City Snotflora

City snotflora have rectangular, fairly regular shapes, bringing to mind a city's building plan. Though city snotflora do not move, their "cities" are full of activity. They have an active "economy" that consists of trading specific kinds of nutrients. The "economy" exists because not every plot of delving lyngbakr skin has the same resources. Some have more mucus, others more skin flakes, and sometimes blood, pus, and necrotic tissue. City snotflora trade their goods in a pre-digested state through the thin pseudopods that connect them to each other. They also send chemicals through the pseudopods to communicate. Messages can include information on present body conditions, hormonal "requests" to commence mass spore launching, alerts on predators on the loose, or the host's rough stress level. (determined by levels of cortisol in the blood) Usually the activities of the city snotflora do not harm the host, but when the delving lyngbakr host is too stressed, it does not recover from wounds as quickly. Therefore, the resource of dead skin cells and mucus dwindles because the rate of consumption is higher than the rate of renewal. Furthermore, feeding on the weakened skin can create a route to infection, and perhaps the death of their host. However, city snotflora do not actually "know" the second reason. Rather, they use high cortisol levels as an indication of approaching "famine" and slow down their metabolisms in response. Thus, they prevent harm to the host for purely selfish "reasons." ("Reasons" being in quotes because they are brainless and cannot actually reason.) Most city snotflora live on the underside of a delvng lyngbakr, but those from a particularly large community of city snotflora might extend to the sides. These "suburban" city snotflora can supplement their diet with "marine snow". (detritus) City snotflora reproduce aesexually, so each individual is essentially a clone of the other. Differences arise only because of epigenetics caused by differing diets. (e.g., city snotflora individuals sitting on a mucus-rich plot activate mucus-digesting enzymatic pathways and pass a mucus "preference" onto aesexually budded copies of themselves.) However, the epigenetic changes are cleared for offspring produced by means of spores, allowing the spores to utilize any resource equally well on a new delving lyngbakr host. On account of delving lyngbakrs travelling in pods, city snotflora transmission between delving lyngbakr hosts is high. If any predators eat an entire community of city snotflora, the individual delving lyngbakr is easily recolonized by spores emitted from other pod members. Predators of city snotflora include left-right scaluckers, cerulean gillfins, and sucker swarmers.