Eetmii

The eetmii is a mutation of the green snarf and have adapted to live in the Darwin Plains. It has failed thus far to extend outside of the biome because it has begun a symbiotic relationship with the sundialeaf, a purple flora that is found only in this area. Like their ancestors, an eetmii will often infect plents who ingest them, although do not seem to have any real effect on other fauna kingdoms. This allows them to start a commensal symbiosis with purple flora without killing them. Eetmii congregate inside the air pockets of the leaves of sundialeaves, ultimately protecting it from some predators, although young animals and some predators will still eat the leaves, thereby allowing the eetmii to continue to thrive. Symptoms include minor coughing and occasional wheezing, with a runny posterior ventilation shaft ("butt-nostril"). However the most interesting symptoms is that eetmii infections in their early stages (generally within a day or two of initial infection) will affect the host's equilibrium and during the third and fourth day they often will feel slightly hallucinatory. This simply consists of causing a creature to not be able to tell its own size, and they may think they are larger or smaller than they actually are, making walking and traversing terrain harder than it would otherwise be. This alone will not kill a host, although their awkward stumbling around can lead to their demise by an opportunistic predator seeing them and taking advantage of the situation. Unlike norats and nogapsids, greepers are infected only indirectly - they can get sick if they kill and feed upon a norat in the right stage of infection. Since fruit phlyers, pink phlyers, and toves feed on the fruit of sundialeaves, they need not worry about the eetmii.