Flashfire Villigrass

The flashfire villigrass split from its ancestor after a series of events caused the villigrass and the hanging villigrass to hybridize at the edge of the water table. Their progeny found themselves in intense competition with its ceiling and floor-dwelling relatives. As a result, after attaining a bizarre set of adaptations, the hybrid population left the water table in search of new pools of water to call its own.

The flashfire villigrass' signature trait is its ability to survive out of water, albeit only in particularly moist regions on the inner edge of the lava tube caves and in air pockets in the water table. The flashfire villigrass also lives the shortest life of any villigrass, with individuals only living a week at most on land. However, this is matched by an absurd degree of asexual reproduction. One can observe flashfire villigrass growing in real time. As soon as a new individual reaches a critical mass in relation to its food source, it will put out runners that actively grow towards new sources of food and moisture. Those that lead to nowhere die back. However, if it reaches a new food source, the runner will give way to a new individual. This leads to a constantly moving colony of individuals with old dying specimens being at the back and newborn specimens spearheading the colony.

Flashfire villigrass will consume all in their path. Their primary food sources are microbial mats. They grow particularly aggressively on lithotrophic mats, which they can gain the most nutrition from. They will also grow over and consume any carcass they come across. Like their hanging villigrass ancestor, they have a homogenous distribution of microbe-housing pits. Their rhizoids contain the same lithotrophic microbes as their ancestor, which they use to process basalt into iron they can use in their metabolism. They will also gain iron from the carcasses of rustwurms. Their surface pits are rarely occupied by microbes on land, as no sources of nutrition land on their surface on land. This has also resulted in the drastic reduction of their villi, as the additional surface area provides little benefit in an environment lacking in falling subsidies.

When a colony reaches a pool in the caves, they will carve out as much territory as possible before encountering another colony. They will then proceed to devour everything within the pool before moving on. When two colonies encounter each other, they will mate via conjugation. This maintains genetic diversity within the species. If too many colonies occupy the same pool, they will actively try to devour each other in an attempt to gain enough biomass to reproduce. The two or three surviving colonies will then proceed to reproduce before leaving the pool behind. New colonies will feed on dead individuals from their parent colonies as well as the basaltic substrate before leaving on their own overland journey. Competition between these young colonies can lead to an even larger war among colonies, with only the largest and most aggressive making it out of the pool alive. Individuals living in these pools often live longer than those living on land, living for some two to three weeks.

Colonies living in the water table have an entirely different way of life. After returning from their exile in the caves, they have become something of an 'apex predator' among the villigrasses. They often frequent the cavern walls and ceilings, where they can better grip the hard substrate. They will even breach into air pockets to feed on the microbial colonies growing there. Individuals will experience similar lifespans above and below water to their cavern-dwelling cousins. However, these colonies tend to be larger with longer-lived individuals due to the larger number of food sources. They will seek out and devour any sessile organism in their path, not discriminating between cushions and villigrasses. Villigrasses are preferred due to their high iron content. Entire swathes of the caves walls and ceiling are left bare in their wake, making way for early successional species like table cushions. When two or more colonies meet, they will mate via conjugation like the cavern dwelling-populations. However, unlike the cavern-dwelling populations, these flashfire villigrasses have no limit to how many individuals they can mate with at once, as there is virtually no limit to the amount of resources they need to reproduce.

Flashfire villigrass colonies will readily switch between their behavioral modes when moving from the caves to the water table and vice-versa. Individuals from different behavioral modes will also readily reproduce with each other when coming into contact with each other on the boundaries between the biomes.