It could be something related to a scrapped concept or idea. Subnautica is full of these.

Take the tree leech for example:

"Parasitic, fungus-like growth found attached to other lifeforms. An enzyme is released by the organism which dissolves a hole in the skin of the host, from which it leeches nutrients directly.

Outer, tooth-lined jaw serves no identified purpose. May be used during a different stage of the organism's lifecycle."

Which doesnt make much sense as aside from tress- you find them in select cave walls. quite the tasty organism (/j)

On top of that, the threat bar for smaller non-hostile creatures is really just an arbitrary placement. As the tree leech is on the same spot as the shuttle bug is- despite being depicted as a dangerous parasite.

That is a good point, I never really thought of cut content being the reason. Thank you.

One of the strangest cut features actually is the shuttlebug egg. (See cut content subnautica page for image of it). considering it had its own unique model.

Another strange thing is the addition of the spadefish egg. Considering it's not a larger passive fish.

And how it also uses the model of the cut reefback egg (theres one video of early access which confirms it did spawn in at some point). Although that was likely cut due to performance issues that came with it.

The reefback egg is something I wish they didn’t cut. On my PC playthrough I actually used commands to give myself one for my aquarium. Now I’m replaying the game but on console because my PC died lol

A lot was lost because of the push for consoles. I don't have anything against console platforms. but when you make a game for consoles, you need to have consistency in your releases. You can't have one version have all the beefy cool features- while the other versions are left out because they simply cant support it.

By putting the game on console it created a hardware restriction with what they could make and do in the long term. Anything on pc > had to work on console.

For reasons like this, anything likely performance heavy such as the powerglide, speculated sea dragon egg, and of course the reefback egg.

Seadragon egg- i do not have any files, trello, or page links to back this up. my earliest times on the subnautica wiki either 2015 or 16. there was a page that did mention seadragon eggs being planned. and had the attribute of them burning other fish in the aquarium. Whether or not this was a troll edit, or actual scrapped content- I dont know as the info is lost to time.

A sea dragon egg would have definitely been cool, originally planned or not. But yeah, I definitely understand what you mean with the PC > Console thing. It is unfortunate that it’s a thing that happens but hopefully with consoles getting closer to PCs in terms of performance (for example I believe the Xbox Series X GPU is similar to an RTX 2080) this happens less.