Creature:Spiraligator

Spiraligators are a species of non-sapient carnivorous faunal lifeforms. They can be found on their homeworld, roaming the wetlands in search for their next meal. They have adapted a set of bony spirals that operates as a housing for a colony of insectoid symbiotes, which have gained a mutual relationship with the Spiraligators.

Statistics
Locomotion: Spiraligators walk and wade through the wetland marshes they inhabit on four digitigrade legs. They can swim, but poorly, causing them to attempt to avoid accidentally stepping into deep spots. Environment: Spend much of their lives in shallow water-filled wetlands, although they are also found on dry land in the surrounding area, and often sleep in these dry areas. Diet: Meat of sufficiently-sized species that they can catch. Size: Unspecified Lifespan: Unspecified Personality: Unspecified

Species Type: Cold-blooded Wading Organism Lifestyle: Solitary Predator Hunt/Forage Success Rate: 100% Hunt (20.32% success rate) Armor: The dorsal side of the Spiraligators is covered in hardened plates of keratin, which extends from the tip of their snout to their posterior. This is difficult to bite through, which often can save their lives from some potential predators and give them ample time to escape. The belly is significantly more easy to break through, and this is taken advantage of by certain ambush predators. Defenses: Spiraligators have 6 eyes on two stalks and two micro-stalks, which allow them to keep an eye out for anything they may need to see, whether it be obstacle, prey, or predator alike. Other than this, they have armored plating to protect their backsides. Another defense is the several bony spirals that forms the home of their symbiotes; these could prevent something from properly biting them due to their awkward shape, but also serve a significantly more interesting defensive feature. Should a Spiraligator get threatened by a predator, their symbiotes will emerge like a cloud of flies, swarming into the face of their foe, which will give their mobile home a good chance to escape. Weapons: Spiraligators are not tremendously fancy in terms of weaponry, and attack and ultimately kill their prey and - if need be - their opponents through the use of a solitary row of razor-sharp, dagger-like teeth. Tools: As wading organisms who have devoted their four limbs into forming legs to hold them up, they have no manipulative power outside of using their mouth. Method of Eating: Catch prey in mouth and bite down upon it with the dagger-like teeth to kill it. If small enough they will consume it right then and there, but if not they will more often than not drag them back to dry land to feed on it in leisure. With the flesh in their mouth, they will likely masticate it some to make it more malleable before swallowing it. From here it passes down the esophagus and into the stomach, where digestion begins. After being processed within the acids of the stomach, it descends into the intestine, where nutrients are partially digested by the body, with wasted remnants excreted out the cloaca on the opposite end. Reproductive Rate: Unspecified Gestation: Unspecified Offspring Incubation: Unspecified Number of Offspring: Unspecified Offspring Survival Rate (before age of maturity): 23% -- Despite being a relatively high-tier predator in their home ecosystem, they are born small and are food to many other predators. However, they can survive as well as they can because the colony of symbiotes will also lay eggs in the spirals of the Spiraligator youth, giving them their own defensive cloud within a couple of weeks. Singular/Plural: Spiraligator/Spiraligators

Trivia

 * A group of Spiraligators is called a shivier.
 * Aurix lead a symbiotic life. They carry an insectoid symbiote organism, which use the Spiraligator as a useful mobile home, while providing the Spiraligator with an interesting and equally useful defense.