Field Observation: Distal Urticators

Distal urticators are semi-social, but skitish - not quite at the bottom of the food chain in the Distal tesseract, but also nowhere near the top. I was observing a procession of three of these ghostly cacti through the woods one night when I caught a distrurbance amongst the fallen leaves a bit closer to my blind. A windsiever, its long tongue previously concealed there amongst fronds of Distal grasses, sprung up from hiding as if startled by the approach of some unseen predator. And it just as well might have been, as the urticators, startled in turn by the windsiever, shot their gas-propelled spines at the windsiever with little 'pft pft pft' sounds. Whether the barb-strewn windsiever was actually felled by the attack or just feigning dead, I couldn't be sure, but the urticators moved on as soon as it stopped twitching...
...Their spines are ample protection against threats like flabbergrypes or even Distal polyps if they catch the threat early, but predators like mature razorbacks or flensers. The attack I witnessed one morning on a column of urticators one morning was instructive with regards to the technique. The urticator charged in, skewered the rearmost of the column on the forward point of its chitinous carapace, and just let is momentum carry it through. The other urticators gave limited chase, hounding the razorback with hurled spines, but, slow as they were - unable to surround the predator and saturate its defenses - almost all of the spines rebounded harmlessly against the razorback's shell. I didn't see where the razorback holed up to enjoy its meal, but I would suspect it had a burrow nearby; it was late fall and, with the winter birthing and hibernation season approaching, it was likely just packing on some fat for the cold months ahead. In the aftermath, the urticators circled up seemingly to guard their perimeter against a second attack, their surfaces glinting and shifting as though they were conversing in some ineffable way. It was a long time before they moved on...

— Field observation notes regarding the habits of Distal urticators