Sprites

Named for their tiny size and shiny carapace, sprites are about the size of an Earth squirrel. Living in holes bored into trees, and sometimes in woven nests in bushes, sprites ignore larger predators in their territory, focusing instead on gathering food such as nuts, berries, and anything else plant bases and remotely edible. They will store this food near their nests, wrapped up in a tiny hammock, or swing, as some call it, of a shiny filament extruded from the underside of their abdomen. This food is both for feeding their young as they hatch, and as bait for avians and other small creatures. It was discovered that the fibers of the hammock are coated in a neurotoxin, which seeps into the fruit and poisons the animals that come to steal from the sprites. It will also affect humans, numbing the skin on contact. The scientists of the colony caught a few sprites and set up a habitat, but the effectiveness of the toxin was not fully researched before the end of the Gene Wars and the abandonment of the planet.