Of the five Great Inland Seas, Loretia sits closest to the Insulasia Ocean. It is also one of the smallest amongst its peers, and the shallowest of them all in its depth which barely surpasses three hundred and fifty feet. Despite this, it does not lack for an abundance of life both endemic and otherwise, hosting equal biodiversity as the other seas.
The loretian insikia is a massive dirichthyan that, true to its name, is a native to the sea. It is one of many species within the larger Fallaxerpetichthys genus, and is not at all the only one present in Loretia.
At an average of sixteen meters long, it is a formidable ambush predator that lies still in the benthos with its seven glowing lures outstretched, catching passing animals unawares with a swift lunge, latching on to them in its jaws and tearing them apart with side to side jerks. This is a messy mode of killing, and so many smaller predators are attracted to the commotion of an inskia kill to quickly snatch stray flesh and viscera over the dirichthyan's nose. Not all animals are on the menu however, as it has a distinct preference for targetting animals not over a third its own mass, and never any prey too small as to not satiate it in one sitting.
The loretian insikia is a flatly built fisk, allowing in its hunkering down under the substrate. Its dark coloration aids this even further. It prefers the darker depths of the waters, ones also choked by water plants floating over. It is thus negatively impacted by the activities of swimming herbivores that mow them down, so the insikia goes out of its way to aggressively harass anything that may open up the floating gardens.
It is due to this reason that high densities of insikia correlate to the presence of gilded daemon, a species of the Deinodontops genus found in the Five Great Inland Seas, in spite of the fact that they risk predation by these great leviathanosaurs. But the benefits they receive outweighs the costs from these formidable reptyl's presence in driving away destructive foragers, as the daemon too benefits from thick plant cover.
It's not to say that they are at all helpless in the face of threats. The sharp teeth and powerful jaws they employ to eviscerate prey can just as easily rend through the muscle, hide, fur and scale of any predator. Their sheer size is also a deterrent for most.
Come the monsoon, when the rains drench the seas and mountain runoff fill the seas pass holding capacity, the loretian insikia mate. The timing of the rains coincides with the boom of prey that their young would require to survive. In attracting a partner in the murky waters, an insikia may employ pings of bioluminescence upon their back. These structures usually remain dormant except for the weeks that their spawning season lasts for. The brightness and duration of flashes is a sure fire indicator of the individual's sex. Dull males flash the longest with short intervals of a few seconds, while females flash the brighest with intervals of a dozen seconds or more.
Much like many dirichthyans, it is the male that broods the eggs. He does so with a specialized pouch just in front of his cloaca that expands in the spawing season. These eggs gestate very rapidly, and the fry emerge just five weeks after they are implanted. These fry start out their lives as free swimming transluscent parasites for the next few years of their lives. Instead of blood, they burrow into the flesh of animals and gnaw their way through their host until they metamorphose into five foot long miniature versions of their adult counterparts.
