Tamjame

Tamjames make burrows next to bodies of water. As it lives in a dry habitat, this is often only a temporary body of water. Its burrows are located close to the surface of the soil, to the extent falling objects or heavy fauna occasionally fall through the roof of the burrow. The tunnels are fairly narrow, but widen greatly around storage chambers. These storage chambers are called middens, and are filled with food. As in its ancestor, its burrow is inhabited by a commensal species of tepoflora, which feed on detritus in the burrow. In the tamjame, this specialized tepoflora species is acorn-shaped and readily photosynthesizes when 'skylights' are opened in the storage chamber.

Tamjames have pronounced cheeks. While not as developed as in Earth hamsters, these cheeks allow them to carry multiple items back to their burrow. Much like a packrat, a tamjame is attracted to shiny objects and may drop one of the items it's carrying in order to make room for the new item. Fortunately for the tamjame, it rarely finds such shiny objects in its habitat, so its middens contain mostly food.

A tamjame's diet depends on the season. It eats mostly fruit when fallen fruit is available and mostly flowers when fallen flowers are available. In the autumn, it eats dead sapworms. It eats supershrooms and sapshrooms year-round, and only eats the cleaner borvermids in its burrow when food is scarce.

The tamjame's favorite food is fruit, which it stores deep in its midden. The fruit it stores is highly perishable, but drying it out by leaving it on the surface is not an option: its relatives are likely to take it. Instead, it preserves its fruit by "pickling" it with specialized guttoplaque symbiotes conveyed through its urine. These lily petal-shaped guttoplaques (Stomachus lilyi) are stored in sacs next to its bladder.

The tamjame soaks the fruit with its urine, and then covers the fruit with dirt. The dirt, moistened by the urine, turns to mud, soon drying out to become a brittle adobe-like substance. Within the jar its microbial symbiotes pickle the fruit. When the tamjame needs to eat the fruit, it places the whole "jar" in its mouth and crushes the shell with its cheek teeth, spitting out the fragments.

While its relatives are capable of infiltrating its burrow and eating its fruit, they hate the pickled taste of the fruit and are further deterred by the ammonia-like smell of the adobe.

It has short fur with an agouti pattern. This fur is sparser on its face and underbelly. Its tail is flattened, hairless, and scaly. It keeps itself cool by exchanging heat into the environment through its tail. When this is insufficient, its sprays its tail with urine in lieu of sweat, since it lacks sweat glands. Tamjame parents take good care of their young, and will wash them and disinfect their wounds using their own urine. While it sounds unsanitary, tamjame urine is largely sterile (with the exception of S. lilyi) and contains or produces lactic acid and dilute amounts of urea, both of which are useful for cleaning.

Notes: It makes pots, so I named it after the Latin word for potter---someone who makes pots. Incidentally, the name 'tamjame" comes from James Potter, Harry Potter's father, and the species name of its bacterial symbiote comes from Harry's mother, Lily. Incidentally, tamjame young are called "harries", but I wasn't able to insert that information in a way that didn't seem extraneous.