Don't worry about not fitting it into the jam. The suggestions are just if you want to carry on with the game, and are only suggestions, you could take it in a completely different direction.
The reason why I mentioned about removing trails is because as the number of objects to be processed and rendered increases, performance will start to drop off. This performance drop will then start to impact the way the game plays. I'm only assuming the next bit, but I take it that the poison spots have a script or timer attached to them and some kind of detection area for physics? Each instance will take it's own chunk of system resources, if this doesn't get cleaned up or recycled, this is when it starts to hit performance. If you don't want to remove the objects, there might be another way of streamlining the objects to reduce the performance overhead.
Thanks again for the game.