Snowy Florasnapper

The snowy florasnapper split from its ancestor and moved into Maineiac’s polar biomes. It feeds on various polar flora and their fruit, which it grazes during the summer and digs out of the snow to eat during the long winter. It isn’t as great at flying as its ancestor, but can still take off to avoid predators. To adapt to the cold climate, its tail is shortened and bottlebrush-like, lacking the stabilizer which was prone to heat loss; it is proportionally larger; it can tuck its wing membranes under large “blankets” of plumage on its arms; and its legs are fully feathered. Much of its underlying anatomy is obscured by what some might describe as “sheer floof”. It is immune to the spicy taste of some of the flora it consumes.

The snowy florasnapper’s beak is far less extensive, making room for its cheeks, which keep food from falling out of its mouth as it chews with its teeth. A large gut allows it to digest the leaves it consumes, though it is not as efficient as a ruminant. Its jaw bones are sensitive to vibrations, allowing it to feel potential danger in the form of footsteps while grazing. Its coloration causes it to resemble a pile of snow while at rest.

The snowy florasnapper, being an egg-layer unable to evolve ovovivipary due to its hard eggshell, must breed in the short summer. Trees are absent in much of its range, so it nests on the ground, often communally and well-hidden among any available shrubs. Both parents watch over the eggs and hatchlings, taking turns incubating, and brutally attack anything that comes near that even resembles a predator. The chicks hatch fully feathered, extremely fluffy, and already able to run, and they follow their parents for the first year of their lives. Only half of all juveniles survive their first winter due to starvation and freezing. Snowy florasnappers reach maturity in only one year and can live up to nine.

The snowy florasnapper has spread the fuzzkern, the pilunoroot, the pilonomroot, and the pilonoroot to Maineiac Tundra through fruit and seeds. Some of the flora it spread depend on water; they survive in the tundra because, just like a real life tundra, it effectively becomes a wetland every summer due to snowmelt and a lack of evaporation.