#andalite biology

[ramonahblog]

Sooo....

Do you think andalites are ruminants* where their cud goes back into their hooves and they have to reeat it?  I mean, they have hooves, they eat roughage and they described as running to eat which to me suggests andalites eat quickly. 

Book eight is great for this since Ax talks about running to feed, where Visser Three would run to feed. And that it’s only Ax’s morning ritual where he just eats without running. But that’s more a ritualistic thing that involves grass going in hoof than actual eating. 

So...do Andalites also have a four-chambered stomach making them ruminants? Thoughts and theories welcomed. Personally, I say yes. Mainly because it’s funny to think these incredibly arrogant alien race have to eat their own spew** in order to properly digest the food they are meant to eat. And the other is just because I feel like we need more ruminant-aliens in fiction. 

Also it would explain why they get so amazed by human tastebuds but also talk about different grasses having taste. Which I think is just a KAASU but I like thinking of in-canon explanation. 

Also we need more ruminant-aliens in fiction. 

*The link is very basic if you know what a ruminant animal is but I think it’s good if you have no clue. 

**Not an entirely accurate description of ruminating. Point is it goes down to one chamber, back up the throat, chewed and goes down to the next and repeat until it passes all the chambers. 

[honkowo]

hmmm mostly just fucking around here. angels + a parasitic alien concept I fucked around with a while back lol

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

speaking of ships i was sold on marco/ax entirely by "lies agreed upon" by cavatica, they do some great worldbuilding with andalite culture and biology too

Oh my gosh, right!?!?!? I love Lies Agreed Upon by @acavatica — I have to reread it now that you reminded me of it.

[kooldewd123]

Alright I've got some THOUGHTS about the Iskoort and how they relate to Yeerk ecology that I've been dying to get out but I wanted to wait until I reached book 26 in case there was some detail I was forgetting. So obviously, the big twist with these guys is they they're actually some offshoot of the Yeerks who found a way to evolve past the need for parasitism by creating an artificial species to inhabit. The part that's been really sticking out in my mind as I reread the series, however, is that this isn't actually the first time a concept like this has been brought up. Let's take a look at Guide's description of the Iskoort:

Since we formed our symbiotes, the combination Isk and Yoort, we have been as we are now. ... The Isk cannot live without the Yoort. And to ensure this symbiosis would be real, the Yoort, too, were modified. Now Yoort cannot live without Isk and Isk cannot live without Yoort. They are one creature with two parts. - Guide, #26: The Attack

This description sounded familiar to me when I read it for some reason. That's when I realized: It's weirdly similar to the way that Seerow describes the relationship between the Yeerks and the Gedds:

[The Yeerks] have no history of harming intelligent life-forms. The Gedds are barely conscious in their natural state. It's not as if they were stealing the bodies of truly sentient creatures. They and the Gedds are symbiotic. - Seerow, The Hork-Bajir Chronicles.

The Iskoort aren't a symbol of what the Yeerks might become become in the future - they're what the Yeerks already were before the Andalites found them. The Yeerks, within their native habitat, aren't parasites, but rather mutualistic partners to the Gedds. The Gedds' bodies give the Yeerks new senses and enhanced motility, while the Yeerks' capabilities for higher thinking grant the Gedds all the benefits that come with it, such as greater survival skills and the framework of civilization. Yeerk benefits from Gedd, and Gedd benefits from Yeerk. It's not hard to imagine that over many generations, as the Yeerk/Gedd relationship grew deeper, we could have seen something strikingly similar to the Iskoort evolve.

But then the Andalites came.

The Yeerks specifically evolved to infest the barely-sentient Gedds, but it turns out that much of sentient life in the galaxy mirrors Gedd anatomy closely enough to also be viable hosts for Yeerks. Like I said before, the Yeerks didn't necessarily evolve as parasites, but they became so opportunistically when unleashed upon unsuspecting habitats that had never had any reason to evolve defenses against such a threat. You know what we call something like that in real-world ecology? An invasive species. And I just love that. Animorphs is a series with a strong, clear environmentalist message. Invasive species are some of the closest examples we have to actual villains in nature, so creating villains that reflect them is a brilliant idea. And with this perspective in mind, even more parallels start to pop up! Real-world invasive species often begin spreading as stowaways on settler ships, and the Yeerks began spreading using Andalite advance ships. Invasive species can cause ecosystem collapse by out-competing native species, and the Yeerks intentionally destroy the ecosystems of worlds they've conquered. My biology brain has been latching on to this idea ever since I read that passage from Seerow. It's such an interesting shift in the way to analyze the Yeerks' actions.

[lakesbian]

please do i want to see the andalite speculative biology. get me the aximili esgarrouth isthill anatomical diagrams

[featherquillpen]

References and Inspirations in "Five Artworks About the Andalite-Yeerk War"

People were curious about what went into my latest Dæmorphing fic, Five Artworks About the Andalite-Yeerk War, so here are some of those.

First of all, the number one inspiration for the fic was the book An Immense World by Ed Yong, which is about animal sensory biology. It really helped me imagine the artistic modalities of the Animorphs aliens.

In a broad sense, the issues with adaptation across species, as in Long Leap to Freedom, were inspired by the issues with translating art across a power gradient. A good example of this on my mind was the issues with the Deaf West production of Spring Awakening.

The Pools Beyond Reach was inspired by an art installation I went to as a child. I cannot remember the name, but maybe if I describe it someone will know what it was. It was a whole designed space that was made to look like a family's home. The family had a lot of terrible secrets that you could uncover as you explored the house and looked at the details. You could uncover the location of a secret tunnel inside the house. If you crawled through the dark tunnel, you could feel the shapes of plaster skeletons buried inside the tunnel.

One of the critics of The Pools Beyond Reach is a Hork-Bajir named Puah Tel. Puah is the name of a heroic midwife in the Torah. Interesting that a Hork-Bajir identified as a "diaspora Hork-Bajir" has taken on a Jewish name, isn't it? Perhaps it has something to do with the Partisanim...

Andalite spinvids were inspired by early animators experimenting with putting animations over real-life backgrounds. The most mainstream well-known versions of this are the animations of the appearing and disappearing letters in Sesame Street and of course the toons of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It's those sorts of visuals and music combined with the kind of satirical commentary you can get with duet videos on Tiktok.

The electro-symphony Insulation was inspired by orchestral pieces such as Holocene Extinction that try to capture the current mass extinction event in music.

Steadfast was inspired by a number of artworks that are designed to be unpleasant to experience. One that I experienced myself was 20:50 by Richard Wilson, which is unsettling and anxiety-producing, and that's exactly the point.

[fanonical]

i will never not rave about how animorphs’ mouthless aliens are the coolest concept ever. andalite biology is just so fucked up and i love them

[tunashei]

First Impression of Animorphs!

I'm listening to the Animorphs series while I work, through Animorphs Aloud - a fan made reading of the series. Here are my first impressions/random thoughts about them! Spoilers below if you haven't read them.

Book 8: The Alien

OOOOOOH AX POV! Ax Pov! This is not a drill! I am so hype

Oh the mental imagery of Ax watching the space battle above him while sitting alone in this artificial dome is so...so emotional. The strange disconnect of watching helplessly in a veritable garden of eden as your brother and others fight above you in the cold vacuum of space. I'd like to draw it

And then the absolute terror of being ejected from your ship and falling into the ocean of the nearby planet. Stuck beneath miles of water pressing down on you. Chills

Also now I'm really curious what the surface of the sea looks like if you're looking up at from below many miles

Ooooh we got little diary entries! Very amusing! This book is starting off so strong

Loving the amount of planning for taking Ax to a movie, they've learnt from previous times!

One of the reasons I was so excited for Ax pov is stuff like learning all these Andalite words, and bits of biology, the different ways of observing things. Alien perspective is so interesting

Confession time, I listened to this book before Megamorphs 1 which is before this book in the timeline. So I had no idea was a Veleek was and was rather confused they'd beaten one

I love the regular forays into Ax's Adventures with Food. Please don't eat cigarettes baby

I was cracking up at work for this whole sequence. Got some funny looks.

Going to make a prediction. Seerow's Kindness is referring to Andalites helping out the Yeerks somehow. Also Seerow is Visser Three's Andalite Host.

My man eat with he feet

I'm so here for Ax and Tobias best buds friendship

Ax confirmed canonically hetero this is a sad day for us all :(

Ok why after the semi-disaster of the movies would you take Ax to school, that is one of the most stressful confusing environments for anyone. Also schools have registers they're not going to just let you bring in a new kid

Unless maybe the teacher won't care because they've got a bloody Yeerk dying in their head! The book has predicted this predicament!

However, very unrealistic that the kids fled the room instead of crowding around the freaking-out teacher. You'd spend 20 minutes chasing them out the room and they'd still crowd around the door peeping in.

Oh this is...a bad thing to have hidden Ax. Poor Jake. This whole conversation is very tense. Ax bringing up his brother as if to remind Jake he's already lost HIS brother to this war

Ax is always described as blue-and-tan, implying he's more blue than tan. I have a hard time believing people would think he's a deer from a distance considering his colours

Huh...wouldn't it be weird to never have moonless nights? The stars are always brightest on those days, great for stargazing. I wonder how bright the night would be if you had multiple moons. Or would it not be additive?

Fascinating evolutionary implications from a species having a biological clock that makes them war every 62 years. Some kind of mass population cull? Ensuring only the strongest breed?

Ok this is pretty funny but actually made me reconsider how we appreciate stuff?? Actually kind of mindblowing. We really don't appreciate food as an art form. After I'd listened to this bit at work, my boss gave us all a tin of chocolates. Ate them on the way home and took some time to really savour the flavour. My life is being enriched by these books.

'He was a male-as all human fathers are' Implication Andalites can have female fathers??? Maybe. Would be cool.

Ax totally winning at social interaction

Aw Ax, you are being very brave :(

Huh so this Yeerk controller loved another Yeerk? I could have sworn in a previous book it said they were incapable of love, I think the one where Jake gets infested

Poor Ax. You really feel his struggle in being compared to his brother, now having to take the blame

The yeerk just fuckin bailed out the andalite?! I was not expecting this. You beat Visser Three?!

Aight so the Visser's andalite was not Seerow. He's just...some guy. Ngl was hoping for a bit more info on that, I've been very curious how Visser Three got an andalite which no other Yeerk has acomplished

Although...they're on the home world? Maybe there are other andalite controllers. Ruh roh

You guys are absolutely going to regret not putting this andalite out of his misery. He's literally begging for death and you know the horrors of being infested, and will be an incredibly powerful enemy again if you leave him. I mean, you couldn't even try to lug him out of there? How many people are going to end up killed in the future because Visser Three remains an andalite?

Called it on Seerow's Gift being helping the Yeerks. I kind of get it though I'd feel sorry for any sapient species that had to life it's entire life as a slug in a pool

Winced when Ax confessed his fears of giving humans help that would lead them to be conquerors, and Marco brushing it off. Humans would absolutely become conquerors, it's in our history

Wow. This is definitely my favourite book so far. I expected it would be, I'm very into xenofiction (when a book is written from a non-human perspective) but I think the emotional journey was also great in this. The ending was a bit quick and weak. But overall great.

[infini-tree]

what had started out as pose practice/reference for andalite!moxie became a loose collection of Andalite Biology Headcanons so-- enjoy(?)!

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

Isn't biology and science a "female trait" for andalites? Considering their seemingly pretty strict gender roles and Alloran's personality, it seems unlikely he'd have any practical knowledge in creating a virus. Also, surely the yeerks would have used that if he personally had that skill and knowledge?

I think you're right that if Alloran had known how to make such viruses, the Yeerks would have leveraged that information to hold the Andalites or other species hostage.

[nikosheba]

So have we TALKED about the fact that Andalites most likely weigh 700-1100lbs

[sauridae]

aminorphs

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Oh geeze, now I'm imagining a Rachel from a universe where she lived after the war coming to the canon universe through a Sario Rip.

Things Rachel would do if she suddenly found herself in canon-verse ~10 years after her canon death:

Put on white face paint and show up in Marco's room at 3:00 in the morning. This would be her way of announcing that she's back, and if she half-kills him from sheer terror then that's a sacrifice she's willing to make.

Find Tobias and drag him by the ear (symbolic ear) into interacting with other people on a regular basis. This effort would probably be aided by Toby, who would both kidnap him to visit the hork-bajir settlements on the regular and also throw him at human activities.

Buy a pool noodle. Get it wet. Ambush Jake. Smack him repeatedly in the head with it, yelling "I! Told! You! Not! To! Blame! Yourself!" [wet squelching noises]

Go for smoothies with Cassie, and promise (on a bed of lies) that she won't threaten to cut Ronnie's balls off if he ever hurts Cassie.

Find Ax. Confiscate the keys to Ax's Dome ship. Tell Ax that he's taking a month-long (one of our months) vacation on Earth. Put in a ransom call to the andalite homeworld, telling them they can't have Prince Aximilli back until every Earth resident who wants to morph can damn well do so.

Morph elephant, uproot her own memorial statue, and carry it to the nearest marine biology research center to be melted down to make artificial reefs.

Nap. She's earned it.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

Thanks for posting that link, last time you posted it is a big part of why i started rereading animorphs. Also i love the idea that andalites etch their tailblades but then i gotta wonder: do they shed them ever, like antlers? Do they decorate their scoops with their shed tailblades that have etchings they still like?

NO PROBLEM MY DUDE, I HAVE A WHOLE TAG FOR IT NOW.

And I feel like Andalite tail blades are more conceptually similar to...teeth?  Because like there are a couple books where they talk about older Andalites having dull blades, and when Elfangor gets time warped in Andalite Chronicles, his hooves grow excessively but his tail blade stays the same.  I mean, we never hear about tail blades getting chipped or whatever but that could easily just be that Andalites are aliens and their bones/etc are therefore of a different composition.  But yes, I think of Andalite tail blades as being more like teeth than antlers or horns, because they don’t seem to grow past their final size and if they shed them regularly, they would never dull.  (And on a societal level, if Andalites shed their tail blades, I feel like the incredibly aggressive prejudice against vecols would be...maybe not less, per se, but different.)

Of course obviously this means that baby Andalites either, A, grow their tail blades at some point in their early life and it’s probably A Big Deal, or, B, they start out with tiny baby tail blades which they eventually ‘lose’ in return for a sharp adult tail blade.  I’m guessing the former because the latter seems...impractical, but also because I cannot think of a single safe way for an infant to be born with a bigass sword on their body.  I have a lot of concerns about Hork-Bajir delivery methods and have mostly come to the conclusion that baby Hork-Bajir must be born without sharp blades, like baby bison or what have you are born with nubby little horns.

Someday Ax mentions that baby Andalites get adult tail blades instead of being born with them, and Marco is like “Does the tail blade fairy leave twenty bucks under your pillow, because that looks like it’s worth more than the dollar or two I got for my teeth.”

And Ax is just.  Baffled.  He doesn’t understand a single concept Marco just threw at him.  Ax is still struggling with the concept of money.

Also, the fact that human teeth just fall out and humans made up a creature whose life’s work is to take the teeth away for unknown purposes strikes him as mildly horrifying.  Ax thinks that the Tooth Fairy probably looks like Jack Skellington and acts like a serial killer and nothing Marco says can dissuade him.

[lakesbian]

Also it's not like Andalites are tentacle aliens. They're centaurs. Maybe not as anagalous to human biology and sexuality as a humanoid, but close enough.

the implication that vague morphological closeness to a humanoid form would increase odds of operating within or analogously to human social constructs wrt gender and sexuality is also not true, and i'm not sure why you're subbing in "biology" for "gender," because those are not at all the same thing

[andalite-apologist]

Thinking about this NONSENSE biology again my limited knowlege of anatomy means this is probably "Ax's Notes" version of andalite biology.