Gumjorn

Mature gumjorns are filled with a light green natural gum. This gum oozes out at injury sites and seals the wound, preventing infection and dehydration. Unlike its ancestor, it uses its light orange pigments all the time. However, little patches of greenish-black pigmentation is a fairly common mutation. Despite its relatively small size, it is unexpectedly heavy, for, like a watermelon, it is filled with water. It reproduces through "stembuds", asexually reproduced buds that detach from the parent. These stembuds are approximately 8 cm tall. Unlike its ancestor, it can produce more than one stembud at a time, though each stembud is smaller. Gumjorns live closer to the waves than their relatives, the saltjorns. Buds are detached during flash floods or spring tides. (which don't actually occur during the spring) The gumjorn detaches its stembuds by dissolving a breakage point in the stembud's internal stem-like tissue, which is similar to the phloem tissue of plants. The stembud's pseudo-phloem has chitinous walls and contains a pocket of air. Its inner tissue is watery. The low density of its tissue, as well as its internal air pocket, allows it to float on ocean currents. Stembuds have thick, chitinous shells resistant to rotting, and their photosynthetic "windows" are covered by chitinous lenses and only pop off once they have established themselves and started growing. A stembud can suspend its metabolism for months at a time until it's washed up on a beach.