Hello, friends and fans!
Today in Fun Facts, a series of articles about characters and plot devices in my stories, I’ll be talking about Crabbygrass.
Crabby-grass is a native plant-like animal form native to the planet Deanna, being essentially an animal which has developed remarkably plant-like characteristics. These characteristics enable crabbygrass to blend in remarkably well with ordinary grass and help it to all but disappear into wild grass and even urban lawns.
Crabby-grass has stalk and leaf-like appendages, and even grows seasonal flowers, by which it reproduces by means of wind or insect pollination, and sometimes, even by direct contact with its partners. The creatures generally resemble clumps of thick, green grass – making them appealing, unfortunately, to herbivorous creatures. The creature’s flowers develop into seed-pods, which can be made to rattle when the creature becomes angry and shakes them, usually as a warning.
Crabbygrass has an interesting composition, and underneath its shaggy grass-like covering, its body resembles a sort of stick-insect, but which has eight segmented legs, and the front two end in sharp pincer-like claws. The body, which is remarkably hard and strong, grows a covering of fine leaf-like structures not entirely dissimilar to hair, which gives the creature its grass-like appearance.
Crabbygrass is naturally highly aggressive and tends to attack anything regardless of size with piranha-like vigor, biting and snapping at herbivores that try to eat it – causing havoc for the local farming community on Deanna. Nervous disorders in livestock is fairly common as a result, and most ranchers on Deanna put anti-depressants and sedatives into the water supply to keep their animals calm.
Crabby-grass generally subsists on its natural diet of small bugs living in the Deannan soil, but since the arrival of Terran colonists, it seems to have grown to favor the pigeons inadvertently imported from Earth as its staple diet. Domestic animals running free and unsupervised tend to vanish mysteriously. Crabbygrass is known for attacking Humans also, although mostly they cause injuries to the parts they can reach, mainly feet etc. Crabby-grass might not be able to actually eat a human, but if someone were to accidentally step on one (which happens fairly often) it would certainly try – which is why a lot of people on Deanna tend to favor safety shoes.
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All material copyright © Christina Engela, 2017.