Nihilosuctor colossus

Suck-Feeders are some of the largest creatures in Wallace II’s oceans and one of the main types of giant filter feeders. They are distantly evolved from the early Panoplovitan species and still retain their three characteristic proboscises and hard, exoskeleton-like structure; however, virtually everything else about them is radically altered to adapt to life on a much larger scale. They live solely in the warm waters on the ocean surface, more or less floating along most of the time with very little effort on their part. Since their bony outer layer has evolved to become much less dense and their bodies are both fairly flat and lacking in many of the dense muscles and other internal structures that more active organisms depend on, they are far more lightweight than one might expect given their size. All of these adaptations for energy efficiency compensate for their immense size, up to 70 meters in wingspan in the largest individuals.

Compared to its Panoplovitan ancestors, a Suck-Feeder has an extremely bizarre morphological structure. It has an aerodynamic shape, the more rounded body of its ancestors changing into one more like that of a ray on Earth, with semi-flexible “wings” extending out from each side of its body, which ends in a tip rather than a tail. It has virtually lost anything that could be considered a head, its eyes having shrunk to vestigial dots able to detect little more than the presence or absence of light. Its two filament-covered proboscises have replaced its eyes as its primary sense organs. As it moves them through the ocean, the extraordinarily sensitive filaments detect the motion of the water that is created by the movement of groups of plankton or small Dispeculata. It then moves its third proboscis, which is much thicker and hollow, to where the prey was located and sucks in the nearby water into the proboscis, along with all the small organisms in the vicinity. When the water and captured prey reaches the end of the proboscis, numerous sticky tongue-like structures latch onto the prey and tissue contractions briefly close the opening from the proboscis to the tube leading to its digestive chamber. The water is then pushed out, while the tongues move the prey into the body to be digested.

Although Suck-Feeders can find food year-round, it is much more abundant for a couple weeks during the summer. This is when the annual Devorande mating season occurs. Devorande Missa is an extremely numerous very unusual Celernantid species. It is about the size of a minnow and only lives for a single year, most of which is spent as an herbivore/scavenger, similar to a typical Celernantid. With two weeks left of their life, the males, which make up only five percent of the species, undergo a strange transformation, their bodies swelling up to the size of a golf ball and producing vastly increased amounts of sperm. They lose the ability to swim and simply remain stationery while emitting pheromones that attract females from great distances away. Soon after that, chemicals in the bodies of the males cause them to rupture and explode, indirectly fertilizing the many females. At this point, the females carry out a bizarre reproductive behavior as well. Having been gathered together by the pheromones of the males, they form swarms which hunt down and devour any smaller-sized oceanic creatures in their vicinity. This carnage occurs throughout most of the oceanic parts of Wallace II for the duration of the female Devorande’s lives. The evolutionary purpose is to enable the females to obtain the energy needed to produce huge quantities of eggs, which they lay right before their deaths, ensuring that Devorande remains an extremely common species. During these Devorande swarming periods, the Suck-Feeders consume a large percentage of them before they have the chance to lay eggs, maintaining ecological balance by ensuring that they do not become too numerous for the ecosystem to support.

Although the Colossal Suck-Feeder is the largest Suck-Feeder species, there are multiple smaller types as well. Nonetheless, they all share a rather similar lifestyle. They are solitary creatures by nature and rare enough that they barely encounter other Suck-Feeders. The only exception is during the mating season, when males and females “call out” to each other by rubbing their two filament-covered proboscises together, which creates a rustling vibration (with a different tone for each sex) that they can detect and use to locate members of the opposite sex. Females give birth to several live young, which are quite small and often end up being killed by Gomphiobians and other predators before they can grow to a large size. Since they have no natural predators and use so little energy, Suck-Feeders can live anywhere up to a couple hundred years.