The Marine Platypus and an Ancestry Unveiled - The Journal of Anther Strein
The Journal of Anther Strein
Observations from a Travelling Naturalist in a Fantasy World
Written by Lachlan Marnoch
with Illustrations by Nayoung Lee
Photo by Meg Jerrard, via Unsplash
Opalday 28th of Corper, 787 AoC
Fishing ship Connotation, unnamed island east of Proesus
The Marine Platypus and an Ancestry Unveiled
Today, on the shore of the unnamed island near which the Maragana are currently fishing, I spotted a marine platypus. It was hauling itself onto the rocks to bathe in the sun, probably after a feeding dive. I lack the expertise to identify its exact species, but it was doubtless of the genus Wardanis; usually seen on the sandy islands east of Essichard, it is an elusive enough spectacle on the subcontinent proper for this event to excite me greatly.
Wardanis includes the largest platypodes alive today. They are the only monotremes that live in the ocean, engaging in long dives to retrieve their diet of fish and crustaceans. Like the other platypus species I have previously mentioned, the marine platypodes walk on their knuckles, keeping their toes curled to protect the precious webbing upon which they rely to swim. It lays its eggs on land, and digs burrows for the purpose, but unlike its river-bound cousins it does not live permanently in them. Relative to its size, its laying burrows are much smaller and simpler than those of, say, the upriver platypus (Dulaiwarrung yemisibi); those elaborate tunnels are frequently found at tens of heights in length, equipped with blind ends to confuse intruders, plugs against flooding, and a lining of dead leaves for insulation. The relative simplicity of the marine burrows may be a practical accommodation for the species' increased girth, as the engineering challenges of digging a sophisticated den must scale with size--especially in the fragile sands where Wardanis burrows are often dug.
The marine platypus keeps mainly to the warmer waters surrounding northern Proesus, as it lacks an insulating layer--like the blubber of the marspeel or the dense waterproofed feathers of the scalade--significant enough to engage in its lifestyle in the colder climes. However, like these competitors, Wardanis platypodes can dive for much longer than their terrestrial cousins, who seem always to surface inside of a minute; the marine platypus can remain submerged for significant fractions of an hour1. The marine platypus is more social than its inland relatives, forming small colonies along the shorelines of northern Proesus. They still tend to hunt alone, diving to unknown fathoms in their pursuit of food. Likewise, the length of its dives suggest that it attains a significantly greater depth than its relatives. Although we witness little of its feeding habits, I believe it to be a fine hunter – especially based on my further conversation with Captain Naaki.
I pointed out the animal, now flopped spread-eagled on its front, to the Connotation’s captain, who, like the platypus, was freshly returned from a dive and looking to relax. She joined me in sitting over the edge of the deck, and I was immediately surprised by the depth of her knowledge. I have previously mentioned, in this journal, the platypus’ ability to sense galvanic currents, and how I believe it relates to that of the Maragana. The captain brought this up without any prompt, entirely confirming the idea. She is aware of the platypus’ extra sense, and she understands the marine platypus to have significantly improved upon it, attaining a much heightened perception over those on the mainland. She has seen them hunting during her own dives--much like the Maragana themselves, the platypodes can pinpoint fish completely out-of-sight without so much as opening their eyes.
Seawater, she told me, is much better for this sense than freshwater, allowing perception with much greater clarity and sensitivity. I am inclined, of course, to believe her firsthand account; to her, sensing galvanism in freshwater is like trying to peer through fog. She believes that the marine platypus has a more-developed version of this sense to take further advantage of its marine habitat. This seemed sensible to me, as salted water is known to support galvanic currents with greater fidelity than fresh. I told her as much. She seemed surprised by even my limited knowledge on the subject--apparently, the understanding of galvanism was thought exclusive to the Maragana.
“Its rediscovery here may prove troubling,” she said, although I could garner no further explanation from her there.
Moving on, I shared with her my speculation that this galvanic sense must only exist in animals that spend some significant portion of their time in the water, surely being nearly useless on land; but at this she shook her head.
“There is one land animal I know of with this sense. The prickly ones, the long snouts. I do not know the Proesine word…”
I remember giving a start of surprise. “Echidnas?”
“Hmmm. There is another name…”
“Ah, the ovix, perhaps? Do you have them in Maragana?”
She nodded, recognising the word. The humble ovix, it seems, has indeed found its way out of Proesus--the Maragana, too, enjoy the eggs and meat of the large echidna2, although caring little for the milk.
“They have this ability too. I have seen it. Only in damp soil, but they can use it to find prey in the ground. We can do this too, sometimes--if I press my head into the ground, if it isn’t too dry, I can feel the delving animals burrowing around me.”
This, about the ovix, is entirely new information. If the ovix has this galvanic sense, then it is a fair assumption that so too does its wild relative the Essichard echidna, and not unlikely the rest of the echidnas. If I can confirm it, this could easily be worthy of publication on its own merit; but quite aside from that is the fact that both the platypus and the echidna are monotremes. Most curious, that these two mammals that share one utterly unique characteristic--the laying of eggs--should share another: the ability to sense galvanism. It must be of great use to the platypus, living in its conductive domain, but less so for the echidna--although certainly it makes good use of it anyway. One might suspect that the echidna descends from something like a platypus, an ancestor in the rivers of Proesus--an ancestor from which, too, the modern platypodes arose.
These thoughts did not occur to me fully-fledged during our conversation, but only when I had time later to write on them. Instead we turned to the origin of the marine platypus itself. The delta platypus, Yeoldae samgagju, is found chiefly in the brackish waters of the Veduka Delta, but also in the ocean for some distance and in the river as far inland as Bayou. This ability, to live comfortable in both fresh and saltwater environments, is unusual among mammals, and one it shares with the mangrove tree, the intrusive shark and the Nullartus--but not with its near relative, the swampland platypus, or its other near relative, the marine platypus, both of whom are restricted to their respective domains. I have little doubt that this ability first appeared in response to the ever-shifting Veduka delta. Freshwater can be just as deadly to sea beings as saltwater to those of the river; creatures who can tolerate both for extended periods are rare3. That among these is the delta platypus, with its exclusively freshwater relative (the swampland platypus) on one side, and the exclusively marine relatives of Wardanis on the other, seems to me deeply indicative.
One could imagine a scenario in which the platypus, first appearing in freshwater, gradually developed a tolerance to variable salinity to allow it to colonise the estuarine Delta--and, from there, gave rise to a descendant which perfected its saline resilience and went on to swim exclusively in the oceans; perhaps this being, in the process, lost its tolerance of freshwater, becoming exclusively oceanic4.
I mentioned to the captain my hypothesis concerning this chain of development, and she seemed mostly unfazed by the idea. This, in turn, quite shocked me. As we sat their, my own body wrapped about the rail-post while her legs dangled over the side, I found myself stumbling onward to explain my general hypothesis of generational change, expecting with each new detail to run up against the barrier of incredulity. Quite to the contrary, she accepted much of it without objection, and, instead of flatly rejecting any details with which she disagreed, offered her own perspective on them. To my joy and amazement, most of what she had to say was compatible, after some thought, with my ideas.
Although matter-of-fact concerning the idea that species change gradually over generations, she admitted an ignorance as to the underlying pressures that result in the changes5. My proposal that these changes were influenced by pressures from the environment and from other species--the struggle to survive--and not simply a matter of course was new to her (which, to be frank, I found something of a relief). She also seemed sure that the delta platypus had developed directly from the swampland platypus, and the marine platypus directly from the delta platypus, without any need for “common ancestors”.
Why, I asked her, shouldn’t the swampland platypus continue to change as well?
She seemed to think this an odd question. She explained that, in the Maragana understanding, creatures evolve from one state to another in pursuit of a higher goal--with the forms left behind being those that abandoned their aspirations. To her, it is the will of the Elements that propels this change, without any need for an intermediate mechanism, although she conceded a certain amount of sense to my conjectures.
So. My thinking is not quite so unique as I had supposed. It is heartening to think that others have drawn similar, independent conclusions, even if not identical in detail. As more and more of my notions and suspicions were released for the first time to the ears of another--ears which seemed, completely against my expectations, receptive!--I found myself thoroughly emboldened. A smaller hypothesis I had been developing over the past week of my voyage with the Maragana, within my larger evolutionary framework, entered my mind. Before I knew what had come over me, I was blurting the headline:
“I think you--the Maragana, you know--might have evolved from okigana.”
I blurted my theory, but then, worried I might have offended, immediately placed my fingers over my mouth. I needn’t have worried. She simply shrugged and said, “We know this, of course. We would have to be blind to live among the signs and not notice them."
Rapt, I urged her to continue, and she related to me the following:
“One story common to all tribes of Maragana, in some form, is that of the Earth Spirit and the Water Spirit. It tells that once, the Sea of Rebirth was a grand harbour open to the ocean.
“Here dwelt the Water Spirit, the father of sharks, and the okigana returned yearly to his abode to pay homage, and to breed. Each year they travelled thousands of kiloheights from across the Spine Ocean, to mate, to give birth, and to nurse.
“One year, when all of the ancestors were gathered in the harbour, the Spirit of Earth came to the island for the first time, striding across the peaks of the Ocean Spine. There, at the mouth of the Sea, the Spirits met.
“Some tribes tell that they fought a great war there, the cataclysm closing the mouth of the harbour forever. My tribe tells it differently--that, overcome with lust, they embraced and mated as the okigana do, and that the throes of their passion caused the closure. Whichever it was, the Sea of Rebirth was cut off from the ocean, and the okigana were trapped.
“They were alive, and the Sea was stocked with plentiful food to sustain them. But the okigana were wanderers. They longed for the open ocean. They called upon the Spirits of Earth and Water to aid them--pitying the sharks, and regretting the harm their actions had wrought, the Spirits cooperated to give power to the will of the okigana. Using this force, the sharks strained to change, to grow the tools they needed, and to cross the land to the seas they remembered.
“This took many years, hundreds of thousands or more, each generation a little altered from the previous. The process was hard, and many forgot or abandoned their quest. But slowly, fins changed to legs, and they became the ganadiles. The ganadiles, at last, could reach the ocean, and dove into it with joy. Even today they move back and forth as they please between river, land and sea. But they were creatures of the earth now, as well as the water. Their compromise had hobbled them, bound them to the island. They could swim no further than the nearest islands; if they tried, they tired long before sighting land, and either turned back or died of exhaustion.
“The ganadiles were not satisfied with this outcome, and so they gathered their will for another push. If they could not swim from the island, they would learn another way. Their bodies changed again; their rear limbs grew longer and equipped with better balance, allowing them to stand on two legs alone. This freed their front limbs to become hands; their brains grew too, giving them the intelligence to make use of them. They made tools, built boats. Finally, we were born--the Maragana. Since then, we have been sailors and explorers. But the island had become a part of us, just as much as the ocean; and so we must always return to our home there.”
At this point I opened my mouth to comment, but she wasn’t yet finished.
“Our geologists tell us there is merit to the story--not of the Spirits, which we know are outside science--but of the closing of the Sea. There is no doubt it was once connected to the Spine Ocean, given the species it contains. The ocean was higher in the past, before the ice gathered at the poles, and the Sea is at a higher altitude than the surrounding ocean. The okigana could have been trapped by the lowering. Or else the shifting of the land could have raised it; even today, Maragana is wracked with earthquakes. There is also a volcano on the island, with ancient lava flows across where the mouth may once have been; perhaps its eruption cut them off, the lava turned solid as it entered the mouth of the harbour. I prefer this explanation--a collision of Earth and Water. War or mating, it fits either description.”
I had previously dismissed the Maragana identification with the okigana as mere folklore, but it seems I gave them too little credit--although mythically clad, this story indicates an awareness of their true ancestry, much greater than any other sapient species. It is for this reason that many Maragana travel to the Sea of Rebirth to have their children--it is considered the place of their origin, and giving birth there completes a spiritual cycle of sorts. They may well be quite correct about the manner in which it occurred, at least in the broad strokes. The pressure toward emergence onto land had to originate somewhere, and their legend concerning the closing sea makes as much sense as any other hypothesis I could offer.
As Naaki said, the ganadile is believed to be a direct ancestor to the Maragana, and the okigana present today in the Sea of Rebirth a direct ancestor to the ganadile. In the Maragana understanding, members of these species that exist today are those who ceased changing, while the Maragana continued to evolve toward their current state. I do not think this is the complete picture6, but it is certainly remarkably close to the point at which I arrived in my previous entry. I would suggest instead that both descendants continue to evolve from any divergence--it is just that the changes are often more drastic or obvious in one descendant than in the other. In each case, two lines of descent have graduated, over time, from a common ancestor with some traits from both. That is, the Maragana and the ganadile share a common ancestor, probably at this point extinct--and this ancestor, in turn, shares a common ancestor with the okigana shark.
There are hammerheads still in the Sea of Rebirth--Naaki calls these “ancestor okigana”--but they are smaller than ocean-going species. She believes them to be her direct ancestors, but after some tactful probing she conceded that larger okigana once lived there too--there are jawbone fossils on display in many Maragana museums. I take it that the “ancestor” okigana is, like the ganadile and the Maragana, descended from whichever unfortunate okigana species found itself trapped there--true ancestor to the Maragana and Rebirth-dwelling hammerheads both.
This hypothesis raises some interesting questions--the changes undergone by the Maraganan line of descent are phenomenal, and yet little seems to have changed in their fully aquatic relatives. I think the answer to this lies, again, in adaptation--the environment of the Maragana faced a sudden shift, in which change became beneficial for survival; meanwhile, the oceanic okigana faced no motivation to change, their various strategies remaining successful in the more stable habitat. Or perhaps I am overthinking it--perhaps they merely evolved more quickly because Febregon dreamed it so. I find this answer vaguely unsatisfying, but there is no rule saying that the universe or the mind of God must satisfy my sensibilities.
When the topic of the common ancestor of ganadile and Maragana was broached, Naaki countered, quite rightly, by asking where this ancestral species is. There is, after all, only one creature anything like the ganadile. I said that it is most likely extinct, having been out-competed by its better-adapted descendants, and that this is also true of the ancestral okigana species. This she seemed to consider for some time, before acknowledging that there is some sense to it. This surprised me once again--that species may disappear entirely from Pendant remains a recent and controversial topic in Proesus (although it seems to me quite clear that they must, given the number of fossils we are now finding to represent species entirely unknown in life). I asked her what she knew of the concept, and she unveiled yet further startling wisdom.
Maragana, it seems, understand extinction quite well. The captain relayed to me the story of the Maraganan moa. This, I gather, is another ancient tale, a sequel of sorts to the first, perhaps handed down for thousands of years. It sheds much light on the enigmatic sketches I related in my entry of Corper 16. The Maraganan moa was a flightless bird, native to the Maragana home island, hunted to complete extinction by the burgeoning Maragana species--having just developed the use of tools and weapons. The Maraganan eagle--an enormous bird, to hear her tell it, which fed almost exclusively on the moa--died out soon after, from lack of food. The eagle had been of great significance to these ancient Maragana, and it was with deepest shame that they watched it disappear. This legend7 has instilled in her people, she says, a deep respect for the complexity of the natural world, and for the supreme influence unwittingly wielded by sapients, even where they themselves might be considered a part of the native life. Clumsy action in a system so delicate as a natural landscape can lead to untold disaster. It is, she says, a tenet of the Republic of Maragana, which protects all native species, at least to some degree, by law8 .
“Our ground parrot, too, was near extinction only centuries ago. It has recovered with our help. There may be others that we have forgotten. On Proesus, too, I am sure, some animals have been killed off by your kind.”
This I would have been happy to confirm, but another question was on my mind.
"But there are moa in Maragana today, are there not?" I asked, having heard reports of them previously--and hence being quite puzzled by this tale of their disappearance.
"Yes, because we put them there. We reintroduced them from another island; a related species, smaller, to try and keep the balance. But the eagle is gone, as is the true Maraganan moa.”
This was equally fascinating, but raised a new issue.
"Without its only predator, the new moa must surely breed out of control?"
"It would. Which is why we have taken the eagle's place. We hunt the moa now, instead."
"Isn't that what caused the whole mess in the first place?"
"It's a delicate balance, to be sure. But the moa's population is very carefully regulated, the hunting restricted. It is our burden to bear."
Maragana Island sounds like a fine country indeed, if this is its attitude toward its lesser denizens. She confided one more fact to me:
“We hope, one day, to bring them both back, eagle and moa alike. Our government has collected feathers and bones, as many as we can grasp, which must contain the essence of the animal. With magic or science, it might eventually become possible to use this pattern to return the birds to life.”
My immediate instinct was to dismiss this hope as mysticism, but on further ponderance I reconsidered this. Indeed, my hypothesis on the origin of species requires that organic material contain some set of instructions, some essence, which is transmitted between generations. Perhaps, indeed, this essence might become accessible to technology or magic at some time in the future, and the Maraganan eagle might one day soar the skies once more. Such things seem far distant, though.
I continue to be deeply impressed by the captain’s knowledge of the living world, and the flexibility in her understanding. She made quite the sounding board for my own ideas, which I have yet to test on a qualified naturalist--for which she made a fine substitute. Although she is certainly an exceptional individual--the rest of the crew, for example, could not have roused the same level of interest9--I suspect there are many others like her. It is a shame that Maragana cannot be brought to publish in Proesus journals of science, for I am certain their secretive civilisation possesses an untold wealth of scientific knowledge.
1 This, in turn, is not nearly so long as the largest scalade and marspeel species can attain--some can disappear under the waves for up to an hour. This is also to say nothing of the fathom chireks, for which dives on the scale of several hours have been recorded.
2 Naaki later explained to me that live ovices are not found on Maragana island, although their eggs and meat are imported. All foreign species are forbidden from Maragana island, for fear of their escaping captivity and imbalancing to the delicate web of relationships connecting the island’s inhabitants. This is an event, she says, that the island has suffered before, and that they are sure Proesus has experienced many times throughout its history. An interesting idea--I can think of several species that might fit this model.
3 No doubt, there is some fascinating alchemy to this, but it is currently beyond me.
4 A curiosity exists in the river chirek (Abhainn veduka), a species which appears--if chireks can be assumed to have originated in the oceans--to have gone in the other direction!
5 This is the piece of the puzzle I wish ultimately to expose--besides, of course, forcing the acceptance in Proesus of gradual change as a possibility, which I suspect much of the continent's scientific community is unprepared for.
6 Naaki took me saying so with remarkably good grace. If all Maragana keep as open a mind as hers, they would be a valuable addition indeed to the scientific community of Proesus.
7 And not, like the previous tale, merely a legend; for there are dozens of sets of remains of both colossal birds in Maragana museums, many of the moa with spear-marked bones.
8 This, I find deeply impressive. Few are the nations on Proesus that pay any mind to the wellbeing of their natural environments--and those that do are usually thinking only in terms of their dependent agricultural activities.
9 Although, I suspect that their knowledge exceeds that of the average Proesan--most people I know show no interest in the natural world beyond how it can best be prepared for eating.