Gormontyants

Food

by Ruby O'Degee

The difference between the prehistorical chocolate covered ancestor and the Gormontyant Sprinkle is clinical. The Gormontyant Sprinkle is alive when it's sifted into the batter of a cake, cookie or creamy candy. The Sprinkle can be any color. Hamlet merchants sell cinnamon, peppermint, lemon, cherry and lime flavored Sprinkles all year. During the All Hallows Eve season, pumpkin flavored Gromontyant Sprinkles sell out.

Basic Information

Anatomy

The Gormontyant is sweet. (No sugar added) The bug salivates a salty glue substance that sticks to the tongue. When added to birthday cakes the blend of the flavored Sprinkle, Gromontyant saliva and spice is an annual award winner. No one dares to eat the cake, but it looks pretty.  When the cake is lit the Gomontyants  sayshay with it across the table.

Genetics and Reproduction

Each year 5,904, 640 Gormontyant Sprinkles are bred in Hamlet chef driveways. Before they make their way to the kitchen, they work hard to find a salty sand hill to roll in. Chef hopefuls sort through the grown up group for the most agressive bugs. Chefs give them a hot bath in a wash tub. Chefs take extra precautions not to scald them.
Sweets are baked thoroughly before Sprinkles are added. No eater of fine treats wants to eat a piece of pie covered with dead descendants. Gormontyants still have work to do when they hit the lips of an unsuspecting trickster.

Behaviour

During holiday seasons sweets are an abundant food source in Hamlet coffee shops, home bakeries and restaurants. But one night of the year Sprinkles can be found anywhere there is a need for defense.
On All Hallows Eve the rascals who string tissue paper from one tree to another, hurl spoiled Jack O' Lanterns at porches, and steal candy from small children while saying BOO! are treated to a thick slice of Sprinkled cake. Gormontyants put on a show. They enter the wide mouths of the selfish tricksters, swell the culprit's lips, burn through sneezing noses, and settle into the tongue. The trickster screams and jumps. The Gormontyant slithers down the thief's throat to find a bloated candy filled belly.
No matter how many Halloweens this happens the tricksters always come back for torment. This is one instance that the Lost Words Hamlet Chamber of Commerce doesn't intervene.

Additional Information

Perception and Sensory Capabilities

Gormontyants are not sensible, magically inclined, or perceptive. They live to make confections soft, moist and edible. Gormontyants love being sprinkled from a salt shaker into hot cocoa during the Holiday season. To sense the roof of a stinging mouth is on every bug's bucket list.

Ants by ROD w/Midjourney

Scientific Name

Insectowdenfensers

Origin/Ancestry

by Ruby O'Degee

Gormontyants are the evolutionary descendant of the delicious and dead Chocolate Ant.

Conservation Status

Gormontyants are not in short supply. There are plenty tricky children who cause mischief in Lost Words Hamlet, so there are plenty of reasons to to breed the tiny chewers.

by Ruby O'Degee