Tamchuck

The tamchuck split from its ancestor. It is a versatile fauna that is a jack-of-all-trades of three environments: land, burrows, and water. It always makes its home beside a body of water, but is not picky about what kind. The body of water can be the ocean, a lake, or even a pond. It can even migrate from one burrow to another when a pond dries up, with a typical maximum of three burrows.

Though it no longer makes floating homes, it still uses purple flora to construct its burrows. It collects masses of marbleflora in its mouth and spews them into the interior of its burrow, where they form a kind of glue. If available, it also deposits pieces of fuzzpalms, tropical canoferns, and tropical clusterblades. The marbleflora deposited in the darker part of the burrow eventually rot. Then they are fed upon by the detritivorous cleaner borvermids (which stuck to the tamchuck's ancestors' bodies as they ventured inland), subterranean tepoflora, and vermees. Though much of its nest components are edible to it, it will only eat its nest components if very hungry.

Though it has a preference for purple flora, it will eat "pile oozes": the colloquial term for certain species of oozes which consist entirely of photosynthetic cells.

As adults are fairly large, they have few predators. Indeed, at the time they evolved the only predator of the adults is the tyrant gossalizard. The tyrant gossalizard avoids the defense of the back spikes by biting the tamchuck's head, underside, or limbs, envenoming its prey if it must.

The young stay with their parents until three-fourths (1.35 m) the adult size, after which they leave to make or claim their own burrow. Should they claim a pre-existing tamchuck burrow, there's a likelihood it's a secondary or tertiary burrow of their parents. While it's convenient their parents have inadvertently provided for them, the parent(s) may need to make another secondary or tertiary burrow should the body of water they live near dry up. They will also leave to make another burrow if the "neighborhood" they return to has signs of tyrant gossalizard occupation, whether it's a freshly-molted tyrant gossalizard in a burrow that is unfortunately not abandoned or the gossamer silk that marks a breeding male's territory.

This habit means there are numerous tamchuck burrows in the environment wherever a tamchuck lives, especially in the Barlowe Tropical Woodland, Barlowe Tropical Scrub and Hydro Tropical beach biomes, where tamchucks have no predators. Spectresnatches, rainforest gossalizards, tyrant gossalizards, and twilight ridgehorns all occupy tamchuck burrows. On account of the demand for burrows in its environments, the tamchuck is a keystone species. Tamchucks will even accept three twilight ridgehorns or six spectresnatches coming into their burrows while the owner is still there. A burrow occupied by a tamchuck is an especially desirable burrow because the warm-blooded tamchuck produces heat.

A tamchuck's eyes are slightly out of synchronization when it blinks. In the picture above, two of the lower eyes are beginning to blink.