Is the image on the left showing a purple bobberfruit, a relative of the blue bobberfruit (shown on the right) ? I thought so for sure, and wondered what they look like as baby plants, and what their lifecycle is like. And thought the small spheres on a stick on top of it might be the seeds, that plant themselves in the ground like you can see on this photo of a slime mold (Comatricha nigra) here:
How? Cal might explain it this way:
"They are still so tiny. What I think is bobberfruit is just a thin stick with a really small purple ball on top. Smooth and solid, that’s its seed, isn’t it? Grows on top of the mature fruit, I have seen it appear on our fields sometimes. I think it gets detached from the plant alongside the stem-like thing by xenos or humans harvesting the fruit, which is the entire part of the plant visible above ground. Because the seed is filled with some gas it tends to land upright, and since the stick it is on has a sharp end it’s often easy for it to bore itself into the ground. Especially since the stick also contains some liquid that drops out of it right before landing that softens the soil! So at first they look like those lollipops made from sugarbug syrup we have gotten at Vertumnalia sometimes. Except with the traces of the acid inside it and the burnable gas inside you should keep them far away from you...You have to wait for the plant to mature and, uh, digest both. Anyway, a few days later shoots starts developing at the base, where the seed is connected to the stick, and then they soon engulf the whole stick, and then, when growing upwards, do the same with the seed. And soon you have a bobberfruit again, which has more seed-sticks appear at top like pins on Tammy’s ancient pincushion."
(from an unpublished chapter of Time and Dirt, the story I have been working on)
Photo: Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
