A Fierce Marine Rivalry and a Curious Resemblance - 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
Previous: At Sea with the Remarkable Maragana
Photo by Jonas Allert, via Unsplash
Pahlaviday 24th of Corper, 787 AoC
Fishing ship Connotation, unnamed island east of Essichard
A Fierce Marine Rivalry and a Curious Resemblance
Another naturalist once called the ocean 'the greatest desert of all'. Pithy ironies aside, this analogy would approach accuracy only if the desert was teeming with life underground, presenting the semblance of lifelessness only at the surface. There is actually some truth to this, but not to the extent required of the metaphor. For, as I am steadily learning, the ocean is utterly laden with life, rich at every layer with hidden activity. If one judges only by the fleeting glimpses offered at the surface, one will be sorely misled.
Among the numerous ocean species to which I am being introduced is the okigana, revered by the Maragana and the very shark with which the Connotation is carved. I am familiar already with its family--Ordae, the bizarre hammerhead sharks--but not with this particular species. Or perhaps genus; I shall have to check the Disciple archives for documentation on the animal when I return to Forumi. Our current location, an island somewhere east of Proesus, is the home of several okigana schools.
To relate any information about these interesting specimens, I must rely here upon Naaki’s learned testimony. Unlike other hammerheads, and other sharks in general, the okigana is a cooperative hunter, pursuing prey in packs of up to ten. They have something of a fission-fusion society, congregating in large schools1 (sometimes hundreds strong) during the day, and splitting apart into these smaller packs at night. Packs may consist of animals from more than one school, but membership in them is quite stable, and maintains a fixed internal hierarchy; the sharks must have quite sophisticated means of recognising one another in order to form these complex societies.
Maragana claim that the okigana is the most intelligent of the sharks2. Although this information should perhaps be treated sceptically, given the almost totemic esteem in which the shark is held, what Naaki tells me of their advanced hunting tactics would seem to corroborate it. Naaki also tells me that okigana care for their young, with the pups trailing after the hunting packs of their mothers and partaking in their catch; this is a point of vast difference with any other shark genus, with all others that I know of abandoning their offspring at birth to immediately fend for themselves.
Okigana can attain lengths of up to three heights. I was, at first, uneasy in sharing the water with creatures of such fierce power, but the Maragana tell me that they, like most3 sharks, almost never attack sapients. They have yet to hear of a single sapient death at the mouth of an okigana--none of us, Naaki remarked, suit their quite particular tastes. The very worst that can be expected is a probing bite (an unpleasant experience, to be sure, but unlikely to be fatal) followed by a hasty retreat4. Besides, my dives have mostly taken place in daylight (the lone exception taking place last night), and the okigana hunts exclusively at night.
The Maragana often fish at night, pursuing a separate set of nocturnal fish. Last night, I dove with the twilight shift, and thus watched from below as a local okigana school reconfigured itself into hunting packs, drifting apart and reconvening in eery, effortless silence (a sight which, with the knowledge of what it signified, raised a ball of nerves in my stomach). I watched one pack in particular, which chose the same hunting ground as the Connotation’s crew, begin its patrol. As they prowled over the sandy bottom in formation, a cacophony of clicks, whistles and ghostly wails suddenly broke the enveloping silence of the dive, emanating efficiently through the water from somewhere behind me. Recognising the sound, I turned with wide eyes to witness the arrival of a pod of common chireks.
Chireks, although frequently mistaken for large fish5, or even sharks, are actually aquatic reptiles. Although not considered essiloth themselves, they have the same warm blood, and may be not so distantly related. Renowned for their intelligence and reputedly benign nature, their pods are often witnessed dancing in the bow-waves of ships. Many stories tell of them rescuing sailors from drowning, or protecting them from sharks. Breathing air via a blowhole located on the back, chireks lack gills but can hold their breath for quite impressive spans of time. While most chireks are roughly shark-sized or smaller, there are much larger species in the fathom chirek (Genus Fathoma) and the occisor (Occisor saeva), some approaching the moderate-sized krakens in scale. Covered in a fine coat of minuscule scales, the common chirek (Pseudopisces vulgaris) is the most frequently seen on the Proesan coastline. The chireks, like the sharks and the Maragana, seem to have an extra sense--or rather perhaps, unlike the sharks, an expansion of a conventional one. Despite their small eyes, they rival sharks in their abilities to navigate murky or nocturnal waters. In dim environments, chireks issue a constant stream of clicks (the approach of a river chirek (Abhainn veduka) pod, during my childhood swims, was always so-heralded) from their beaks, and I suspect their keen navigational abilities and ability to see in the dark may thus be linked to their hearing; but this is by no means settled.
The two animals, the chireks and the okigana, are held by the Maragana to have a deep enmity; the tense standoff I witnessed between the two groups seems to substantiate this idea. Although they fill different niches and largely do not compete for the same food supply (although there is some small overlap), species from either group are said to habitually kill the young of the other--a habit all the more notable in the chirek case, because they do not appear to exhibit this behaviour toward other sharks6.
Neither pod nor pack had any juveniles in tow, so I cannot assign any independent merit to the claim, but I see no reason to disbelieve it given the violent grudge the two groups appeared to hold for each other, each abandoning its hunt in response to the presence of the other. The rival creatures engaged in a darting, swerving skirmish, neither drawing blood but seeming to approach it more closely with each escalating pass. Unsure of who to root for, I watched the clash with mounting anxiety. The chireks had them for speed and agility, but could not compete in terms of the size and number of teeth brought to bear--a twisting lunge from an okigana was usually enough to keep a chirek at a safe distance, although the reptiles certainly delivered a nip or two to their piscine rivals7. I did not witness the outcome of this battle, as the sunlight swiftly quickly became too little to see by8 and I was forced to depart the water; Naaki later told me that the okigana succeeded in surprising and killing one of the chireks with a clever feint, and this was sufficient to frighten the rest of the pod away.
It seems only fitting to expand here on a point raised in my previous entry discussing the Maragana themselves, following my close observation of the okigana pack. There I frequently compared the Maragana to the shark, and this is for good reason. No observer who has seen both can fail to note the strange resemblance between the Maragana and the hammerheads. Among the superficial similarities, aside from those already mentioned, are the five pairs of functional gill slits along a Maragana’s neck, near the shoulder, which allow them to breathe underwater. The parallels, however, go far beyond the merely superficial.
I had the opportunity, during an undergraduate course in sapient anatomy, to closely examine a Maragana skeleton9. It was, unlike those of other sapients--and, indeed, unlike any land animal--composed chiefly of cartilage, with hard calcium present only in the jaws; special preservation measures had to be taken to keep the stuff from rotting. Sharks, too, lack a bony skeleton, ancient specimens being represented, in the fossil record, almost exclusively by their jaws and teeth.
Once more unlike all other known tetrapods, the Maragana leg bends forward at the knee. In fact, the overall structure of the Maragana limb deviates quite drastically from that of other limbed vertebrates. All other terrestrial vertebrates (gwaemul aside)--the mammals, the birds, the essiloth, the reptiles, and the amphibians--share the fundamental bone structure of the limbs; even many which have lost their external limbs, such as my species or certain snakes, retain internal vestiges with matching bones. The forelimbs invariably contain bones that can easily be identified as humerus, radius, ulna, carpals, metacarpals; and in the hindlimb femur, tibia, fibula, tarsals, metatarsals. I have come to believe that this shared homology is an indication that these animals--collectively referred to as the tetrapods--descend from a common limbed ancestor with the same features, and have adapted these limbs for the many and varied purposes for which they are now used. I do not here have the time or space to fully explain my reasoning, but I shall endeavour to do so at a later date--although perhaps it shall have to take the form of a chapter in a more cohesive work.
However, the logical converse to this is that those beings with sufficiently different characteristics, to which no homology can be found, do not share this ancestor--but one more distant. Might it be, in light of the severe differences in their skeletal patterns, that the Maragana are not ‘tetrapods’ at all--not in the sense that they lack four limbs, which they certainly do not, but in the sense that they are part of a separate group; one that came by its limbs independently, emerging separately from the ocean?
I run ahead of myself, and should explain. Although I have yet to gather sufficient evidence, I have my suspicions that all of the vertebrates must have originated in the sea--among the ancient fish. There are fish today able to drag themselves over the ground for some distance with the use of bony fins, and even those able to breathe air--the lungfish being among them. None can endure being parted from their watery home for an extended period--but it is entirely possible, if there is such a thing as generational change, that they could develop ways to do so.
We may look to the amphibians--frogs, salamanders, even our friend the grændel--for the key to this transition, playing it out in miniature over the course of their lives. Most spend the dawn of their being in the water, breathing through gills as the fish do, and the remainder on land and with lungs as do we. From here it is a short leap to imagine that some might, if it should advantage them, make the permanent transition to land by way of generational change. The reptiles, I hazard, emerged from such a transition.
But what of the mammals? The fact that certain mammals retain reptilian characters, such as the monotremes' egg-laying, seems evidence to me of an origin among the reptiles. As further evidence of that transition, we might even look to modern species such as the Ractanos and their apparent hybrid nature. The birds and essiloth, with their eggs and scales, can likely be traced to yet another brachiation from the reptiles, although further investigation is required. Taking these facts--although a leap of fancy is here required, I grant--as given, we have traced all of the major tetrapod families back to a single origin: most probably in a group of bony fishes that gradually ventured onto land, developing limbs and lungs via the slow process of generational change. To make this connection irrefutable, one need only find the fossil fish with tetrapod-like bones in its fins.
Although the tetrapods may have brachiated from a single adventurous ancestor, that is not to say there have not been others. There is ample time in the age of the world for numerous groups to have made a return to the sea, and we see these in the several kinds of marine mammal, reptile and even bird (by which I refer to the penguins). Why not, then, for more than one emergence onto land? I daresay a second venture, resulting in the pseudo-tetrapods of the ganadile10 and the Maragana, has taken place, accounting for the various disparities in their physiology. The terrestrial arthropods (insects, arachnids, myriapods, oxydolans and others), of whom limb structure is the least of the myriad features distinguishing them from the tetrapods, must represent a third colonisation (or perhaps a first, if we are to place them chronologically) from the seas--or even multiple within this group11. From one of these must be descended the Austia.
Legs and lungs are terribly advantageous if one wishes to live on land--in my developing framework on how benefit and detriment drive the gradual change, it makes good sense for separate families emerging into the same environment to develop analogous (but not homologous; that is, with features similar in function rather than form) structures. The separate development of these devices--different in form but similar in function--in these three groups is hence quite explicable, just as the development of fins in such separate aquatic groups as the chireks, scalades, whales and fishes. Incredible. I am even beginning to believe myself.
To return to a point mentioned breathlessly above: among those creatures in the Captain’s books, of which she related some further details to me today, was an animal called the ganadile. This creature lives in the many interconnected lakes and inland seas of Maragana island, but can also be found on the coast. The ganadile, like the Maragana, is amphibious, but in inverse proportions--it spends much of its life in the water, although I am told it can breathe air quite comfortably and does so at rest. This low-slung creature resembles a bizarre hybrid of a hammerhead shark and a female grændel; take an image of such an okigana and draw bowed limbs in place of its pectoral and pelvic fins, and you attain a reasonable approximation of the ganadile’s appearance. The dorsal and caudal fins are reduced, the body is somewhat flattened, and there are of course other minor differences, but this is certainly the first impression offered by its sketches. The limbs, on the other hand, quite closely resemble those of a Maragana, if much shorter and shaped for quadrupedal movement (over the bipedal locomotion of the Maragana). In fact, if one placed three sketches in sequence--first the hammerhead shark, second the ganadile, and third the Maragana--one would be immediately struck by how much they appear like steps in a process, as stages in a continuum of development from the fish to the sapient. Now, one must be cautious with such conclusions; the modern ganadile is probably not the ancestor of the Maragana, but rather both are descended from a ganadile-like ancestor. Nonetheless, there is truth here.
In light of such facts, and considering the theory of gradual change which continues to brew in my mind, I find it difficult not to conclude that the Maragana are descended from sharks; given the back-swept, lateral elongation of their skulls, it seems quite apparent that those ancestors must have been hammerheads. In light of what I have learned of the okigana--their unusual intellect, their increased sociality and cooperation over other sharks, to say nothing of their remarkable brooding behaviour--the Maragana seem to share an even greater affinity with the animals; I hesitate little in saying that the Maragana’s marine ancestor, if not a direct member of the okigana genus, must have been at least a close relative.
The Maragana seem almost aware of this, at least in a spiritual sense. The ganadile presents me with yet another instance of the “gana” wordlet, here used in prefix rather than suffix but represented with the same two characters of the Maragana syllabary. Reminded of my musings on this, I minutes ago inquired to Naaki on them, and was told that my hunch was correct. The name “Maragana” actually translates roughly to “tall shark”, while ganadile comes out as “amphibious shark”. This is not a mere spiritual identification, it seems, but a belief that both are actually species of shark! I do not know that I would go so far as this--they have gone through sufficient changes, in my view, to place them in a new group--but that they recognise an association of themselves with the sharks is remarkable, and further fuel for my hypothesis concerning their origin.
Most modern tetrapods resemble fish little, and are extraordinarily varied in the manners in which they differ; this suggests to me that a great deal of time has passed between the terrestrial emergence and the modern day12. In contrast, the resemblance between the Maragana and the hammerhead shark is striking, and there seems little variety in the other descendants of this emergence (of which I know only one, the ganadile--although perhaps there are multiple species of this creature?). I would propose that this implies a far more recent date for the divergence of the Maragana ancestor from its marine progenitors, as there has been less time for superficial change. How recent, I again cannot say--to know such details we must look for some means of absolute calibration, perhaps in the geological world--but given that evolutionary change is very gradual, this could still number in the thousands of millennia. It is worth noting that this transition remains incomplete, if complete it shall ever be--the Maragana remains amphibious (not an amphibian in the taxonomical sense, but living comfortably on both land and in the water as the amphibians do), as does the ganadile.
I have much to think about, and every new thought sparks five more, each more exciting than the least. I find myself lamenting the slow and imprecise process of transferring thought to paper--if only they could be recorded more directly, without need of this clumsy material interface! The insights that Captain Naaki has offered me have been deeply invaluable. I shall have to find the courage to put to her my thoughts on the origin of her species. I do hope it does not offend her, as the notion of a bestial descent doubtless would so many others on Proesus.
1 Even this much sociality is unusual for sharks, found only in the hammerheads; other members of this family school, but hunt individually at night.
2 She applied to this the qualifier of “aquatic”, which I found odd. Perhaps she meant to say “marine”? There are sharks that venture upriver on occasion, but none that I know of live permanently apart from the sea. Perhaps there are true river sharks known to the Maragana but unknown in Proesus.
3 I say most, because shark attacks certainly occur with regularity, albeit without frequency, along much of the Proesus coast. The majority of these, it is believed, are perpetrated by the deadly shark (Mandibula mortiferum), with some few coming from the intrusive (Hospes indecorum) and vaga sharks (Gwahagjeogin ileum). All three of these sharks prefer relatively shallow water in which to hunt, which brings them into frequent overlap with swimming sapients. Very rarely, greatsharks (Megapistris ithekraken) are reported to sink small vessels, although no such claim is well-verified.
4 Naaki believes that sharks use their mouths as many sapients use touch--biting objects is an important component of their exploratory behaviour, driven chiefly by curiosity. And okigana, like all animals of some intelligence, are curious indeed.
5 The fish-like shape of the otherwise reptilian chirek is another point to add in favour of my hypotheses--the most efficient shape for slicing through water, it seems only logical that an animal returning to the ocean would evolve in such a fashion, given the pressures of survival in this environment. The ancient, extinct whales provide similar favourable evidence, if I understand their fossils correctly.
6 Except for the occisor, which is quite indiscriminate in its piscine persecutions.
7 If I expected any intercession from the Maragana on behalf of their revered totems, I was disappointed--the crew merely paused to watch as I did, hanging back at a safe distance. Captain Naaki later explained that the okigana fight their own battles, and that the Maragana should not be tempted to intervene--“We must avoid interfering needlessly in the balance of their world, no matter our feelings toward its denizens.”
8 The Maragana do not have this problem, seeing quite well by night--even in the increased dimness of the ocean water.
9 Febregon only knows how the College came by the thing--something tells me that few Maragana would willingly consent to the donation of their remains to Proesan science.
10 Oops--in my excitement I have once again run ahead of myself and mentioned the ganadile out of turn. I shall explain this curious animal further in the following paragraph.
11 I have suspicions concerning the gwaemul, which might be considered in the course of a fourth transition--although, like the ganadile, it never strays far from the water.
12 How much time precisely depends on the rate at which evolutionary changes are accumulated, which I admit I have little idea of except to say that it must be slowly.
i Although briefly reported in Disciple literature as the “smartshark”, the common name prevalent in Proesus, the okigana was undescribed in Anther’s time; the oceanic smartsharks were later assigned the genus Ipsum. Debate continues today, with the ongoing integration of the Proesan and Maragana scientific communities, on whether the genus should be renamed to Okigana.