#hyperfauna weasels

[saltycharacters]

Oogh Lovin Baizel and the species concept! What does their diet consist of? Is there any way for them to avoid what happens to them over time? Do the hearts work like- if 1 stops it's ok bc there's others or if 1 stops they all stop?

SO glad you like my silly n weird ideas :""] Regarding the hearts question, it depends on how long they've grown at the time and which heart gives out, the front one / further back / etc - the reason they have so many hearts in the first place is to help pump blood throughout such a massive body. And the longer they get, the more work has to be put into that. So, if they're around 20-30 ish years old or less, they can probably survive a heart or two dying on them because the other hearts can pick up the slack (although the extra strain can promote further heart failure). But with each added foot, the amount of work/ importance each heart is deligated increases, and that makes it much harder to recover from a failure.

Essentially, at some point each heart has to mantain a body section alone and if that stops, then there's a domino effect that affects every heart preceding it since the blood exchange from section to section halted. If this happens though, there's a chance of survival if the hearts near the front/head are ok, as cutting off blood flow to the brain is definetly fatal. The other sections will die off but, as the hyperfauna weasels are literally predestined to have that happen at some point in their lives, it's not the end of the world. They even have systems that can function indipendently regardless of what happens to the body (cough cough. Waste disposal) so the biggest change just becomes limited movment.

For the question about preventing the fates of hyperfauna weasels, assuming that you mean as they are now and not by manually altering the entire species via selective breeding/ bioengineering, there IS. a theoretical way to manually stunt growth (also via bioengineering) but, it is VERY difficult to control the outcome over time, and without careful planning (like, what parts of the body are suppose to be stunted and what parts need to develop to survive? How to prevent this manual cell death from reaching something vital? At what age should they be stunted? At what age CAN they be stunted, before these alterations become harder to induce? etc) it can result in a load of problems that make their life over time a miserable one (or just kill them straight off).

Also, hyperfauna weasels are notorious for being difficult to work with medically/bio-manipulatively because 1] their skin is VERY thick, needles need to be long but strong enough to pierce them and NOT break on the way down (also few people can find their veins) 2] any effect needs time to travel throughout their entire body, which can take a WHILE (and depending on how long the effects are suppose to last, their former half could've already worn off while the latter is still feeling the effects [this makes anesthesia difficult bc it needs to be powerful enough to hit everywhere while not being so powerful that it causes heart failure]) 3] their cells are super stubborn/hard to change and it's difficult to intruduce new instructions to them, not to mention they're so hellbent on forever-growth that they're super hardy, multiply and die off quicker than any changes can be induced in them, and kill most foreign objects without prejudice.

All this to say they're a nightmare to manually bio-alter and your best bet would be to manipulate them at the embyonic stage, where they're most cellularly vulnerable / suseptable to change, and if all goes well you can artificially cease their growth after a point, but in terms of lore-reasons this hasn't happened yet. It's mostly because those who DO know about this species, at least by the time this kind of technology was available, just. don't really have the (cough. financial) motivation to do this. Bio-engineering companies are mostly about profit, and this kind of job would require bringing back a near extinct species (not impossible, just a chore) that needs a LOT of resources to mantain, monitoring over a LONG time to see if their alterations worked, and they'd end up with a lot of failed experiments that live almost forever before they get one that lives a reasonable, sustainable amount.

For the last question about their diet, they're omnivorous and can eat a lot of what normal weasels eat already :] although their portions have to be HUGE (even standing on all legs they can be over 5 ft tall, plus all that body length means a LOT of) so in a pinch they can eat most any kind of meat, plant-matter, even fungus.

[saltycharacters]

[ID: A digital drawing featuring a long, weasel-like character. They have short fur with brown stripes, large round glasses, and a short, round snout. They’re drawn in 3 stages of their life, first being 20-30 yrs old, second being 31-40 yrs old, and last being 200+ yrs old. Each stage shows a dramatic increase in length, as well as an addition of more limbs, eyes, and clothing changes. The last 200+ stage is shown to reside in a cave, being so long and entangled that their end is hard to make out. They’re all posing on a soft gradient background, with the name “Baizel” plastered near the top. End ID]

An oldie but a goodie, Baizel (they/them or he/him) is an oc I've had since 2013, but neglected to draw up until now. He's part of a nearly-extinct species of weasel hyperfauna (lore term), who are known to grow from 5 inches to a foot every year of their life, as well as gain a new pair of limbs and set of eyes every ten years, and up to five hearts during their entire lifespan. Due to their notoriously longevity, after 100-200 yrs they end up becoming so long that brain signals stop reaching the furthest parts of their body, cutting off movement and causing them to drag their latter halves when traveling. 

However, at some point the weight from all that extra body length becomes impossible to drag, so they become permanently tethered to one place, limited to whatever their front halves can reach and remaining there until they expire. At this point, they have also lost most of their sapience and become focused on survival, intaking as many resources they can to keep themselves alive. They only ever die from starvation or thirst (or heart failure if they had pre-existing problems), but if they find themselves a place with replenishing resources, then they can live for as long as those resources are available.

Due to their impossible lifespan, insatiable need for recourses, and lack of natural predators/ difficulty to kill, they cannot be comfortably inserted into any habitats and/or foodchains, and are considered a “lockstone species” (character world term: a universally invasive species that can damage ecosystems and be a detriment to the environment), so efforts to bring them back/ encourage their form to shape-shifters is non-existent.