Dancerplent

The Dancerplent split from its ancestor, crossing by flyway into Fermi. It developed neoteny, finally freeing itself from the requirement to turn into a plant. It was able to do this because of its ancestor’s change to its reproductive system so that eating and reproducing were no longer mutually exclusive. Its neoteny is not a perfect development, however; 30 cm tall when fully grown, adults are rather slow and must rest often due to their hydrostatic legs, as they were not designed to function well at its size. It has no predators and the only other decently-sized fauna in its environment is an arguably even slower amphibious herbivore, however, so its slow speed is hardly a detriment. It can catch small prey or strip flora of their leaves with its vine-like leaf arms, grasping with the individual leaf-fingers and dropping the morsel into its waiting four-jawed mouth.

Though biradial like its ancestor, the Dancerplent can take on a strikingly bilateral appearance--it will often lean to one movement direction, the legs on that side compressing, to get a better look at its environment. This behavior allows it to focus better on something directly underneath it, and it causes it to occasionally resemble the Elevated Plent of another time and place. It has also developed, and is named for, a mating dance which involves leaning, where it will lean in a circle waving its leaf-arms around to show off its health and energy to a potential mate. A pair will copulate mouth to mouth, as the reproductive organs are accessed through there. The female will give birth by “coughing” up her babies into the air, somewhat resembling a Terran cat coughing up a hairball apart from their insistence on aiming upwards. Newborns are tiny, generally only 1 mm tall, and are airborne by way of their proportionally massive tufts.

Like the juveniles of its ancestor, the Dancerplent is a relatively active air-breathing creature which produces some of its own oxygen through photosynthesis. It also respires passively through a “butt nostril” on its underside, which leads into a chamber filled with fractal “respiratory roots”. Despite being for respiration, it also drinks with these, pulling back the skin covering them to dip them into water. It has blue blood and four camera eyes, and it makes up for its slow ground speed with the speed of its vine arms for catching prey. Most of its major musculature is hydrostatic--that is, fluid-filled sacs which are squeezed to push instead of pull--and its endoskeleton is a single continuous wooden bone. While it has no teeth, the portion of its skeleton which extends into its jaws is thick and heavy, allowing it to crush prey regardless.