Bilbetter

The bibetter split from its ancestor the hopping ketter. It is better adapted for burrowing than its ancestor. Its ears, legs, and tail have shortened, and its forelegs (or arms) are larger in proportion to its hind legs. It spends almost all its time within its burrows. Consequently, its sight-eyes are slightly smaller. It always lives near a thorny hedgelog, and expands the tunnels made by the thorny hedgelog's fruit or the hopping ketter. The two species can live in the same burrow, but only the bilbetter makes a distinct sleeping chamber. Bilbetter burrows are often roughly E-shaped, with the first prong being the entrance path, the second a tunnel for hunting vermees, and the third a sleeping chamber. As a plent, it excretes most of its wastes through its skin. In a sense, it sweats urine. Like sweating, it has no habitual times for waste secretion, nor any ability to control the secretion of its waste. Consequently, the walls of its tunnels absorb any liquid wastes it produces. Rarely, small and subterranean tepoflora may grow on the walls of frequently-traveled (and thus sweaty) burrow paths. The urea in its sweat-wastes is converted by unique nitrocycles into ammonia. The ammonia is then turned into ammonium, and from that point the cycle proceeds in the standard nitrocycles fashion. The nitrocycles are eaten by several kinds of consumer microbes, thus forming a tiny ecosystem of microbes in the unique environment of sweaty tunnels. Like an anteater, it slurps vermees with its tongue. It will not slurp up vermees tunneling through the walls of waste-soaked passages. This allows young, mucus-coated vermees to stealthily stick onto the bilbetter's tail, which the bilbetter cannot reach with its tongue. It is still good at hopping away, if not quite as well as its ancestor. It has little, if any, evolutionary pressure to be a swift hopper. Its ancestor's only predator at time of evolution, the tuskcoat, does not live in the Coolsteph Desert. Furthermore, the only predators in the Coolsteph Desert, the desert gossalizard and elongated scarlethorn, respectively eat only sapworms and dartirs larvae. Even the magnificent slaesosaurus, a fearsome carnivore with a wide range of prey species, is unlikely to travel all the way from the Coolsteph Temperate Beach into the desert. Due to lack of need, the warning colors on its tail are much more muted than that of the hopping ketter. The bilbetter will lick sap from an injured thorny hedgelog. Its jaw is too fragile to allow it to eat fruit, but it will still attempt to lick the juice off a thorny hedgelog fruit that has fallen into its burrow.