Kellace

(Note: The cutaway diagram may not be entirely accurate, for some features may have been hidden or simplified. Depicting the kellace not embedded in its host would be unlike how it appears in the wild.) The kellace, like a parasitic fungus or plant, uses an extensive root system to take nutrients from its host. Its roots are initially pale and soft, but become hard and green by absorbing pigments and minerals from the host. However, the growing tips of the root system remain pale and soft. While it can digest chitin, it is not particularly good at it. The kellace digests chitin so slowly that if it tried to dissolve a hole in the chitin wall itself, it would run out of nutrients before it succeeded. Therefore, it can only germinate on a host from a preexisting wound or breakage point. Fortunately for the kellace, its tropical crystamboo host is rather fragile and breaks easily from strong winds and storms. The kellace's mushroom-like fruiting body grows very quickly. In two days, the fruiting body has completed its growth. At the night of the third day, it rapidly grows delicate stalks topped with berries. When the berries and stalks are halfway through growth, cells inside much of the fruiting body die off and are digested, making the fruiting body hollow. With their echolocation, swampslurpers can hear the difference between a solid fruiting body and a hollow one, and so can hear when a kellace is "ripe." The kellace's spores are kept inside the berries. The berries' juice is very sticky. If swampslurpers wipe off the juice on a tropical crystamboo, the spores inside the juice, with luck, can germinate on another tropical crystamboo. If the juice is swallowed, the spores inside the juice will instead be spread through the swampslurper's "dung". (which, like most plents, is more like an owl pellet.) If there aren't any tropical crystamboos living near the pellet, the kellace spores can remain dormant until a young tropical crystamboo sprouts near them. With luck, the newly-emerged tropical crystamboo has a breakage point, allowing the kellace to parasitize it. Kellace can reproduce by budding, so what appears to be one individual may actually be a colony. If a kellace finds a structural weakness on the inside of a chitin wall, it will secrete digestive enzymes and eventually create a hole to the outside. At this point, another fruiting body can sprout. Kellace are called such because, as they tunnel through the crystamboo's fungal interior, they may cause deformations of the chitin wall, which trace the path the roots take in a lace-like pattern. (or, more grotesquely, like keloids.)