leg snatcher

There are many incidents reporting people being dragged underwater. Some speak of a monster, others about traps set up by the goddess Valeria the torture mistress. People fear to swim too far from the shore, as it is too dangerous.
But what truly causes these incidents remained a mystery, until a few years ago. It turned out a creature fittingly named: the leg snatcher was the one responsible. People tend to get their legs tangled in it's tentacles, panic and most commonly drown.
Despite this discovery, some people still gravitate towards the old stories.

Description:

The leg snatcher is a cat-sized creature with a flatter squid-like body and about 100 thread-like thin tentacles that stretch to be around 2 meters in lenght. It also has two half a meter long tentacles with seevral spikes at and around the ends, which it uses to drag it's prey up to it's beak.
It's color pallete tends to be a mix of brown and green, or even yellow, but one onew of the colors always seems to be dominant.

Biology and behavior:

Leg snatcher is a carnivore that relies on it's hundred thin tentacles to trap prey. It swims against the flow of water and traps any fish that get close enough. The thin tentacles are surprisingly strong and durable, as they are used to entangle it's prey. These tentacles also seem to release some paralyzing poison into the prey's body, but it doesn't appear to be potent enough to have much effect on larger creatures such as humans, past slight and short numbness.
Once it catches it's prey, it impales it on it's larger tentacles and delivers it to it's mouth. Surprisingly, leg snatchers are quite strong and, as said before, they might give a human a scare with a really strong tug. It's tentacles seem to regrow, if it looses any, withing a few days.


Leg snatchers don't have eyes, so they rely on touch to navigate through their surrounings. They can't survive above water for more than a few minutes.

Giant Leg snatcher:

Rarely, legs snatchers live for so long, they grow to the size of a car. While still not interested in humans as food, they are much more dangerous and scary. These are most commonly found too deep underwater to really be an issue, but once in a while one of them gets close enough to the surface to scare the people swimming near it, or even drown one of them.