Sanguine o' Spheres: Difference between revisions

While a host dying quickly is detrimental to most parasites that don't rely on complex, multi-host lifecycles, for the sanguine o' spheres it is of little concern. By the time the first spheres have reached maturity, they are already releasing their spores asexually into the surrounding water. While many will never find a host, all that's needed is one to be successful in order to start the process all over again, and with oceans rich in gilltails, there are many potential opportunities to find a host.

While the vast majority of the hundred or so species of sanguine o' spheres - typically at least one for every species of gilltail and their kin - follow a very similar lifecycle and bear almost indistinguishable appearances beyond size - many species can only distinguished with genome sequencing - there are still a few evolutionary oddballs that pop up from time to time. One lineage, for example, has developed a tolerance for brief ventures out of water, a necessity given their typical hosts are srugeings. Another lineage doesn't immediately release spores throughout its life, instead relying on the guts of large carpozoans to release them from their bodies, and to achieve this they subtly alter the chemical scent of their gilltail host to make them more pungent to these sorts of predators. Perhaps the oddest of all is a lineage that is particularly deadly to its host, primarily because once the gilltail has died, the spheres will extend outwards from the corpse on thin stalks in order to better infect small scavengers with their spores which are in turn consumed by un-infested gilltails. Of course, all these examples are merely outliers on the evolutionary tree of the sanguine o' spheres. Time will tell whether or not they will lead to vibrant new limbs, or if they are but mere branches to be pruned all too soon.