Beckon blood
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Beckon blood is the fluid that circulates through the body and root mat of a Beckon, driven by the heart in the bulb. It is dark, with a faint glow in the colour of the Beckon's hive: green in Beckons of the Iris lineage and purple in those of the Knox hive. It carries oxygen, nutrients, the sulfate and fluoride from which Beckons make sulfur hexafluoride, and heat. It contains almost no calcium.
Composition
The blood is a water-based fluid carrying dissolved nutrients from the root mat, an oxygen-carrying protein, sulfate and fluoride ions, and buffers. The glow comes from the same fluorescent pigment as the glow of the outer tissue, and shows through the skin where vessels run close to the surface.
Fluoride forms insoluble minerals with calcium and magnesium, and Beckon blood carries little of either; its dissolved salts are mainly sodium and potassium. Beckon cells keep fluoride out with transport proteins in their membranes, as some bacteria do, and the gas glands are the only tissue that takes it in. Beckons have no bone or other calcium mineral anywhere in the body.
The blood also carries away the acid released when the gas glands break down sulfur hexafluoride, and returns sulfate and fluoride to the root mat or holds them for later use.
Primitive and Adapted Beckons
The blood of the two species differs in what it carries.
- Adapted Beckons carry high concentrations of sulfate and fluoride for their gas glands, and sugars and glycerol-like alcohols that keep the blood liquid below freezing. The blood is held at the Beckon's body temperature of 18 to 25 °C, and in the root mat warm blood leaving the Beckon passes its heat to the cold blood returning to it.
- Primitive Beckons carry less of both and no antifreeze, and their blood follows the temperature of the air. In a hard frost it freezes with the water in their cells.
Clotting
Where a vessel is cut, the membrane gel flows into the wound and sets on contact with air, closing it. Blood lost into an opened gas cell drains out of the wound and is not recovered.
Effects on people
Beckon blood is not acidic. Its fluoride makes it mildly poisonous if swallowed, and field manuals advise washing it off the skin. Blood draining from a large wound in an Adapted Beckon can collect on the ground in quantity.