COMC-401 Lessons

An Abundance of Fourth Years

Welcome back to Hogwarts everyone! Before I begin, let me properly congratulate you all on making it to Fourth Year! This is an incredible milestone as this year is a very big and important year. You may even be starting to think about your future as adult witches and wizards. My, it has been a long time! I do hope that your break went well, and that you enjoyed the various trips and special weeks that occurred. I have a little clerical work to get out of the way here, so please bear with me as I get through all of the required policies, information, and announcements. 

I plan to cover twelve topics total this year, with eleven of these topics being creatures. All of the creatures I will be covering this year are XXX classified creatures. Next year, I will begin to cover the XXXX classified creatures, as well as finish off the XXX classified creatures. 

On top of covering creatures, I will also be discussing a topic that is crucial for any magizoologist to be aware of. While I don’t want to give away the surprise, I will give you this hint: the circle of life is a very beautiful thing. While discussing that topic, I will also be discussing spells at length. You have come to the point in your magizoology education which requires me to make sure you know the spells needed for the creatures covered from this point forward, as we are coming upon dangerous, yet important, creatures of the wizarding world.

I would also like to take a moment to discuss the coming years of Care of Magical Creatures. As you all may remember, you will have your Ordinary Wizarding Level exams at the end of next year, and while it may seem early, I encourage all of you to begin your preparations for the Care of Magical Creature exam. I remember in my days the examiners were rather harsh about the techniques and information we used, but they have since lightened up on that.

Last year, you had a year-long project with your creature journals. This year we will also have a year-long project, as will your remaining years in this course. Each project will help cultivate a different skill. The creature journals helped to instill proper note-taking and record keeping, as this is one of many skills you will use when dealing with creatures. This year’s project will help instill a sense of nature in you, as every magizoologist must know what is going on in the natural world around them. The project will be discussed at length, along with an introductory lesson, next time. 

Finally, don't forget that if you have a learning disability, or you are not a speaker of the English language, please make sure you are appropriately marking your papers with either LD, or NES so that they may be graded accordingly. You will not be marked down for grammar and spelling.

Bundimuns: The Creator of Corrosive Ooze

Today, we have two creatures to discuss. We’re going to start off with Bundimuns, so let us begin!

What are Bundimuns?

Bundimuns are given an XXX classification, with the status of beast. Found all over the world, the creature is a sickly, green color and has several eyes. Bundimuns have at least one eye, but there is no limit to how many it can gain. Although the creature looks like a fungus, it is not: it has eyes and legs, making it a common household pest. Their legs closely resemble roots, and this allows them to move rather quickly, so if you frighten them, they will attempt to flee. It is best that when you attempt to handle a Bundimun infestation, you do so quickly and calmly. Never touch a Bundimun. Their spongy body excretes a substance that is highly acidic.

Where do they come from?

A Bundimun’s diet consists solely of dirt. I trust you grew up in mostly clean households, however there are times when one gets behind on the housework! Bundimuns feed on the dirt that builds up. Luckily, if you aren’t aware that something in your home is dirty, Bundimuns have other ways to let you know that they are infesting your home. Bundimuns let off an awful aroma - many have said that the smell of a Bundimun is equivalent to a rotting or decomposing organism. The more severe the infestation, the stronger the stench will be.

Bundimuns are asexual creatures. Each eye may break off from the original Bundimun to create a new Bundimun. This is how the colonies expand.

Are Bundimuns useful?

Bundimuns can either be useful or destructive. They are interesting creatures in the sense that they have the ability to either clean a house or destroy a house all based on one key factor - their secretions.

The Bundimun Secretion (or Bundimun Ooze) is an excretion of the creature. It is an acidic and corrosive material which can harm unprotected hands. When these creatures infest buildings, they will crawl under floorboards and behind baseboards. Their raw secretions will rot away the building’s foundation and can cause it to crumble. However, their secretions aren’t all bad. When diluted, the ooze can be used as a magical cleaning solution that can be used in the home.

The Scouring Charm

For the first time ever in Care of Magical Creatures, I’m going to ask you to take out your wands! I will be teaching you how to perform the Scouring Charm. This charm has several uses - it is a cleaning spell which is used to rid an object of unwanted substances.

The Scouring Charm can also be used on people (however, I do not condone or recommend it). Some of you may be aware of this if you have ever said something rude in front of your parents. For the Muggle-born students, this would be the equivalent of your parents “washing your mouth out with soap”. If cast on a human, you will most likely see their mouth bubbling up with soap.

However, we won’t be using this spell on each other. Today, we will be using this charm to clear out a Bundimun infestation. I will demonstrate it once for you, and then I will have you try it on your own.

The incantation for the Scouring Charm is Scourgify. Please repeat after me. That’s “SKUR-ji-fy”. The wand movement is very simple. All you need to do is draw an “S” in the air in the direction of the target. Do not expect to see anything emit from the tip of your wand; there is no light effect. Simply by pointing your wand directly to the creature, the infestation will just vanish eye by eye. Make sure that as you are saying the incantation, you also focus on clearing out the Bundimuns. The spell block has been included below so you know the appropriate amount of willpower needed.

Please take note: This spell is useful for only minor Bundimun infestations (one to fifteen eyes). If you notice that you have an infestation of Bundimuns that contain upwards of twenty eyes, please immediately contact the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures and ask for the Pest Subdivision.

When you perform the spell on the Bundimuns by yourself, please make sure to stand at least five feet away from them. When provoked or frightened, the creature will spit acid out as a defense mechanism. The acid is very corrosive and will harm you if it touches you. I don’t want anyone being rushed off to the hospital wing on the first day back!

Salamanders: The Fire Dwellers

The next creature I will discuss with you today is a creature I feel very strongly about. I often found them, along with Ashwinders, in the fires of wreckage sites of places I’d go to while searching for illegal dragon breeding operations and activities. Even though these illegal breeders were trying to cover their tracks by burning down their operation, they actually allowed different creatures to thrive. A beautiful thing, really. But, let’s get onto the second half of this lesson. 

What are Salamanders?

The salamander is not what you know of in the mundane world. In the mundane world, the salamander is a lizard-like amphibian that has to spend a majority of its time in damp places because of its skin. You might know them by their second name of newt. Not all salamanders qualify to be newts. Newts are salamanders classified in the specific subfamily Pleurodelinae. While the mundane creature associates with water, Muggle-lore did get one thing right: they associate the salamander with fire, saying that it can walk through flames unharmed. The salamander known to the wizarding world is precisely that. It is a small, fire-dwelling lizard. Salamanders average about six inches in length from head to tail, and live in any magical fire. They have no definitive life span, because they live as long as their host fire lives. After their fire dies, you can keep them alive for up to the normal six hours by feeding them peppers, and then they will pass away. The larger the fire, the more salamanders that can live in the fire. Many salamander breeders keep a room enveloped in fire and keep anywhere from one hundred to one hundred and fifty salamanders in the room.

While the picture above shows the salamander as red, they can also appear blue in color, depending on how hot the fire is burning, and the material that is keeping the flame going. A fire high in oxygen, element number eight on the Periodic Table, will burn blue, as well as a fire caused by ethanol, methanol, rubbing alcohol, or natural gas. We often see these fires at natural gas spills or the aftermath of a party.

Salamander Care

While in the fire, the salamander does not need to eat. It merely reproduces, which we will discuss more later on in this section. In order to keep a salamander outside of its fire, which is necessary to remove blood for use in potions, you must feed them peppers. The kind does not matter, though trials have found that the hotter the pepper the better. It is hard to procure ghost peppers, one of the hottest peppers in the world, but jalapeno and habanero peppers are fine substitutes. The peppers will need to be fed fairly often, usually every half hour, to keep their body heat. In younger salamanders, or when it is the first time the salamander has left their fire, it is recommended to feed them peppers every fifteen minutes. I have included a chart below to help you understand the heat level of different peppers, so you can select the hottest one available to you to use for feeding salamanders. While feeding them peppers will keep them alive outside of the fire, it will only do so for six hours. Coincidentally, salamanders also have six legs. These two reasons are why the salamander is used to represent the number six.

The Salamander Way of Life

Salamanders in the wizarding world have similar mating habits to those in the Muggle world. Their breeding season is from late spring to early autumn. The male and female salamanders will meet in their fire. If the male is interested in mating with that female, he will crawl under her, so that she is on top of his body. If the female is fine with mating, she will not move. If she has already mated, or is not interested in mating, she will move away from the male.

In the situation she does not move, the male will release a spermatophore. The spermatophore is a small packet of sperm. After he has released his spermatophore, he will move himself so that his spermatophore moves into the female’s cloaca. The cloaca is the reproductive and urinary openings on a female salamander. After the spermatophore is in the cloaca, the casing holding the sperm together dissolves, allowing internal fertilization to occur.

Their gestation is 95 to 105 days long. Our salamanders are very similar to fire salamanders in the Muggle world because they are both ovoviviparous. This means that the hatchlings are in an egg while in the womb and hatch in the uterus. This causes the female to have a live birthing process that can last anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours. Salamanders typically have between fifteen and thirty hatchlings at one time. They are about one inch long at the time of birth.

Over the course of the next five months, the hatchlings will grow about an inch a month, reaching the average size of six inches. They must stay in their fire the entire duration of their development. Now, I know you must be wondering: “If they can’t leave the fire during that time, how will I know they are actually there?”. The fire will burn bright green from the time they are born until each hatchling has become an adult. During this time, it is best not to disturb the salamanders besides checking that the fire is still burning strong.

The Salamander Species

While the salamander resides in fire, a cousin was created which dwells in ice. The frost salamander shares all the same traits as the regular salamander, though it is so rare its blood is often not used in potions. They are blue in color, with blue eyes, and have the same reproduction patterns as the regular salamander. Instead of feeding them peppers to keep them alive outside of their home, you will feed them frozen foods. Muggle frozen corn and peas works best, as it is the right size for them to chew, and is fairly affordable and regularly available.

Scale Rot in Salamanders

I would now like to discuss a disease that heavily impacts the salamander community - Scale Rot. We also see it in other creatures, such as dragons, and any other creature that has scales. Scale Rot appears when the creature is malnourished, because the scales are not receiving the nutrients they need. In salamanders, it would be seen if you weren’t feeding peppers often enough while outside of their fire. Symptoms of Scale Rot include dull, flakey scales, scales that are molting, or falling off in large chunks, and even tail detachment in severe, untreated cases for salamanders. The treatment for Scale Rot varies for each species. For salamanders, chili powder needs to be rubbed all over the affected areas several times a day. It is recommended that in between treatments the salamander is placed back in their fire. 

I would now like to welcome former Potions professor, Ms. Batyaeva, to discuss the use of salamander blood in potions.

Guest Lecture: Salamander Blood in Potions

Hello, and thank you so much to Professor Aspen for having me guest lecture on salamanders, the fascinating fire dwellers of the magical world, and their use in potions. As an interesting side note, in an Ancient Theories course that I took at Belzaly, they told an old Russian myth concerning salamanders. Back in the fifth or sixth centuries, Russian and some Slavic witches and wizards believed that salamanders were created in the stomach of dragons who had swallowed the eggs of other dragons. Although the egg was demolished within the dragon’s stomach, they thought that the stunted and underdeveloped baby dragon within that shell would then abide in the dragon’s stomach as a salamander. Eventually, as the dragon breathed fire, it was said that the salamander - once baby-dragon - would be emitted in the dragon’s flame. Once they were free, they would scurry to find a new fire in which to dwell, as they had been born and lived of the flame, and now required it to survive. Of course, we now know this to be completely false, as you just heard in the lesson.

Moving on to the topic at hand, as you may remember, you surely discussed the overall use of salamander blood and its storage in depth in the second lesson of Potions last year. To review in brief, salamander blood has powerful restorative, rejuvenating, and healing properties. The potions your current professor mentioned in class were the Strengthening Solution and the Muscle-Building Mixture. They can also be used to treat severe muscle tears and strains and torn ligaments. Salamander blood should always be used in brewed form, and should never be taken on its own, as its potency will cause burning and tearing of the esophagus and stomach lining. In some cases, salamander blood taken on its own has led to combustion and death.

The key element to the efficacy of salamander blood lies in the magical and profound thermal energy stored within the blood. When combined with magical and thermal energy of potions, it has the capacity to speed metabolic and body reactions in order to more effectively build tissue and cells. Taking for example the building of muscles, as in the Muscle-Building Mixture. There are two means by which muscles grow - either the individual muscle fibers must expand or the muscle must grow additional fibers of the same size (or, most often, some combination of both). This is achieved in mundane ways, of course, through exercise. Repeated use of certain muscles brings about the need for the individual muscle fibers to increase size in order to accommodate more frequent or heavier demands. It is thought that microtrauma, or small, subtle damage to the tissue may bring about this change as well as the damage to the tissue is corrected - essentially, small tears bringing about improved and larger muscles as the body works to repair.

The second method of muscle building occurs when the muscles are split apart, eventually forming more muscle fibers of the original size. This is occasionally disputed, as some assert that it is simply damaging the muscles and not building strength and endurance over time. However, it has been shown that in the bodies of some athletes who train in high speed and low resistance activities, this splitting of the muscle fibers does occur.

Where does salamander blood factor into this? Well, when combined in certain potions - particularly those that contain ingredients that grow muscle tissue - it provides energy to speed the process of fiber growth so, while the muscles still must be stimulated through activity in order to grow, the process of muscle growth and development works at an accelerated rate. As with use of all potions, however, they must be used carefully, or the user runs the risk of over-bulking the muscles or damaging the muscle tissues permanently. One should never use a Muscle-Building Mixture without the oversight of a healer or a certified magical trainer. It’s also wise to remember that those who participate in magical sports should also refrain from using Muscle-Building Mixtures, even in the case of repairing most injuries, as many gaming commissions have outlawed their use under any circumstance.

And this brings us to the end of our brief overview and review of salamander blood as used in potions. Thank you again for having me, and I hope that you enjoyed the information! Remember, we will be covering the Strengthening Solution in greater detail in the third lesson of this year, where we will be learning even more about the uses of the blood and its effects on the body.

Closing

What a fascinating guest lecture! I do hope you all enjoyed that, as well as the entire first lesson of Fourth Year.

I hope you all enjoyed the very eventful first lesson about Bundimuns and salamanders. Please remember to thank Ms. Batyaeva on your way out. I will see you all next time for a very special Lesson Two. I don’t want to give too much away, but we will be discussing your year-long project. I hope you have a good first day back!

Main lesson content written by Professor Elizabeth Anne and Professor Aurelia Cattercorn

Guest lecture written by former Potions professor Lucrezia Batyaeva

All pictures are found using the Google Images search engine, and belong to their owners.