Congrats on the milestone!! Your art is gorgeous 🥰

And thank you for the art share!! Here is some of my dreamy shark art :))

I plan on making a drawing of the animal and coming up with a solid name for it soon, I think I did pretty good writing this :D

Upon getting enough nutrients for enough eggs, the animal then goes completely silent and stops hunting or eating completely. it then searches for the perfect spot, where it will lay the eggs on its exoskeleton made of bones, and then die, thus beginning the cycle anew.

The third phase is the longest, and the animal spends most of its life that way. As the fourth and final phase begins, it reaches maturity, and then begins hunting even more for a short period of time to develop eggs in an asexual reproduction.

In the third phase the animal begins to predate, as it has consumed whatever it could from the initial host's remains and needs more sustenance to grow further and develop. The strong scent of death and rot follows the animal wherever it goes.

Second phase begins when the host dies, the parasite now uses the bones as an exoskeleton, and keeps certain organs alive by essentially growing its own circulatory system around them; everything else from the original host, like the skin, eyes, tongue, muscles, and cartilage, rots away.

Then the first phase begins, the parasite eats whatever the host ingests, forcing the host to be in a constant state of starvation. The parasite grows and slowly begins latching onto the inside of the bones of the host in a very painful and slow process.

it would begin life as a parasite embedded deep into an animal's system via ingestion of tiny eggs laid in carcasses; say a deer comes to chew on old bones to get calcium in an environment where natural calcium is scarce, and gets infected with the parasite