1980s/90s "Analog" story set on a world where the flora grow wormholes

Question

I'm pretty sure this was Analog, based on my memory of the internal art (more on that later), and the timeframe corresponds to the block of issues I can't find.

The story is set on a world - I recall it being notionally SF, though the subject matter suggests otherwise - where most native plants, and maybe some animals, grow a wormhole that manifests as 2 openings on its exterior that are topologically connected. These wormholes are used in various ways mostly to hunt, IIRC.

So, for example, there is a plant or animal that grows in large clumps in shallow water. Each individual is basically a fat tentacle, with one end of the wormhole in a slit near the end, and the other near its base. They hunt cooperatively, with the one nearest food reaching for it, and its neighbour(s) reaching through the wormhole in its base and out through the wormhole further up to extend their combined reach. This can happen successively many times to give them a great range to grab food, which happens by pushing a wormhole over the prey, so it is forced out the wormhole at the base, where it is trapped, digested, and the nutrients shared.

This is the art I recall: it's a full-page image of a colony of these hunting, so it shows a shoreline and a dozens of these reaching out through one another like a giant tree made of tentacles.

One reason I believe the story was SF was that there was some exposition about how potential energy affects the wormhole; PE is conserved, so if the far end is too high above the near end it will be almost impossible to push something through it. And there is another critter that hunts by having one end of the wormhole at the surface of a body of water, and the other at a much higher elevation. It looks like a pool of water, but if you put anything through it trying to drink it will pull it through, possibly shredding it in the process if there is enough potential being converted to heat+kinetic energy.

Again, an SF element is that humans are not native here, and have brought their own food plants, etc., though they have adapted some of these plants in place of (lost?) technology, like using a wormhole in a higher reservoir to provide water pressure without needing pipes.

Answer 1

"Captives of the Slavestone", a novelette by Ian Stewart in Analog, Mid-December 1987; a sequel to the novella "Displaced Person" in Analog, May 1987 which was the answer to the question Story where portals grew on trees. "Captives of the Slavestone" was James Forde's unaccepted answer to that old question.

Both stories are set on Qish, a planet with botanical wormholes. Quoting from "Captives of the Slavestone":

A hundred million years before Old Earth devised the dinosaur, a Qishite plant came up with a gimmick that changed evolution into revolution. Like many a plant before it, it reproduced by budding. But these buds stayed linked to Mama by a tame wormhole in space. All the descendants of that vegetable Einstein have the trick woven into their genes. Wormholes have two ends, and each end has two sides—inside and outside. The insides join the plants together. The outsides form a spatial short circuit—a vegetable matter transmitter. The locals call it a synte.

For more details, see the answers to the older question.

The story you remember seems to be "Captives of the Slavestone", because you have described the illustration by William R. Warren, Jr. on pp. 172–173 of the Mid-December 1987 Analog.