Microcosms of the keprem
The claws of the keprem are one of the most sought-after resources of the Wormwood Coast, highly prized by collectors who will pay exorbitant sums for such biological marvels. The fresh claw of an adult can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars on the black market, provided that a scavenger is willing to brave the vicious retribution of the keprem to obtain them.
Really, there are two things being sold - the claws themselves, and the miniature ecosystems they contain within. The claws, often presented cut in cross-section like nautilus shells, are valued for the beauty and complexity of their internal structure, the delicate and carefully-sculpted chambers that keep the life swimming within in a precise balance. The water collected from the claws’ interiors, teeming with unique communities of rare invertebrates, is sold to the pharmaceutical industry as a treasure trove of novel bioactive compounds. Occasionally it makes its way into the hands of religious sects, with all manner of ideas about Wormwood or purifying elixirs or What The Scallops See, but nothing ever seems to come of their many practices.
Economics aside, the fauna of the keprem claws is one of the evolutionary and ecological wonders of the Wormwood Coast. These claws serve an elegant dual purpose for the massive arthropods - allowing them to swing like spider monkeys from their long, many-jointed legs through the dense canopy, as well as providing them their most important source of food. The keprem are specialist consumers of the olam fruit, a plant made devastatingly toxic by the influence of Wormwood. To combat this, the claws of the keprem contain dozens of enzymes which they inject into the fruit in order to detoxify it. However, this process can take more than six weeks, so upon finding a suitable fruit, a keprem will stab its claw through the skin and then snap it off, leaving the claw embedded in the fruit to be returned to once it becomes edible.
The timing of the release of the digestive enzymes is also critical to the process. To this effect, the claws are hollow, and quickly fill with rainwater in the wet olam forests. Much like bromeliads, many species gather around these small pools to lay their eggs in the water. The inner surfaces of the claws are rich in specific nutrients to attract certain species at certain times, and the complex inner chambers partition different species at different depths in the microhabitat (the eight-inch length of the claw is plenty deep enough to define different habitats for creatures of the scale that make their home there). This miniature ecosystem is established such that the complex rises and falls of the populations of the various species as they grow, reproduce, and consume each other serve as a kind of ecological clock to time the various steps of the digestive process. It was once thought that these communities contributed chemically to the breakdown of the olam toxins, but it is now believed that their regulatory role is far more significant. Hundreds of species are known from keprem claw pools, dozens of them endemic. The makeup of these communities can vary greatly between keprem populations, with some even playing host to small vertebrates like frogs and salamanders.
It is remarkable that the keprem do not appear to supervise the development of the complex ecosystems they catalyze. The remarkable aspect of the claws is that they are self-sustaining - their physical and chemical structure will automatically gather the proper species together and facilitate a community structure with the correct properties to regulate olam digestion. In doing so, they provide one of the only connections linking plants back into the food web of the Wormwood Coast.