Green Sjaul

Far out in the open ocean is where you can often find the fastest swimming animals. Nowhere to hide, in this watery desert, the only defense for anything that isn't translucent is speed. Fish that live here are often thunniform and carangiform in body shape for hydrodynamic efficiency.

It should therefore be little surprise that nienktvissen, conodonts that do not possess a typical fish like body, are not that common far out in the ocean. There are a number of very large bodied nienktvissen that carve out a living in the open ocean by feeding on plankton or small shoaling crustaceans and fish, but these do not typically frequent the surface.

There is one kind of nienktvis that can be found at high sea, the sjaul. Scientifically known as the genus Cephalopteron (and possibly others), there likely at least a dozen species of sjaul to be found in the oceans of Eryobis. 

These are peculiar looking animals, even for nienktvis standards.

Their bodies are cone shaped and possess four very large fins, behind which a much smaller fin is located. It is thought that the large fins are used for propulsion while the smaller ones provide stability or aid in changing or maintaining direction and stability. In addition, sjauls have another pair of "fins" located on top and below their head. These derive from the ancestral barbels present in most nienktvissen and are likely a feature that sjauls evolved convergentlty with some other unrelated nienktvissen such as vlagops. It is still unclear what exactly these are used for.

The green sjaul (Cephalopteron virens) is a species that can be found cruising the open waters of the Tinjis Ocean in its warmer regions. Here it feeds mostly on free swimming arthropods, small fish and plankton. The tooth elements in the back of its mouth are blunt and rounded, which helps them crush the food that they cannot swallow whole.

Sjauls are a much desired catch for fishermen because of their muscular bodies and crustacean induced flavor. But it is not just fishermen that want to eat sjauls.

Because these fish are quite common and often form shoals of several hundred individuals, they get preyed upon by a wide variety of both marine and aerial predators.

The soft bodies of sjauls make them favorable prey for ritsuara's and other Fermourodonts, which often emply hit and run tactics where they will slice a sjaul in half and come back to eat when it has become incapacitated.