are colored by both melanin and pheomelanin.
While the cishes lost the ability to produce their own light long ago, the Snoodcish still has bright colors: through biofluorescence, its fins absorb purple light and re-emit it as orange light. It functions like a fluorescent marker, although it uses different frequencies of light. In a dark room, illuminated by purple light, the Snoodcish's fins seem to eerily glow.
The Snoodcish is slightly less intelligent than most cish, and shows play behavior more rarely. However, it can still learn how to capture certain kinds of prey by watching others’ techniques. Snoodcishes are aggressive to other kinds of cish, especially the Greenscale Cish. They will attempt to scare other Cish away through strutting-like displays, and, rarely, attacking others using the rasps on their tentacles. They identify others of their kind by coloration, and act confused if other species of Cish are similarly orangish-brown.
Snoodcish have soft, tasty, fish-like flesh, which breaks down under heating to produce compounds similar to roast turkey, with hints of briny straw. Like a shark, Snoodcish are boneless. Unlike a shark, which have jaw bones, Snoodcish have no bones at all: their closest approximations are the cartilaginous support structures in its jaws, and the cartilage nubs at the ends of their tentacles. The jaws and nubs are both slightly calcified in adults, but not enough to fossilize.