User blog comment:Lord Loss/Monster Appreciation Week: Baleful Gigginox/@comment-174.52.196.175-20130528024556

Baleful Gigginox is another very well done subspecies that's a great experience to fight. Its attacks always keep you on your toes because it has the most effective paralysis attacks in the game. The paralysis globs it lays on itself definitely adds extra caution to the fight.

The only thing I was dissapointed with is that it doesn't have any paralysis element weapons. Paralysis/Lightning Dual Swords would have been a perfect weapon to get from him.

As for the whole biology thing, maybe its possible that Baleful Gigginox aren't a rare mutation, but a common one that's just rarely seen. It might be quite a common mutation.

As for why it produces electricity instead of poison, I have an idea for why.

Gigginox might be an advanced relative of Khezu, and both of them might have evolved from a common ancestor that produced electricity. While Khezu kept its electrical producing abilities when it evolved, Gigginox might has lost its electrical abilities in favor of poison.

What they produce to subdue their prey probably has to do with their environments. Living in a cave means prey rarely wanders in and you go longer without food. Khezu handled this by developing large fat reserves to store energy, but it still uses electricity which uses a large amount of energy. Gigginox has very little fat, but uses poison which requires less energy to produce and kills its prey with little effort.

As for Baleful Gigginox, it might be atavism, which is a mutation that brings out ancestral features, like people born with tails, whales with hind flippers, snakes born with legs, and birds with teeth. Such a mutation might bring out the development of the electrical organs of its ancestors.

The reason why Baleful Gigginox are so common might be because of the way Gigginox reproduces. Self-reproducing clones endlessly is bound to produce plenty of mutations. Some mutations might be fatal, but due to the sheer number of offspring produced, it might not be that much of an issue. The atavism mutation might be the most common of these mutations, but it doesn't seem to be disadvantageous so they survive to adulthood and are seen by people often enough to be classified as a subspecies by observers.