#alien physiology

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

About the Yeerk three-day time limits, since that post drifted across my dash just now.

I’ve always kinda hypothesized that the Yeerk homeworld’s rotation is rather slower than ours, and so what we think of as every three days would be every day for a Yeerk.

No idea if this holds up in practice, but it’s a thought

Yes, that works! Because we know that kandrona is their homeworld's sunlight. So maybe they evolved near the pole of their homeworld, and can survive months-long periods of only having an hour of sunlight per (72-hour) day.

That's also an interesting twist on the question of how hungry any given yeerk is at any given time. Like, a human can get by eating once a day — we might've done that for millennia, depending on how anthropologists interpret it — but that's probably not optimal for us. Two meals a day (e.g. ancient Egypt), three meals a day (e.g. modern U.S.), or continuous grazing (e.g. 1600s Haudenosaunee) seems to be better for our digestion. But there's some evidence eating once a day might be better for circulatory health.

There's also evidence that a human who eats once a day can get by for longer on less food than one who eats thrice a day. I'm a "miss one meal, pass the fuck out" type of modern human; my homeostasis demands that I eat every ~6 hours if I don't want to be unconscious. One meal every 72 hours sounds monstrous to me. BUT we know it's possible for humans to be happy/healthy with one meal a day if that's how they grow up. So I think "yeerks are constantly hungry" and "yeerks are comfortable, as long as they don't go 70+ hours without an hour in kandrona" are both valid interpretations of canon.

Plus: aliens. They can be as (un)comfortable with the feeding schedule as you headcanon them being.

[halepo]

Kaeden didn't know much about their physiology, but she liked it.

Same, Kaeden.

SAME

[harley-rose25]

another trekkie alien physiology thought

So I was thinking about how different animals can see different colors; like humans have 3 types of cone cells that allow color vision but other creatures have more or less, or maybe different kind of cells; anyways, so then I started thinking like aliens would probably also have different color vision cells and I was imagining humans in star trek using this as a way to look at things on their padds, write stuff or like pass notes without certain aliens understanding what they're looking at because the screen is set to use red green blue light.

Im thinking that humans mostly do this as joke to mess with their non human crew members

[coffeeangelinabox]

It had been repeated over and over again throughout the training but xe hadn't thought anything of it. After all, xyr instructors also insisted that FTL tolerances should not be pushed above 10% and any pilot worth xyr salt knew that even the most unreliable safety margins were higher. The only ship that rule should be adhered to was in jury rigged pirate scows held together with internal mucus and string. A familiar ship...

Well, xe had flown rescue throughout the Quarg war and had once pushed an atmospheric skimmer with a missing tail fin to 53% above. Saved a dozen of the queen's warriors in the doing too.

Human engineers...so what if they were reckless, experimental. That was why xe liked humans. Xyr weren't bound in ancient traditions like xyr own people. Xyr spacefaring wasn't steeped in custom and expectation, instead it was the joyful exploration of a cub first learning to use xyr gliding appendages and soaring from the high crystalline peaks of the homeworld.

And all of this admiration is how xe has found xemself on exploratory mining crew. Dangerous and undesirable. An orb of metal hurled through space with minimal independent propulsion on a lazy arc through an asteroid belt and dust cloud surrounding an unremarkable chunk of ice orbiting a dying star in an uncharted corner of the Milky Way. It was just xyr and xyr human crewmate - Jane. Xe loved the sound of the human name. It was exotic and otherwordly, evoking the stories of exploration and discovery that had led xyr down this road all those cycles ago.

It was however, close quarters and however friendly xe was with Jane, there were times when xe felt xe would have given anything for the privacy of a single occupancy cocoon. For space to spread xyr gliders and soar, high above a world. For somewhere to extend xyr mandibles to their fullest and rip a whole zarlack apart, licking salt from xyr incisors and enjoying xemself in a frenzy of feasting. For the simple pleasure of a mudbath, peat sinking into xyr drying scales.

That had been the extent of xyr desires. Until xyr'd crashed. The mapping sensors simply hadn't picked up the chunk of rock until it was almost upon xem. The slight radioactive signature taken for the background radiation of space, and masking the density and magnetic pull. And now the orb has crashed, the engines are fragmented. There is no hope of making it back into space and no way of summoning help.

Xe draws the bottle of grontlik from xyr hibernation pod. Xe had been saving it for xyr renewal day, but it is unlikely that xe will see that day now. Xe wishes to share it with xyr friend so that at least one night can be passed in happiness in this barren place: admiring the way the radiation refracts the reflected rays overhead into a kaleidoscope of rainbows arches. Xe will have the last taste of the homeworld xe will ever enjoy and perhaps Jane will allow xem to turn the heating units to slow cooling - intoxicated on grontlik, the cold will put xem into a hibernation state, allowing an easy passage to the SkyHalls.

Xe pops the seal.

"What's that?" Jane asks, head coming up from where she is bent over the console, spanner in hand, valiantly dismantling each component and slowly rewiring to cut the already minimalistic orb to its very bare bones of components. It won't do any good, the crash severed the fuel line.

"Alcoholic, whatever it is," Jane continued, sniffing the air, before burying her face back into the blankets she's wrapped around her head to ward off the cold. "Does it combust?"

"I've- never tried," xe answers in xyr stilted standard, wrongfooted by the peculiar human question. Xe does remember being handed a flaming drink at one of the human outposts xe had been stationed at. Perhaps it is a ritual? Xe would not deny Jane a religious observance the eve of xyr death.

Jane disappears back into the mechanism of the control board. "It's a good idea anyway," she mumbles around the tool clenched between her teeth. "We'll need a new fuel source."

"You can't power an orb with grontlik!" xe cries, realising at last what the human intends. The idea is ludicrous. She may as well try to power the orb with dreams. It would be more effective to get out and push!

Jane looks up, eyes alight and xe suddenly, powerfully remembers the instruction given all those years ago. Jane looks dangerous, feral like a challenged karthak in mating season. Even despite her human, vulnerable, fleshy face, with no scales or armouring at all, no venom or fangs or spines or any other indicators of combat at all, xe shivers.

"Watch me."

“Do not in under circumstances challenge an Earthling engineer to do something. Not even for a dare.”

[tenth-sentence]

"You hit my apex."

"Incarnations of Immortality: Bearing an Hourglass" - Piers Anthony

[joltrify]

Guys I didn't know if you knew this before but i like him a lot //

Practicing anatomy and marker...ing w/ my most favorite guys!! Also the slightest bit of physiological dev wheee

[rain-on-wax-feathers]

nonhuman burr, washington, and eliza!!!

[ranahan]

Headcanon accepted! Mixed ancestry makes a lot more sense than essential sensory organs being sexually dimorphic.

However, if you wanted to use the canon explanation, there could be some subtle quirk in foetal development or an incompatibility between Twi’leki and human genomes, that meant that male foetuses with mixed ancestry were more likely to develop ears rather than cones, even if in aggregate both sexes could develop either cones or ears depending on their specific ancestry.

Btw, I’m loaning this into Mando’a in the absence of any native terms. I think terms for alien physiology (features that were not present in the Taung) would be prime candidates for loan words. I have a similar loan-word etymology headcanon for Togruta montrals, but head-tendrils would probably have a native Mando’a word, for example.

I think it would become either chara (pl. charase) or char (pl. chare), depending on whether the -a would be analysed as a (archaic) plural suffix or not—they do become naturally in pairs, after all. It could even become charan (pl. charane), if people usually spoke about them in plural.

Ears Vs Cones

One of the more well-known physiological characteristics of Twi’leks is the presence of their ear cones or tcharan [sing. Tchara] in the place of ears in some members of the species.

According to the official canon, females have cones and males have lobed ears. This makes very little sense to me. Yes, there are sex-linked traits, genetically, that is a thing. But having sensory organs with completely different functions honestly doesn’t seem reasonable to me, partly because of my head-canons on what exactly tcharan do. It’s safe to assume that if the females are in an environment that requires the functions preformed by the tcharan, then so are the males.

Short version of the above, I came up with ideas that I like a lot better than the official “differently shaped ear-things that work exactly the same as human ears.”

So what do tcharan do?

Keep reading

[des-no9]

Vhayeri, the future ruler of the githyanki that you will be

[skittles-posting]

In celebration of 4/20 I will partake in a "blunt rotation", if anyone would like to join me!

[ddeck]

istg all the music sw ocs that have been popping up recently are so cool

[oflgtfol]

like sorry i do think there is a CRIMINAL lack of bottom symby and it kinda bugs me i once again made yet another top symby fic but like. like. hello. hello. its dark in here

[grimm-haven]

Beginning of Rose Gen // Previous // Next

[harley-rose25]

Wow a Star Trek Thought

So I'm currently taking a physiology course and when we going over the movement of sodium ions through the cells and the function of the sodium potassium pump; and I started thinking about how weird it is that humans in star trek can just eat practically any random alien food. Like it'd be interesting if while certain aliens might look human their internal biochemistry is different which makes their food poisonous to us or our food poisonous to them. Or like imagine if Vulcan food was considered bland not because it lacks spice but because it lacks salt; and human food is extremely salty to Vulcans and cant be eaten except for a little bit or else they'll get salt overload.

[bagheerita]

Me, watching "Profit and Loss": uh ma'am 😳 thank you ma'am

[bluejaysandblackbats]

Conner Kent x human boy this. Conner Kent x human boy that. When do we get Conner dating people that are v much not human??? Like I mean not even human-looking. I want Conner to j pop up w some alien boy guy like, "This is [insert coolest name ever], and the pronouns that closely match [name]'s subspecies gender is he/him. This is my boyfriend." Also bonus points if the pronunciation is so wild he's like, "Yeah half of these letters don't exist in the English language... Call me Robert," or some shit like that.