Mangot

The mangotower, or mangot for short, splits from the spinetower. Those spinetowers that colonized Fermi Temperate Beach's dunes found highly favorable conditions, as there was much more water and slightly more organic matter from decaying flora. (mostly beach colonystalks) With greater water availability, reproduction costs were lower. Thus, it no longer produces spores only when the rains have come. Instead, the mangot produces four spore-filled fruit-leaves in the spring, at the end of its three-year lifespan. (It no longer had to wait for rains to come to reproduce, so longer lives were unnecessary.) Mangots emit a thin orange plume when the fruit is ripe, which serves to attract fauna from far away. The plume is made from modified spores that do not contain any gametes.

The mangot's fruit-leaves are similar to bananas, nopalitoes, and stevia. Like a banana, it has soft, starchy flesh; like a nopalito, it has crisp skin and mucilage; like stevia, it has steviol glycoside-like compounds that make it very sweet. It has less sugar than would be expected given its sweet taste, but it is still fairly high in calories because of its high carbohydrate content. The fruit-leaves are ripe when the tips turn mango-orange in color.

The flesh of the fruit-leaves contains numerous spores. While greatly enlarged compared to the mangot's ancestor, they are still very small, at only 2 millimeters long. The seeds are resistant to digestion. Some don't survive being eaten, but, due to sheer numbers, a significant amount do. The seeds germinate only a day after their deposition in dung.

Unlike some Earth species of fruit, the fruit do not fall off the parent "tree" when ripe. Thus, only tall fauna, fauna that can climb, or fauna that can fly can reach the fruit-leaves. At the time of its evolution, its fruit-leaves are eaten mostly by snapjaws.