Exquisite Biome - an ecosystem-crafting game

Name: Andrea!!!

Lines: Blood loss (mosquitos are fine, leeches not, gigantic mosquitos that drain you dry definitely not), particularly gruesome parasites of animals (those that kill their host or live in skin/muscles), reproductive organs of vertebrates
Veils: Internal parasites, eating prey alive, copulation/reproduction

A cool real-world plant:
Ohhhh I have so many examples for this (dodders, giant redwoods, all carnivorous plants, air plants, lithops, myrmecophytes -- seriously, look up myrmecophytes if you aren't familiar), but I wanted to choose a plant others wouldn't know about. Salal! It grows abundantly in my home biome in western Washington state, and the leaves and berries are both edible. But interestingly, the leaves are appetite suppressants. It's a very interesting defense mechanism, and I don't know many other plants that do that. It's a neat alternative to poison!

A cool real-world animal:
I've been really getting into mollusks the past while. Did you know that some sea slugs in the genus Sacoglossa can absorb chloroplasts from algae into their own cells, becoming temporary photosynthesizers? Or that all cephalopods ancestrally had a shell, and that shell was lost at different points and in different ways? Or that squids and octopi move by breathing water in through one aperture, and then expelling it at high velocity through a jet?