Shroom Herder

Migrating outside of its ancestral homeland of Vivus and deeper into the verdant grasslands of Darwin, this descendant of the ziraber has taken on a more purely herbivorous lifestyle. They form small herds of eight to ten specimens, and will establish a territory which they will fiercely defend from other herds and competitors with the use of their prominent fangs sprouting from the sides of their beaks. Battles can be fierce, and it is not uncommon for an individual to bleed out after a particularly nasty slash to a vital artery.

Social creatures, as a group they raise their young together, often with the adults taking turns to watch them while the rest set off to forage. The various shrooms make up their diet, and as such it is not difficult to tell where they live due to the lack of them in the vicinity. Males are slightly larger than the females, and often have more vibrantly colored throat sacs. The purple coloration of their hides help them to remain camouflaged within the purple flora, while their backs retain the greenish hue where the process of photosynthesis, though weak, is performed.

What appears to be a secondary thumb is in fact an extension of the wooden wrist bone. A dense, rigid structure, it is primarily used in both defense - such as jabbing predators in their eyes - as well as for spreading an oily, musk-like secretion produced from glands beneath their arms. They coat this "thumb" in the substance and then wipe it along the surfaces of large flora and stones in order to establish the boundaries of their territories, as well as to display their overall health.

The feeding strategy of the shroom herder is, as its name suggests, a fairly interesting one, even if it is unintentional: while more than willing to graze upon existing populations of sapshrooms and supershrooms, they will also engage in "farming" them. Once they have established a territory, they will dig a shallow pit and bury within it bits of dead flora and fauna they come across, in order to to ferment it. Once a stockpile has been formed, they will feed upon it at their leisure. In doing all this, however, they have unintentionally provided the various shrooms that inhabit the region a rich medium upon which to grow on. Growing from discarded berries or partially eaten adult specimens, new shrooms will undoubtedly flourish within the pit should conditions prove favorable, and in turn provide the shroom herders with a steady food source.

An additional benefit of these pits is that they quickly start to reek beneath the heat of the midday sun, producing a rancid odor that wards off many would-be predators.