Pricklecone Keryh

The pricklecone keryh is specialized in infecting the ziraber.

Adult

The body of an adult pricklecone keryh has three parts: the absorptive base, the middle, and the infective cone. Its absorptive base is specialized in absorbing sulfur from the soil. The tentacles have small extensions, similar to the root hairs of plants, that increase their absorptive ability and likelihood of picking up the gametes of others of its kind. The middle part contains its reproductive organs. When its eggs are fertilized, it moves the eggs up into the top part of its body, the infective cone. The infective cone has little prickles on its outer surface and secretes a sticky bright yellow fluid.

The adult pricklecone keryh has a wobbly but dense texture, a little like a mozzarella stick. The infective cone is a little firmer than the rest of the body. Pricklecone keryh body shapes are somewhat lumpy and irregular. Adult pricklecone keryhs can only live in sufficiently moist and warm environments. While they can live in a variety of soils, they can't live in soils with too much clay or salt. They grow fastest at 36 to 39 Celsius at a pH of 5.5 to 7.

Pricklecone keryhs can metabolize several sulfurous compounds, but preferentially metabolize hydrogen sulfide.

The pricklecone keryh's host, the ziraber, is a little harder to infect than the cragagon. Unlike its ancestor, the ziraber sometimes walks quadrupedally on its claws, and the papain of pricklecone keryhs can't dissolve the ziraber's wooden claws. This led to pricklecone keryhs developing a different route of infection.

Whenever a ziraber walks on it, the whole infective cone sticks to the toe claws and detaches from the individual pricklecone keryh, like a burr from a plant. The adult's middle body quickly seals itself, eventually growing a new cone.

With luck, the cone will find its way to the flesh of the toes surrounding the claws. When this happens, the cone's prickles jab into the skin and inject a small amount of carrier fluid with a few eggs. The carrier fluid contains papain, which dissolves surrounding skin cells, allowing the eggs to pass into a superficial blood vessel. The eggs travel around in the circulatory system until they pass into the veins of the large intestine. At this point, they hatch.

The cells of the infective cone eventually die and drop off the ziraber. If it is incubated at the right temperatures, placed in a nutrient-rich broth, and given root-growth hormones, the cells of the infective cone survive and can grow into another individual. However, this only happens under precise experimental conditions, and never occurs in the wild.

Larvae

Oddly enough, the larvae act like sea anemones of the large intestine. Though the larvae can absorb nutrients floating around through their tentacles, they are also capable of catching and digesting the microbial symbiotes of its host. Sometimes they are indirectly helpful, eating pestilences that might otherwise make its host sick. Other times they are indirectly harmful, eating guttoplaques that help the ziraber digest its food. Larvae can't fully digest the microbes they eat, so they use the host's circulatory system to get rid of their wastes. They do this by emitting chemicals from their prongs that cause capillaries to grow at their bases. This dense network of capillaries makes spots occupied by pricklecone keryh larvae distinctly bright green. Eventually, these wastes emitted by the larvae induce a allergy-like nonspecific immune reaction. At this point the larvae detach and leave. It usually takes several days for the immune system to react, since the larvae's wastes aren't especially toxic.

While in transit, each larvae brings its prongs and tentacles together and secretes a thin mucus coat. With its prongs and tentacles stuck together with mucus, it assumes a cylindrical shape. Being too big to travel through the blood vessel and pop out from the skin, they instead are excreted with the ziraber's owl-pellet-like dung. If conditions are sufficiently moist---usually while it's raining or after a rain---the larvae separate their tentacles (but not their prongs) and crawl into the surrounding soil. There, they orient themselves upside-down and grow into adult forms.