Furcot

Furcots are large, sapient arboreal creatures from the jungle planet Midworld, and have a deeply symbiotic relationship with Midworld's Humans.

On Midworld, each Human is accompanied by a specific Furcot and vice-versa, as a new Furcot is generated by the They-Who-Keep trees everytime a Human is born on their branches. The Human and the Furcot remain by each other's side for their entire lives. If one dies, the other inevitably perishes as well, although the exact reason for this is not known.

Biology
Furcots are large, hexapedal creatures adapted to an arboreal lifestyle. Their bodies are covered in shaggy green fur, and they perform photosynthesis. They have ursine faces with long floppy ears, three eyes arranged in a curve over their muzzles, and triple nostrils. The mouth is filled with multiple fangs and a pair of sharp lower tusks. Their six legs are thick, and equipped with large grasping claws. They're strong enough to carry creatures of the same size or even larger than themselves with relative ease, and to tear holes in metal as if it was nothing. Despite being robust creatures, they move swiftly through the canopies.

In spite of their formidable strength and agility, Furcots are not very active creatures and prefer to spend as much time as possible sleeping. They seem to acquire all their nourishment from sunlight. Assuming that they never ingest food, their mouths seem to serve solely for speaking, and their fangs and tusks solely for defense and for assisting Humans on the hunt. Since Furcots are created specifically to be the companions of Humans, this isn't particularly unusual.

Furcots are genderless and do not reproduce. Instead, they are created by the They-Who-Keep trees, generated from buds that form near the base of the tree, which crack up like seeds to reveal the newborn Furcots. The trees generate a new Furcot for every new Human born on them. When a Human dies, their Furcot dies as well and vice-versa, although the exact mechanism through which this is achieved is not clear. Those who have died are ceremonially inserted into the trunk of the trees, which absorb their minds and add them to a matrix-mind gestalt. The matrix-mind of each tree is itself part of the greater forest-mind, which forms a collective planetwide intelligence that allows the Midworld superorganism to respond to and interact with its inhabitants (even non-native ones like the Humans, which are descended from lost colonists). It is likely, therefore, that Furcots aren't technically a species in the traditional sense, but simply a component of the planetwide superorganism.

Appearances

 * Midworld, by Alan Dean Foster (1975)
 * Mid-Flinx, by Alan Dean Foster (1995)