Anonymous asked: was reading through your book 4 reread, I'd love to hear your thoughts on Taxxons and Hork Bajir. Especially the 'Taxxons used to be ocean aliens and now they live on land kinda thing'
YEAH LET’S DO THAT. Okay, so, I ended up just doing the Taxxons rather than the Hork-Bajir because…um…this got long, to the shock of everyone, I’m sure. I might do the Hork-Bajir later. But yeah. Okay. I wrote this during Anatomy class over a couple days and then typed it up, so.
ALL RIGHT.
So, let’s start with a quick little recap I like to call Everything We Know About Taxxons.
- Large, more like planaria with legs than actual insects, perfect 360 vision (eyes evenly spaced around head), brightly colored
- No apparent skeleton, exo or endo, except on legs and claws
- Fragile in the extreme, to the point of ‘bursting’ during combat with the Animorphs
- Excellent swimmers (buoyant, motile, quite fast) but unwieldy, not very agile
- Possessed of complex sentience(Yeerk-equivalent), but not independently capable of interstellar travel (we never hear about Taxxon ships, so I’m assuming that they never built them)
- Live in hive structures, but more like meerkats than termites (Taxxons do not share a hive mind)
- Desert planet (what we’ve seen of it anyway), which probably floods like a motherfucker in rainy seasons
- And, of course, ravening hunger, including:
- Total inability to be satisfied (Taxxons are always starving)
- Difficulty controlling feeding impulses (even Taxxon-Controllers can’t really keep themselves under control, except to somewhat limit consumption of live meat)
- Preference for meat if available, but plant matter is also eaten (the Taxxons are occasionally described as ‘chewing’ their way through forest or jungle)
Okay, so, that’s the majority of pertinent information we know about Taxxons, and it’s not a lot, but we can make some deductions based on this. First of all, we can assume that—besides other Taxxons, of course—Taxxons have no natural predators in their home habitat, making them an apex…consumer, I guess, since they’re not really predators as we think of them on Earth. If they did have natural predators, the whole Taxxon species would be a wash, between the facts that they have no natural weapons besides their mouth, they aren’t fast and nimble enough to survive by flight, and they’re too fragile for hard combat. If anything wanted to eat a Taxxon, it wouldn’t be too hard to pull off, comparatively speaking—therefore, the ongoing survival of the species indicates that nothing is interested in eating them. I can’t blame their cohabitants, quite frankly, but I digress.
Second of all, we can assume that the Taxxon planet wasn’t always desert, because they swim remarkably well. The ability to swim (or at least swim well, almost anything can figure out how to stay afloat) can actually be retained for several evolutionary ‘steps,’ but not a ton—for example, moose do pretty well in water, deer not so much. So the Taxxons probably functioned as at least semi-aquatic/amphibious creatures not so long ago, evolutionarily speaking, in order to retain the ability to swim as well as they do in Book 4. This would also make sense with their structure—a giant, skeleton-less worm with thin skin is going to dehydrate very fast in a desert environment. It makes more sense to assume that something like that would evolve in the water, like our own Earth cephalopods (or, in a closer comparison, lamprey and hagfish—no, seriously, look at a lamprey and tell me that shit isn’t a little too much like a Taxxon), and then transition directly to living in underground hives when land-life became inescapable. Anyone can tell you that the only cool and remotely damp parts of a desert are underground—a Taxxon hive would be the best place for a giant worm to avoid getting crispy. Furthermore, the sheer bulk of a Taxxon suggest this sort of water-oriented evolution, because big, cumbersome, fragile things just don’t do well on land. It’s sort of like how whales can’t survive on land because they’re literally too bit, the weight of their own body crushes their lungs and causes asphyxiation. Taxxons aren’t THAT big, but they’re unwieldy as shit—speedy in a straight line, but not agile enough to dodge a predator or catch nimble prey, and too fragile and ravenous for a long hunt to be feasible. They’re faster in the water, and oceans host huge ecosystems to support an enormous metabolic demand like that of a Taxxon. Ergo, Taxxons would probably hunt best, move best, and survive best in the water, which means that’s most likely where they started out.
And then there’s the crucial third part about Taxxons: that hunger. Here’s the thing about evolution. Something doesn’t spread so virulently through a species unless there’s a real advantage to it. If walking on two legs didn’t grant humans the unlimited use of dexterous hands and arms, we probably never would have gotten off all fours. If howler monkeys didn’t have to worry about screw flies eating a wounded monkey alive, they would never have evolved to scream rather than fighting. So, that means that there’s an ‘if, then’ statement to be made about Taxxons, something to the tune of ‘if we aren’t prepared to eat anything available, then we die of starvation.’ And, you know, if they were a subsentient species like, say, jackals or (duh) lamprey, there would be no need for evolution to hack into their brains. Jackals and lamprey will eat pretty much what’s around, as long as it’s meat, because they don’t have anything inhibiting that—emotions and consciousness can really gum up the survival instinct. SO, being sentient and therefore capable of emotional articulation, one can assume that, at some point in their past, Taxxons were starving to death because they were unwilling to eat other Taxxons. Friends, family, whatever. Maybe they just had a really strong cannibalism tattoo. And then suppose you had a handful of Taxxons who had some kind of variant of our Prader-Willi syndrome (the primary symptom of which is constant, overwhelming hunger). Compounded with starvation, suppose this caused them to lose control and do what had to be done to survive—meaning, if it was feasibly edible, they ate it, no matter what (or who) it was. So, those would be the Taxxons who would survive and—through whatever undoubtedly far-too-gooey method Taxxons opt for—make little Taxxons with the same genetic anomaly causing constant hunger as their parents. ‘It’s not a bug (or rather disorder), it’s a feature’ is pretty much how evolution works. Flash forward a couple thousand—or more like million—years, and you get a whole species with absolutely no memory of having a cannibalism taboo, and a pandemic syndrome causing them to eat everything in sight.
Okay, time for some flashy deduction, because do you know what these, especially those last two, scream to me?
Extinction level event.
Stick with me on this for a minute. Let’s say that, through whatever happenstance you like, the Taxxon home world suffered an extinction level event that had the result of spiking the temperature. The oceans, where Taxxons—enormous and efficient—were the apex hunters, dried up and left these worms on dry desert, struggling to adapt legs better suited to the ocean floor (think lobster, or mantis shrimp) to land, and racing against their own metabolism to consume enough calories every day to survive under the weight of gravity. Fortunately for the Taxxons (sort of?), our extinction level event wiped out the land predators even though the water-going ones made it—there’s precedent for this, sharks outlived the dinosaurs, and so did crocodiles, this is pretty much the same principle. This means that Taxxons don’t have any natural predators on land, which means that there’s no evolutionary drive away from their fragile, sack o’ goo bodies—they don’t need to fight other predators for food or survival, so there’s no selection for tougher skin or evasive abilities.
Great. Super. For a little while—maybe even a couple generations, at the longest—Taxxons are doing great. Given the situation, I mean. No natural predators, not even many competitors for food, since even the Taxxon population is probably pretty decimated post-extinction level event, and they have uninhibited access to a world that was totally inaccessible to them before due to the threat of large land animals. These cusp-of-the-change Taxxons are basically living it up, is my point here.
And then things start to change. All at once, the food is running out as the massive calorie demands of a large apex consumer, especially one used to having a major percentage of their body weight supported by the water, take their toll on the ravaged environment. Whole taxonomic families have disappeared in the extinction level event, and Taxxons have chewed through a number of the others left—and prey evolves to hide and run a lot faster than predators evolve to hunt.
So now it’s just the Taxxons, alone in a desert they’re ill-adapted for.
And they’re hungry.
