Duckplant

The duckplant is a locomotive meat plant of the poultry plant variety. The plant is cultivated for human consumption in limited locations, but can much more commonly be found growing and locomoting in the wild in regions often coinciding with the natural habitat of its cousin fauna, the chickenplant and the turkeyplant.

The duckplant is one of several meat plant organisms artificially engineered for the benefit of the Lucidus mission and its resulting civilization. The duckplant was invented using Earth-native vegetative plant tissue suffused with genetic material from various species of duck. The resulting genetically engineered organism was a plant that produced edible meat-like material that tasted like duck and contained many of the nutritive benefits of meat, but without the fresh-from-the-slaughterhouse zest.

The duckplant, as planned, was among the creatures evacuated from the Lucidus mission to the surface of Neonisi upon the mission's end.

The fruit of the duckplant is the primary source of consumable meat plant food found on the duckplant. The fruit of the duckplant ripens three times per Annual Unit in most Illuminatian climates. One duckplant organism is able to produce multiple fruit and produce repetitively, providing a constant harvestable source of sustenance for humans while also proving sustainable for the plant. The duckplant organism can survive continuous harvesting of its fruit and can survive a controlled amount of harvesting of its extremities.

The duckplant is a highly-mobile plant in the wild, detaching from its root system and alternately re-attaching to the ground to form new temporary root systems in new locations in an interchanging pattern throughout the organism's lifecycle. The organism's locomotive behaviors build a meat-like vegetative tissue in the plant's extremities. The fruit of the plant, when they develop, draw upon the nutrients that build up in the plant's motion-producing limbs, sacrificing muscular material used for locomotion in order to store the nutrients instead in the fruit. As more energy is absorbed by the fruit, the plant becomes less mobile and begins to form a root system in one location in order to more efficiently absorb nutrients and water from the soil. The water further aids in the development of the fruit while the nutrients replenish the muscular tissue of the duckplant's limbs.

Since the duckplant—like all meat plants in Illuminatia—is considered to be a plant and not an animal, Illuminatians are able to maintain a vegan diet while benefiting from the animal proteins found in the duckplant. The duckplant—being a vegetative organism and not an animal—is not sentient and does not have conscious experiences, so therefore harvesting of this plant is considered to be perfectly ethical.

The duckplant is a primary participant in the phenomenon of the turducken plant—a fellow poultry locomotive meat plant which develops only after the fruit of a duckplant—having been infiltrated by the fruit of a chickenplant—in turn infiltrates the fruit of a turkeyplant, producing a Turducken fruit. This unusual process only takes place naturally in specific regions where the habitat of the three creatures overlap and where the unique climate encourages this behavior. However, the process of forming a turducken fruit is also reproducible in captivity, where most Turducken plants are commercially produced.