Woodyshroom

The woodyshroom split from its ancestor and grew significantly in size due to a lack of competition, becoming a prominent decomposer of black flora. It differs from sapshrooms, which also grow as “shelves” on wood, in that it does not consume sap at all and is not parasitic. It has traded its ancestral fruit for clusters of woody achenes which each contain only a few spores. As its name suggests, the woodyshroom’s fruiting body is lignified, which makes it difficult to eat, digest, or dislodge from the decaying log it feeds on. It is strong enough to support the weight of medium-sized fauna standing on it. Unlike the chitinous “wood” of shelf fungi on Earth, the woodyshroom’s wood is actually genuine cellulose-based wood.

The woodyshroom has gained sexual reproduction; as its achenes contain multiple spores, not all of them germinate. These dormant spores are periodically transported by rain, and when they meet they sometimes fused. Having never had sexual reproduction in its ancestry, the woodyshroom's ancestors were naturally haploid; the first fused spores, meanwhile, were diploid. However, it did not gain the ability to undergo meiosis until several iterations later, resulting in the modern woodyshroom being highly polyploid, possessing a monstrous genome 32 times the size of its ancestor's. Fertilized and unfertilized spores can grow into fully functional and morphologically identical woodyshrooms, the former (sporophyte) with 32 complete sets of chromosomes (dotriacontaploid) and the latter (gametophyte) with 16 (hexadecaploid); the sporophyte uses meiosis to produce hexadecaploid spores. The large genome will likely not shrink considerably in the future, rather the redundant chromosome pairs will gradually transform into new kinds of chromosomes with their own genes and purposes, taking full advantage of all the newly-added genetic "space".



The woodyshroom’s achenes, which are just one millimeter wide, function like seeds and have hooks on them, which causes them to become stuck in fur, feathers, trichomes, plent cotton, and other forms of fibrous integument present on fauna. They depend on luck to successfully land on logs, as the achenes have no food stores apart from the wood making up the casing. This is not much of a problem, however, as the forests are filled with wood, and the main body is perennial—they can live as long as 80 years, growing bigger all the while and producing new spores.

The woodyshroom can sometimes grow on living trees, feeding on their deceased heartwood. When it does this to a towering rain forest tree such as the gargantuan obsiditree, this can be actively harmful, as the trunk becomes more fragile and will eventually be toppled by strong winds. However, shorter, wider black flora such as obsidoaks actually benefit from this, as being hollow makes them lighter and better-able to support their own weight, which in turn allows them to live longer and grow larger.

Like its smaller ancestors and cousins, the woodyshroom is highly resistant to disease and parasites. It readily bounces back from plagues without ever even becoming endangered.