Alpine Hedgelog

Alpine Hedgelogs are shrubby, needle-leaved flora found 2.7-3.4 kilometers up in its habitats. They can slowly grow offshoots from their roots, allowing them to form broken “hedges” in suitable habitats.

Its leaves are stiff, thorny needles, borne in pronged clusters. Alpine Hedgelogs grow 1.0-1.8 m tall, with the smallest ones in Drake Alpine, and the biggest in Drake Rocky. Alpine Hedgelogs often have shallow, wide-spreading roots, due to the shallowness of suitable soil, especially in the Drake Boreal and Drake Alpine habitats.

Uniquely among contemporary Hedgelogs, Alpine Hedgelogs’ poisonous and acidic compounds aren't exclusive to its yellow berries. Now, its roots produce large quantities of the strong acids, helping it break down rocky soil. Its outer stem tissue also contains small quantities of the poison and acids. Generating its poison is energetically costly, so it makes the poison in its tissues and especially its fruits only as needed. They make fewer poisonous, highly acidic yellow fruits than their ancestor, and those fruits are less acidic and less poisonous. The berries often taste like rhubarb or sweet lemons, and the flowers often taste like sweetened cranberries. (The exact taste varies somewhat across populations.)

There’s a mismatch between the habitat of its ancestor’s chief pollinator, the Hopping Ketter, and its own habitat range. It therefore relies on smaller, more wide-ranging pollinators, such as Xenobees and Xenowasps. In Drake Alpine, pollination is rarer due to fewer pollinators around, so it produces fewer berries. Those in that population have berries that drop easily whenever large fauna (generally the Loafpick at time of evolution) brush up against them.

Population Notes
Despite the name “Alpine Hedgelog”, Drake Alpine actually has the smallest population of Alpine Hedgelogs. They live in only a narrow sliver of Drake Alpine in its east and northeast section, for almost all of Drake Alpine is 4 kilometers or above. It is called the "Alpine Hedgelog" because, at time of evolution, it's the only Hedgelog to live in Drake Alpine at all, and despite its limited geographic range is very conspicuous as the largest flora there (at time of evolution) and the only non-genus flora species. They are actually fairly common there, but their numbers are inherently limited due to the small sub-habitat sizes.

Typically, damage from pests triggers poison production as an epigenetic response, so those in more pest-ridden environments have more poisonous fruits. Drake Alpine, the yellow fruits are barely poisonous by normal Hedgelog standards and are simply astringent and sour; an adult human could eat an entire individual Drake Alpine Alpine Hedgelog’s crop of yellow fruits to no ill effect. Occasionally, the fruits of alpine populations are red rather than yellow, as its red pigments are superior at protecting it from intense radiation, but the trait is not universal among the population because of continued interbreeding between border populations. The berry color and toxicity variation fall within usual genetic variability within a species, like how some strains of the earth plant Solanum nigrum have edible berries or red berries, despite the general rule of toxic, black berries.