A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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troglobite
A troglobite is an animal that lives its whole life in caves and cannot survive outside them. Troglobites converge on the same appearance regardless of family: no eyes or vestigial ones, no pigment, elongated legs and antennae, slow metabolism, few offspring, and long life. Cave fish, cave salamanders, cave crayfish, beetles, and springtails have all arrived at it independently.
Etymology
The word is Greek for cave-dweller. It heads a three-part scheme worth knowing: A troglobite cannot leave, a troglophile can live in a cave or outside it, and a trogloxene uses caves for shelter but must go out to feed, which is what bats and cave swiftlets are.
Notes
The loss of eyes and pigment is not simply neglect. Building and running an eye is expensive, and in permanent darkness the energy is better spent, so the loss appears to be selected for rather than merely tolerated. Because each cave system is an island, troglobites are often confined to one cave, and a single hill can hold several species found nowhere else on earth.