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Speculative Skull Island Bullshit: Honeypot worm
The beautiful groves of giant flowers growing on parts of Skull Island have a deadly secret in the form of the honeypot worm, a huge, terrestrial polychaete mimicking the appearance of its surroundings, waiting for a hungry pollinator to approach but offering it a set of crushing jaws rather than nectar. Apparently related to the bobbit worm, the honeypot worm has a few more adaptations besides its size and flower-like appearance. With its prey being land animals rather than fish, sometimes including giant arthropods, the jaws are notably more robust, especially the lower pair. The upper pair is more slender and has only one point at the tip, being used more to hold onto struggling vertebrates. While its main prey are the titan orchid's pollinators, the honeypot worm is an opportunistic predator that will attack anything small and close enough; if it senses anything it deems to big, it will retreat into its burrow instead. Even if a predator is successful at identifying a honeypot worm among the titan orchids and grabbing it before its retreat, it will usually only result in the head being torn off while the rest of the body remains in the ground, where it can regenerate a new head. Honeypot worms reproduce by shedding parts of their hind bodies as epitokes, which will crawl around in search for another one, with which it will mate, then die. Young honeypot worms can be found anywhere on Skull Island with sufficiently soft and wet soil and do not mimic flowers, but after a certain size, they will seek out the proximity of titan orchids and dig their final burrow there, where they will mature into their adult form.
Changelog:
-Designated it to be a terrestrial polychaete
The Disney character overlays are a measure to prevent art theft by corporations.
Changelog:
-Designated it to be a terrestrial polychaete
The Disney character overlays are a measure to prevent art theft by corporations.
Category All / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1104 x 1006px
File Size 1.4 MB
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