#this is actually cool as hell because it's rooted so deep in the aligned ecosystem in a way that's a lot less straightforward than energon

[transingthoseformers]

Your "deep sea vents pump out Unicron's blood" hypothesis implies that deep-sea creatures are Like That because they quite literally feed on evil god blood, and i for once support that. I'd like to add that that fungi type would probably be in symbiosis with some type of chemotroph bacteria, which implies that there are even more organisms that use that type of bacteria to digest dark energon. Hell, I'd go as far as to say that these, or at least a philum or two, inhabit surface-level organisms to feed on trace amounts of dark energon in their systems.

Symbiotic evil fungi ftw

Deep see fish are also like that because the adaptations that let you live at those depths are coincidentally Evil Looking As Fuck which does loop back to how we're wires to find certain traits terrifying a la traits of a predator. And tbh them also having the "digest dark energon" bacteria would aid them in surviving in the dark cold hard depths aaND ALSO IMAGINE BIOLUMINESCENCE FUELED BY DARK ENERGON

We actually have a SHIT LOAD of mutualistic bacteria living inside and outside of us, so it makes quite a lot of sense! Though, they cannot instantaneously process too much dark energon so the stuff could be dangerous (but let's be real that happens with vitamin C as well)

holy shit imagine a dark energon deficiency because in a way... what prevents it from being a vitamin at this point?