Drinking Cloudgrass

The drinking cloudgrass split from its ancestor. With the absence of any medium-sized sky flora to compete with, it grew 10 times its ancestor's size. Like its ancestor, it is bilaterally symmetric, however its bubble is more spherical and it floats with its leaf-covered end tilted upwards. It bears a "skirt" of sticky tendrils which surround its root tendrils. It is named for the behavior these changes evolved to support: instead of living "attached" to clouds, it floats freely by day and drifts downwards to "drink" from the ocean by night. In addition to drinking, its sticky tendrils also capture plankton from the water. This is a much better food source than aeroplankton and allows the drinking cloudgrass to grow and reproduce considerably faster than other sky flora, even reaching full size faster than its smaller ancestor.

The drinking cloudgrass's sponge tissue only extends one centimeter past its membrane. This makes it very lightweight and therefore have considerably more lifting power, at the cost that much shallower wounds are sufficient to pop it. However, being able to survive floating on the ocean's surface also gives it time to heal from such wounds and re-inflate. Metals within its membrane such as magnesium prevent hydrogen from leaking out of its bubble.

Like its ancestor, the drinking cloudgrass reproduces sexually using spores. It produces millions of spores per day using the nutrients it gains from the ocean overnight, creating a consistent ocean-to-sky transfer of nutrients which allows other sky flora to grow and reproduce more quickly. Fertilized spores germinate inside clouds and fall as raindrops. Juveniles float at the surface of the ocean, using macroscopic binary fission to rapidly bud new individuals and growing quickly using oceanic nutrients. They utilize cloudbubble cryoutine symbiotes to convert large amounts of water into hydrogen to form their bubbles. Once they reach about half their full size, they are able to float out of the ocean and begin their daily migrations between sea and sky. Very few survive to adulthood, as they are extremely vulnerable to predation early in life.