It is largely notable for the quantities of slime that its skin produces. This slime acts as an irritant, weakening the plants and animals that live in the pool and allowing the nonakara to more easily feed on them.

Unfortunately for the nonakara, this slime also poisons the water, eventually doing so to such a degree that other forms of life can no longer survive. At this time, the food supply of the nonakara disappears, and it is forced to begin searching for another home.

The nonakara prepares for this search by covering its body with a thick layer of mud. Doing this slows the rate at which water evaporates from the skin of the nonakara and increases the chances that the creature will find a new home before it dies of dehydration.

This journey serves an additional purpose - reproduction. Nonakara are solitary creatures - only one will live in any body of water - but, during these searches, the migrating nonakara enters any occupied pool that it encounters. While in the pool, the nonakara consumes large amounts of the polluted water and allows its covering of dried mud to dissolve. The nonakara then thrashes violently, causing a large amount of its slime to be introduced into the water. This behavior is the basis of most primitive legends regarding the nonakara, who are often called whirling serpents.

These two activities - the ingestion of water polluted by the slime of another nonakara, and the release of slime into the pool of another - represent the methods by which the nonakara exchange genetic material. In just a few days, both nonakara (provided the migrating nonakara completes its journey) will give birth to a large number of offspring.

Not long after their birth, the larval forms of the nonakara burrow into the muscle tissues of any large fish and other aquatic or semi-aquatic animals that are found in the pool. These larvae will use the muscle tissues of their hosts as their initial food source, and will often be spread throughout the area by the travels of their hosts.

It is commonly accepted that the spread of the nonakara through the galaxy has been caused by explorers who have acted as host animals for nonakara larvae and carried the creature far beyond its homeworld.

While it is most often the case that victims of nonakara larvae begin displaying signs of fatigue in a matter of hours, it is not uncommon for the larvae to temporarily restrict their development and remain undetected in the victim's body for several months before they begin feeding. In these cases, the victims often do not even suspect that they have become infected until after the unexplained fatigue begins.