On Ocula Porta, the frozen moon of Tra Sakinig, the squad sent to the crashed Reshanna ship in A Blip in the Dark kept finding holes about six inches across in the snow and the walls of the ravine, roughly five metres apart, always in solid ice and never in rock, with the creatures' saliva all over them. Eventually one put its head out: a sharp cone that swivelled round to eye the party, then split in three, put out a small tongue and darted back in. Whatever was behind it could have been as small as a fist or as long as anything at all.

They are something like a long kiwi or maggot with a sharp cone fixed on the front, which opens on a whirlwind of thorny teeth. They are drawn to heat, and as the squad lifted out the still-cooling reactor the holes along the ravine filled with them, fixed on the casing, a couple leaping out to bounce off it. The Reshanna survivors had shallow bite wounds, and one of the crash survivors was killed by them.