Vegetable aliens short story with a pun

Question

I read this short story (only 3 or 4 pages) about 1990 but I think it was an old anthology.

What I recall, there are a lot of native aliens on a planet Earth is colonising or mining, they are basically humanoid in form but they are walking vegetables.

The Earthmen are using them for a workforce but suddenly their numbers are declining, they're afraid of the jungle and are heading back to their homelands.

An Earth Investigator learns the natives are being found dead and drained of their sap. He concludes it's a vegetarian vampire.

They set a trap and kill him, the final line is "we buried him with a steak through his heart"

Answer 1

This must surely be "Eripmav", a (very) short story by Damon Knight, first published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in June 1958.

As the OP recalls it deals with Earth colonising a planet in the Fomalhaut system called "Veegl":

The Veeglians, like all higher life on this world, are plants; the Veeglian vampire, needless to say, is a sapsucker

A Veeglian girl is found complaining of lassitude, and two puncture wounds are found in her neck. The Earthmen find and kill the Veeglian vampire responsible, and the story ends:

Afterward he seemed dead enough, but the local wiseheads advised us to take certain precautions. So we buried him with a steak through his heart.

Answer 2

This is "Eripmav" by Damon Knight. It's a one-pager from Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1958.

The story starts out:

On the planet Vcegl, in the Fomalhaut system, we found a curious race of cellulose vampires. The Veeglians, like all higher life on their world, are plants; the Veeglian vampire, needless to say, is a sapsucker.

And the ending:

We sizzled him with blasts from our proton guns, and yet to the end, with un Veeglian vitality, he was struggling to reach us with his tendrils.

Afterward he seemed dead enough, but the local wise-heads advised us to take certain precautions.

So we buried him with a steak through his heart.

The story is available at the Internet Archive.