Giving in to the temptation because I still haven't seen any other posts about the horror of Proteus' ecology, so! Spoilers ahead for Subnautica 2 early access obviously, if you have not played or seen the story, I'd recommend doing that before reading this.
For the rest of us who have played/seen EA so far:
TL;DR -- Subnautica 2 drops you into a world where a dinosaur level mass extinction event has already taken place, and gradually shows you that the beautiful lifeforms around you are really the last survivors of a cataclysm... and they're all on the brink of extinction too. It's brilliant and absolutely horrifying.
Really the game's entire ecology is designed around this fact, and there are tons of supporting details, but these are the two pieces of dialogue which spell it out most plainly:
In order to understand this you'll need to be familiar with trophic levels:
Every ecosystem is held up by primary producers. They take energy from the sun and convert it into matter which can be eaten by things on the higher levels, and each level eats from the one below it. Without primary producers, the entire food web collapses. And by the time we start the game, this has already happened on Proteus.
The reason the sea life on Proteus seems so squid and crab centric is not because of an evolutionary quirk, its because every other type of life that may have existed on Proteus is gone. We don't know why (most likely the Proteavirus, but there's no answer in the lore yet), but regardless: something wiped out the primary producers on Proteus, and everything that relied on them went extinct too.
When Nahema says the world is surviving on its own rot, she means it literally: the only remaining upper trophic level consumers are the ones whose food web leads back to detritivores: bacteria, animals and other organisms which eat decaying matter to survive. Because things are always dying, there is food for detritivores, and therefore anything that can eat those detritivores or their produce can live on. They are the last fragile link keeping all life from going extinct… but eventually their food could run out too, especially if human colonists disturb the incredibly fragile balance Proteus hangs in.
I like literally haven't been able to stop thinking about this since I figured it out. Granted, this is my niche, but it affected me so strongly that I'm still surprised I haven't seen anyone else discussing it. It's a brilliant, simple, and very effective eco-horror setup and I'm so excited to see where the story takes it when the full game is out!
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