Lungworm Clogmane

The Lungworm Clogmane has split from its ancestor, making the transition from feeding it's larvae on the wood of flora to feeding on the woody tissues of plents, and any other tissue that will stand in their way. While their early ancestors took advantage of plent carcasses, whose wooden remains were as fitting for their diet as the wood of any flora, by expanding their diet into living plents they no longer have to compete with vermees and other detritivores.

Much like its ancestor, they do not eat as adults, instead building up their nutritional reserves as larvae, stuffing themselves into a fatty sausage form before undergoing metamorphosis into a adults. Unlike its ancestor, they are no longer annual, but opportunistic. While the males are identical to the ancestor, the female has taken on a mane of her own with barbed feathers that end in sharp quills. Once mated, she will seek out a plent, dead or alive, plug herself in its butt-nostril and expand her mane to lodge into place while she lays her spiky eggs into the lung to lodge themselves into the lung walls.

Sometimes the plent will suffocate, but in the vast majority of cases it will merely experience a decrease in oxygen while being eaten from the inside. As the larva chew through the skeleton and other wooden tissues, they will pierce holes in the plent's epidermis and turn around to seek more wood, creating random holes all over the plent's limbs and supportive structures that happen to air out the tunnels.

In either case, eventually a plent falls down, and once the larva have had their fill they will burry themselves underground in a bed of holes just under the carcass, where they will take about 6 weeks to undergo metamorphosis, though the process slows down to a halt during the colder periods of the year. Once done, a large clog of adult clogmanes emerge from the underground bed, ready to seek new mates and new plents to settle in.