Raft-Building Cone Puffgrass

The Raft-Building Cone Puffgrass split from its ancestor. It has gained the ability to reproduce asexually using runners. However, these runners are not used to carpet their driftwood home; instead, they only emerge near the edge of the driftwood piece and serve to “grab” other pieces of driftwood to create a larger, more stable raft. This is where it gets its name, and this capacity is what allows it to build what is perhaps Sagan 4’s most unique microbiome.

Raft-Building Cone Puffgrass colonies can be massive, sometimes even a few kilometers in width, but they rarely exceed a few meters due to storms and fauna activity tearing them apart. In the event that a colony survives the test of time, it can get larger and larger, and it will also get thicker as new grass and even other flora such as trees grow on top of old individuals. This can form floating islands, but in the grand scale of geologic time, they don’t last that long as they can still rot apart or collide and sink. The underside of these islands are quite literally made of detritus, even after the original driftwood making up the island rots away, attracting all manners of decomposers and detritivores to feed on them. Methanogenic microbes such as Seacleaners may live inside the islands, feasting on the detritus as well as helping to keep them afloat by producing often massive pockets of methane gas.

The female cone of the Raft-Building Cone Puffgrass is shorter and more compact, but it is still fleshy. Its reproduction is unchanged; male spores are airborne and will land in female cones to fertilize them, and the fertilized spores are dispersed using the long hairs that give the puffgrass lineage its name. They germinate early, producing necessary structures such as leaves and roots so that they can obtain food and water while waiting to land in a suitable place to grow. Similar to their ancestor, they remove excess salt by transporting it to specific leaves which are then shed.