Blind Arbourundi

The blind arbourundi replaced its ancestor the arbourundi in Ferret Limestone Caverns. After being cut off from sunlight for millions of years they lost their eyesight and pigment. They appear greenish due to their green blood. Without predators and hard limestone walls they lost their legs spikes. Rather than trying to dig into the limestone they live on the top, inside the vast caverns.

Like their ancestors they have a semi-symbiotic relationship with the berry arbourshroom. The workers will harvest berries from the arbourshroom, helping the 'shrooms to grow and expand, and will also protect the fruiting shrooms from herbivores like the blind hoofplent.

The majority of a colony is comprised of workers, whose job it is to gather food and tend young (their picture is above). The soldiers' job is to defend the colony; they travel in "squads" of 5-10 and use their barbed nose-tooth to defend. In addition the "digger" caste has disappeared due it being too hard for them to dig through hard limestone. Just as its ancestor, every arbourundi colony has 1 queen, who is the only one capable of giving birth; she is much larger than the rest and has a much bigger mouth for giving birth to multiple babies at once. All other members of the colony are kept sterile by hormones emitted by the queen. Each caste gives off a particular pheromone scent; the queen is able to pick up these scents through tiny pores around the base of her eyes and is thus able to get a rough idea of how many workers of each particular caste are present in the colony (the ratio of workers for a normal colony is for every 1 soldier, there are 2 regular workers). If the number for a particular caste drops below normal levels, the queen responds by giving birth to more of that caste.

The lifespan of a queen is about 5 years while the lifespan of any given worker is about a year, maybe less. Just before the queen dies, she gives birth to a "king", a special worker of the soldier caste who is capable of breeding. After the king is grown she will give birth to a new queen and then dies; after she dies the workers will continue for a short time, but will eventually die too. Once the new queen is born the king will take her to a new location, there he will tend to her until she has grown. Once this happens the king will deposit his reproductive cells into a special organ in the queen; in this organ specialized stem cells analyze the DNA from the king's reproductive cells and begin producing more of these cells, so that the queen will never run out. And so the process begins again.