Bangsticks

Despite rising sea levels and sinking islands, a population of Boomsticks just narrowly avoided extinction and managed to continue their evolution. Bangsticks replaced their ancestor and developed sexual reproduction. They are hermaphrodites and have distinct male and female stems. The male stems fire spores into the air, and they eventually land in and fertilize a female stem which soon fires its seeds. Its seeds are contained in a larger casing which explodes in midair, sending seed “shrapnel” flying in all directions. The firing of the seed makes a “boom” sound while the seed casing exploding creates more of a “bang”, so when a Bangstick fires its seeds one might hear “boom boom boom boom, bang bang bang bang”. Its seeds are borderline microscopic and easily picked up by wind, and thus it has spread far and wide and contributes to aeroplankton in the lower atmosphere.

Derived from a desert species and relying on wind distribution, the Bangsticks are not suited to survive in especially moist habitats with a lot of tree cover. As a result, they are most commonly found in beach, desert, and steppe environments. Their seeds can and do land and grow in other habitats, as is to be expected from aeroplankton with no control over where the wind takes them, but those rarely reach adulthood due to overwatering or competition with larger flora. In cases where they might land in a montane environment, they might be able to successfully grow to full size, but they are unable to reproduce if the environment around them prevents them from heating up their combustion chambers.

Like other seed-shooting cryoflora, the Bangsticks make use of combustion of hydrogen and oxygen produced by its endosymbiotic cryoutines to fire seeds and spores into the air. When it comes time to fire its seeds or spores, flesh covering a chitin lens dies to expose it, causing light to be focused hard enough to create a spark. The explosion of the seed-filled “bullet” is unrelated. The fleshy bottom of the bullet is tightly bound, and when launched into the air it pops into a different shape shortly afterwards, creating a powerful but more biological explosive force which shatters the rest of the bullet and distributes the seeds.

In order to thrive in warm sunny environments, the Bangsticks have made the rather unprecedented adaptation to lose all of the lens-like structures of most of the cells of its chitinous exterior. This was an easy mutation, only a matter of the lens shape-encoding genes malfunctioning, and it’s baffling that such a thing never evolved beforehand. Instead, its exterior is structured very similar to crystal flora with more facets, as almost every single lens is replaced with a flat hexagonal face. The only lens left intact is the one responsible for focusing light for combustion in each stem.