Slaver Sunflower

From the video game Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch.

The slaver sunflower is a plant engineered by the Tnuctipun during the reign of the Thrintun, with the purpose of serving as a defensive weapon, and are to be found throughout the planets dominated by the Thrint Empire.

The image on the right shows a sunflower that is inconsistent with the books, depicting a highly reflective central surface that can burst the light stored at a target in fatal beams.

The sunflower blossom looks like a silvered paraboloid mirror, it tracks the movement of the sun and its petals reflect the concentrated light to a dark green photosynthetic node in the center. The stalks upholding the blossoms are described as thick and bulging. The sunflowers have the ability to shift the focus of the mirror petals and attack creatures deemed as enemies such as intruding animals or in the time of the Empire rebellious slaves and enemy Thrintun. This form of defense is very powerful being described as deadly as a laser cannon and extremely accurate.

During the time of the Slaver Empire the sunflowers were were considered a symbol of the landowning class and were used as the sole means of defense for the estates of landowners, being kept in a border around the house or plantation. The Thrintun dependance on the sunflowers became a weakness as unbeknownst to the Thrintun the sunflowers were controlled by the Tnuctipun and were a linchpin in their multi-stage plan to overthrow the Thrintun. Eventually, on the day of the Tnuctipun revolt the sunflowers who had previously never attacked the landowners or members of their family turned against them.

The sunflowers were unaffected by the culmination of the revolt and 1.5 billion years later have evolved into different but similar forms across the former Empire worlds. On Silvereyes the sunflowers have a gray coloration, and the photosynthetic node at the center being black. They also reach two feet in high and appear less reactive than other sunflowers but still keep the paraboloid silver blossom and the tendency to kill intruders in their midst. The sunflowers are also present on the Ringworld, a structure built long after the Thrint Empire. It's speculated they were carried there by the Ringworld Engineers as decoration but after the fall of the Engineers they managed to grow wild. They have now become a plague on the Ringworld and can cover great areas larger than entire planets where they are the only life form as anything else that gets in the line of sight of the sunflower patch is killed. Bringing things full circle some of the hominids of the Ringworld have also taken to using sunflowers as defensive weapons for their houses.