âMudhearts, sometimes called mudroots, are neither plant nor organ, but a whole creature unto themselves, if one which seems fundamentally incomplete in construction. It is a simple, blind and limbless sort of animal, and it spends its whole life buried in the loose soil beneath still, swampy waters, with only its stalked throat and anus protruding above the sand, pumping water in one end and out the other.
The chamber of their bodies is lined with muscle, which pulses to propel water through, so that the sticky hairs which line its gullet may trap detritus or whatever tiny, hapless animals cannot escape. It is this throbbing motion which gives it the common name of Mudheart, for its motions very much resemble those of said organ.
Individual mudhearts can live ten lifespans or more, and grow many hundreds of times heavier than a person. The Vuxte seem to favor them as a foodstuff, and many of their wetland or coastal cultures will expend great effort to create shallow, flooded plains and ponds wherein the mudhearts breed extensively, so they may harvest them in quantity.
Mudhearts propogate themselves in much the same way as certain trees and lilies, bearing creeping, wormlike fruits, though fully aquatic and lacking any vegetable anatomy. Mudheart fruit-larvae are small, dark, and fishlike, swimming erratically by the motion of a pennant-like tailfin. These larvae are ravenous vegetarians, and will quickly reduce any green matter within their reach to particulate. Through their insatiable appetite, they create muddy barrens suitable for the development of their immobile adult stage. The feces of the larvae is also a suitable foodstuff for the adult forms, and by their digestive action they convert biological material that would be inaccessible to their mature forms into a ready supply of nutrition.â
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