Taddle

It filter-feeds on algae and drifting matter, mouthing constantly at the pondweed with a tireless, undirected appetite, and it schools tightly with hundreds of its siblings for the simple safety of numbers. It swims in sudden synchronized bursts that scatter and reform, a living cloud that confuses predators by having no single edge to seize. As it grows it begins, almost imperceptibly, to sprout the stubby limbs of the Fibio to come, and a pond's worth of Taddle is really a pond's worth of impatient amphibians waiting to climb out into the wider, drier world.