So, Sarnothi are just born in a state like a much earlier human pregnancy. Humans have tails as well, but are converted into the spinal column during gestation.
Short embarassing tails, but you aren’t wrong lol. Fun fact: out of all the animals in the animal kingdom the one we most closely relate to in physiological similarities (in terms of fetal development) is the pig. 8D I might be just a cynical bastard when I think that says something metaphorical about us as a species, but eh.
I think she already has, there’s just a big difference between being at peace with something, and witnessing it first hand. Also there is Amanda to consider. She would never let Selkie live it down. Selkie has every right to hide it from her.
I could see fish used as a cute nickname between friends if Amanda hadn’t soured it for her first. Context is everything in these cases and the way Amanda has been using it it’s obviously malicious.
It’s entirely possible for a term that was negative to be turned into a positive once the relationship changes. I doubt it will be that in this case — since part of the lesson Amanda needs to learn is to consider Selkie’s feelings about the term — but it’s a thing that happens, to individuals and to groups.
Like how we adopted “Yankees” from those who mocked us, or how siblings often use insulting nicknames for each other. My brothers and I share “bonehead” and “smeghead” though neither references a specific person — they refer to “you” and “the third sibling” depending on how they’re used in context (vocative or third-person respectively). Or how a snobby girl who becomes a friend might still be designated “snob” or a similar term by the group, or a nerd who becomes part of the group might still be called “nerd,” only where these terms were used negatively before, now they’re used affectionately or in a way that indicates fun and acceptance instead of attack.
I keep seeing comments that “Sarnothi are amphibians”.
Amphibians are born with gills, but the gills disappear as they mature. Tadpoles have gills, but frogs don’t.
I think they qualify as mammals.
Mammals have hair (check), nurse their young (check), and have live birth (uh-oh).
But there is a branch of mammals called monotremes. Only five species extant, but they exist. They lay eggs. The platypus and four species of spiny anteater.
I think she’s a hybrid between amphibian and mammal. Her species isn’t found in real life so as long as it’s consistent, it can break the identifier rules between amphibian and mammal.
You can throw out the rules completely anyway. “Mammal” and “amphibian” are just categories created by humans to help other humans understand what things are most similar to.
Think of the Klingons from Star Trek: They have hair, the females have obvious breasts so we can safely assume they nurse their young, and they have live birth. They’ve also been shown to have a very insectile ancestor, and they’re from another frikkin’ planet. I’d still call them mammals, because that’s the category they fit into, but no way is “mammalness” a property of Klingons if it’s a property of Humans. There’s no useful biological distinction between mammals and non-mammals: it’s all semantics.
TL:DR Sarnothi are fish-people and we should all stop trying to categorize them scientifically.
Some salamanders keep their gills though. Monotremes have a good number of traits that closer to bird or reptile than mammal. I think maybe it’s the same here except for mammals and amphibians. It’s a bit problematic because as far as I can tell mammals and amphibians are evolutionary further away than mammals and reptiles or birds, but hey it’s fiction. The question is whether they’re mammals with amphibian traits or amphibians with mammalian traits, because they have pretty strong resemblances to both. *shrug*
Given that they undergo metamorphosis, lay eggs underwater and have gills, I’d guess the latter, as all those traits disappeared from the mammalian lineage when reptiles evolved.
They seem to be a mix of mammalian and amphibian, which wouldn’t make much sense based on taxonomy. I think they were originally aliens who migrated to Earth many years ago and settled in the Great Lakes since their original planet was covered in a huge freshwater ocean. This would also explain their bizzare glowy green magic stuff.
Mammals are warm-blooded. Sarnothi are not. Evolution among the jawed vertebrates took a different turn on their planet, and the Sarnothi combine characteristics of several distinct Earth classes:
Retain lungs and gills as adults: Lungfish. But these only have enough mobility and endurance in the air to crawl between puddles. The modern lungfish are thought to be a separate clade from the similar ancient lobe-finned fish that evolved into tetrapods (amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals).
Lay eggs: Most animals of all classes except mammals. (There are fish, reptiles, and insects that give live birth, but they simply carry eggs within their bodies until the eggs hatch – the mother does not provide sustenance beyond creating the egg. The first mammals probably laid eggs and produced milk to feed the young after hatching; a few of this group survive. Marsupials were the second improvement; they carried the hatchlings in a pouch next to the mammary glands, which enabled carrying smaller eggs in their bodies and hatching them at an earlier stage of development. Finally, the placental mammals replaced the egg’s food supply with an organ to link the shell-less egg with the mother’s circulatory system and feed it until the young grows too big to carry internally.)
Guard the eggs and young: Some fish guard the eggs closely, but most just lay lots of eggs in a supposedly hidden spot and leave. (If you can’t guard them effectively, sticking around just marks the spot.) Reptiles also vary from guarding the nest and hatchlings to lay and scram. Birds and mammals have to work long and hard at raising their children.
Lay eggs in water: Fish, amphibians, some insects. (Reptiles, birds, and egg-laying mammals must lay eggs on dry land. It’s very inconvenient and dangerous for sea turtles to come up on the beach to lay their eggs, but because they are reptiles that returned to the sea, it is necessary.)
Hatch into a sea-dwelling form and metamorphose into a form that can live on land: Amphibians and some insects, maybe also some other arthropods.
Bony limbs: Lobe-finned fish and tetrapods. (Most fish are ray-finned, with their fins shaped by thin bony/cartilagenous spines, anchored directly in the main body. They are poorly equipped for crawling out of the water or in extremely shallow water. Lobe-finned fish had bones resembling leg bones, ending in a splay of webbed toes.) Here is my one concern with how Dave drew the “baby” – it seems to be ray-finned, although it’s possible that there are leg and arm bones buried in the flesh beneath the fins.
Hair: Mammals. Possibly also some obscure reptilian lineage(s), depending on where you draw the line between reptile and primitive mammal. (In the fossil record, this lineage of hairy warm-bloods is difficult to find among the more dominant line of feathered warm-bloods, which included at least part of the bird-hipped dinosaurs and survives today as their shrunken descendants, birds.)
Several issues: Several species of amphibian have lungs and gills as adults, though they’re not much more mobile on land. A number of fish have mechanisms for breathing both air and water, but lungfish are OBLIGATE air-breathers. If denied surface oxgen, they’ll drown.
Placental vivipary does occur in a small number of non-mammalian species, including at least one insect and a variety of fish. A number of species of amphibian, and several species of reptile have brood care that extends to include feeding the young. One species, the Solomon Island prehensile-tailed skink, not only feeds their live-born babies, but females have been observed ot adopt orphaned young. By contrast, in some birds like malee fowl and kiwis, the parents abandon the yound either shortly before, or immediately after, hatching.
While you’re right about the differences in fin structure, several ray-finned fish are well-equipped for land movement, such as mudskippers and walking catfish.
If it had hair and it wasn’t a mammal, that doesn’t mean it was a reptile, it was a synapsid. They stopped calling them mammal-like reptiles when I was a little kid. Frankly, reptilia is so polyphyletic it isn’t funny. For that matter, while it seems backwards, birds are evolved from LIZARD-hipped dinosaurs. Mind you, the bird-hipped dinosaurs have recently been discovered to have developed feathers, or at least something similar, as well. Search Psittacosaurus and be astounded by tail quills.
I am guessing that it is more a matter of tone Selkie may have been using, rather than the words she said, as he did acknowledge that she was not wrong for wanting the fact hidden from Amanda. I know that as a kid, I had a bit of the dramatic in me, and probably would have said this phrase in a manner that would have sounded like I was telling government secrets, or in a “If I tell you, I would have to kill you” way.
Yeah, he said “You’re not wrong,” he’s well aware Amanda can and would use it against her, but that “must never know” bit just SOUNDS like it was said in her best Mad Scientist/supervillain Selkie sort of mode. “We don’t tell Amanda” is totally not melodramatic, “We can’t tell Amanda this” probably isn’t but could be delivered in a really dramatic way, “Amanda must never know of this” is the sort of phrasing you use when you need to hide a body.
It will be interesting to see how her body morphs as she grows. We know she’ll develop legs and lose the tail but I’d like to think it wont be like a tadpole does it. Given that she swims by beating her tail up & down instead of side to side she could repurpose the same muscles for walking if her tail split down the middle to become legs.
okay i need to say something, there’s something seriously wrong with the commenting system here. I have to rewrite every comment I make before it stops triggering the spam filter. if i elongate a word by adding extra vowels, that gets it. if i use single quotes instead of double, that gets it
Yeah I’ve been noticing, with your comments specifically, that there’s a high amount of “double posts” where one post is visibly seen and one is in the spam folder. I did not, however, realize you were manually re-typing your entries. I thought the system was taking your posts twice for some reason.
I apologize for the trouble, let me check my settings and I’ll see if I can’t get it to stop.
possibly it might have something to do with the URL in his screen name going an off-site webpage?… anyone else that has their name show up as a URL only has it going to a post that’s already on Selkiecomic.com… the spam filter may be taking his screen name as a spammer website and continuously blocking it
No, because my username also links to an offsite web page, and I haven’t been experiencing any such problems. If it’s a spam filter triggering on the content of the username, well, ColdFusion does just happen to be the name of Adobe’s commercial web development platform. The filter might be getting confused by that — though I don’t really see why.
Thanks guy. Yeah sometimes I notice a double post too, so I guess if I get the spam filter message I should ignore it? But I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work consistently.
Basically how it works is that once a comment goes to the spam filter, I still see it in my email notices as if it were a regular comment. So for your Zora comments made on the strip after this, I saw both of them just as if they’d been posted normally, but outwardly only one is visible.
I’m trying to be quicker on approving them until I can figure out why your comments are being singled out like this.
So, in this universe, examples of what were called the Fiji Mermaid could have been partly developed baby Sarnothi. That thought is one I wish I hadn’t had.
Baby Sarnothi strongly resemble fish. Humans eat fish (as do Sarnothi of course, but we expect them to recognise that is not an actual fish).
Part of the secret Sarnothi-human treaty is that fishing is now illegal in Lake Superior. Maybe that’s not just to keep the human population in the dark?
She is cute and energetic! Love it and yeah Amanda must never know.
So i think this answers this,
but sarnothi do not experience pregnancy like Humans?
Lucky for Selkie
But what is Puberty going to be like?
I bet laying an egg is not any more fun than having a period.
Laying an egg is never fun, especially if you’re a comedian.
Love Todd’s behavior here!
So, Sarnothi are just born in a state like a much earlier human pregnancy. Humans have tails as well, but are converted into the spinal column during gestation.
Short embarassing tails, but you aren’t wrong lol. Fun fact: out of all the animals in the animal kingdom the one we most closely relate to in physiological similarities (in terms of fetal development) is the pig. 8D I might be just a cynical bastard when I think that says something metaphorical about us as a species, but eh.
Don’t insult pigs like that, Saokara.
Well, we are also known as Long Pigs.
There’s a theory that humans evolved from a primate mating with a porcine. It’s a widely discredited theory, but still, it’s a theory.
I think at some point Selkie is going to need to come to terms with the fact her species shares traits similar to fish.. Or amphibians or something.
I think she already has, there’s just a big difference between being at peace with something, and witnessing it first hand. Also there is Amanda to consider. She would never let Selkie live it down. Selkie has every right to hide it from her.
I could see fish used as a cute nickname between friends if Amanda hadn’t soured it for her first. Context is everything in these cases and the way Amanda has been using it it’s obviously malicious.
It’s entirely possible for a term that was negative to be turned into a positive once the relationship changes. I doubt it will be that in this case — since part of the lesson Amanda needs to learn is to consider Selkie’s feelings about the term — but it’s a thing that happens, to individuals and to groups.
Like how we adopted “Yankees” from those who mocked us, or how siblings often use insulting nicknames for each other. My brothers and I share “bonehead” and “smeghead” though neither references a specific person — they refer to “you” and “the third sibling” depending on how they’re used in context (vocative or third-person respectively). Or how a snobby girl who becomes a friend might still be designated “snob” or a similar term by the group, or a nerd who becomes part of the group might still be called “nerd,” only where these terms were used negatively before, now they’re used affectionately or in a way that indicates fun and acceptance instead of attack.
I keep seeing comments that “Sarnothi are amphibians”.
Amphibians are born with gills, but the gills disappear as they mature. Tadpoles have gills, but frogs don’t.
I think they qualify as mammals.
Mammals have hair (check), nurse their young (check), and have live birth (uh-oh).
But there is a branch of mammals called monotremes. Only five species extant, but they exist. They lay eggs. The platypus and four species of spiny anteater.
I think she’s a hybrid between amphibian and mammal. Her species isn’t found in real life so as long as it’s consistent, it can break the identifier rules between amphibian and mammal.
You can throw out the rules completely if the Sarnothi are from another planet.
You can throw out the rules completely anyway. “Mammal” and “amphibian” are just categories created by humans to help other humans understand what things are most similar to.
Think of the Klingons from Star Trek: They have hair, the females have obvious breasts so we can safely assume they nurse their young, and they have live birth. They’ve also been shown to have a very insectile ancestor, and they’re from another frikkin’ planet. I’d still call them mammals, because that’s the category they fit into, but no way is “mammalness” a property of Klingons if it’s a property of Humans. There’s no useful biological distinction between mammals and non-mammals: it’s all semantics.
TL:DR Sarnothi are fish-people and we should all stop trying to categorize them scientifically.
Mammals don’t have gills and the ones who lay eggs do it on land. Also she is more cold-blooded. So maybe more of a fish-mammal hybrid.
Some salamanders keep their gills though. Monotremes have a good number of traits that closer to bird or reptile than mammal. I think maybe it’s the same here except for mammals and amphibians. It’s a bit problematic because as far as I can tell mammals and amphibians are evolutionary further away than mammals and reptiles or birds, but hey it’s fiction. The question is whether they’re mammals with amphibian traits or amphibians with mammalian traits, because they have pretty strong resemblances to both. *shrug*
Given that they undergo metamorphosis, lay eggs underwater and have gills, I’d guess the latter, as all those traits disappeared from the mammalian lineage when reptiles evolved.
Oh, and I like how, in the last panel, the baby’s mouth is superimposed over Selkie’s teeth, making it look like the baby has fangs. Sweet.
Are sarnothi mammalian? (Remember, there ARE mammals that lay eggs)If not, which taxonomic class do the fall under?
Hair but poor body temp regulation… I would guess closer to seals but who knows.
Are they native to Earth, or alien? If sarnothi are aliens, we need an entire new taxonomy for them.
They seem to be a mix of mammalian and amphibian, which wouldn’t make much sense based on taxonomy. I think they were originally aliens who migrated to Earth many years ago and settled in the Great Lakes since their original planet was covered in a huge freshwater ocean. This would also explain their bizzare glowy green magic stuff.
Mammals are warm-blooded. Sarnothi are not. Evolution among the jawed vertebrates took a different turn on their planet, and the Sarnothi combine characteristics of several distinct Earth classes:
Retain lungs and gills as adults: Lungfish. But these only have enough mobility and endurance in the air to crawl between puddles. The modern lungfish are thought to be a separate clade from the similar ancient lobe-finned fish that evolved into tetrapods (amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals).
Lay eggs: Most animals of all classes except mammals. (There are fish, reptiles, and insects that give live birth, but they simply carry eggs within their bodies until the eggs hatch – the mother does not provide sustenance beyond creating the egg. The first mammals probably laid eggs and produced milk to feed the young after hatching; a few of this group survive. Marsupials were the second improvement; they carried the hatchlings in a pouch next to the mammary glands, which enabled carrying smaller eggs in their bodies and hatching them at an earlier stage of development. Finally, the placental mammals replaced the egg’s food supply with an organ to link the shell-less egg with the mother’s circulatory system and feed it until the young grows too big to carry internally.)
Guard the eggs and young: Some fish guard the eggs closely, but most just lay lots of eggs in a supposedly hidden spot and leave. (If you can’t guard them effectively, sticking around just marks the spot.) Reptiles also vary from guarding the nest and hatchlings to lay and scram. Birds and mammals have to work long and hard at raising their children.
Lay eggs in water: Fish, amphibians, some insects. (Reptiles, birds, and egg-laying mammals must lay eggs on dry land. It’s very inconvenient and dangerous for sea turtles to come up on the beach to lay their eggs, but because they are reptiles that returned to the sea, it is necessary.)
Hatch into a sea-dwelling form and metamorphose into a form that can live on land: Amphibians and some insects, maybe also some other arthropods.
Bony limbs: Lobe-finned fish and tetrapods. (Most fish are ray-finned, with their fins shaped by thin bony/cartilagenous spines, anchored directly in the main body. They are poorly equipped for crawling out of the water or in extremely shallow water. Lobe-finned fish had bones resembling leg bones, ending in a splay of webbed toes.) Here is my one concern with how Dave drew the “baby” – it seems to be ray-finned, although it’s possible that there are leg and arm bones buried in the flesh beneath the fins.
Hair: Mammals. Possibly also some obscure reptilian lineage(s), depending on where you draw the line between reptile and primitive mammal. (In the fossil record, this lineage of hairy warm-bloods is difficult to find among the more dominant line of feathered warm-bloods, which included at least part of the bird-hipped dinosaurs and survives today as their shrunken descendants, birds.)
Several issues: Several species of amphibian have lungs and gills as adults, though they’re not much more mobile on land. A number of fish have mechanisms for breathing both air and water, but lungfish are OBLIGATE air-breathers. If denied surface oxgen, they’ll drown.
Placental vivipary does occur in a small number of non-mammalian species, including at least one insect and a variety of fish. A number of species of amphibian, and several species of reptile have brood care that extends to include feeding the young. One species, the Solomon Island prehensile-tailed skink, not only feeds their live-born babies, but females have been observed ot adopt orphaned young. By contrast, in some birds like malee fowl and kiwis, the parents abandon the yound either shortly before, or immediately after, hatching.
While you’re right about the differences in fin structure, several ray-finned fish are well-equipped for land movement, such as mudskippers and walking catfish.
If it had hair and it wasn’t a mammal, that doesn’t mean it was a reptile, it was a synapsid. They stopped calling them mammal-like reptiles when I was a little kid. Frankly, reptilia is so polyphyletic it isn’t funny. For that matter, while it seems backwards, birds are evolved from LIZARD-hipped dinosaurs. Mind you, the bird-hipped dinosaurs have recently been discovered to have developed feathers, or at least something similar, as well. Search Psittacosaurus and be astounded by tail quills.
Todd…you do know what people call her,right? So this isn’t that melodramatic.
I am guessing that it is more a matter of tone Selkie may have been using, rather than the words she said, as he did acknowledge that she was not wrong for wanting the fact hidden from Amanda. I know that as a kid, I had a bit of the dramatic in me, and probably would have said this phrase in a manner that would have sounded like I was telling government secrets, or in a “If I tell you, I would have to kill you” way.
I could be wrong though.
Yeah, he said “You’re not wrong,” he’s well aware Amanda can and would use it against her, but that “must never know” bit just SOUNDS like it was said in her best Mad Scientist/supervillain Selkie sort of mode. “We don’t tell Amanda” is totally not melodramatic, “We can’t tell Amanda this” probably isn’t but could be delivered in a really dramatic way, “Amanda must never know of this” is the sort of phrasing you use when you need to hide a body.
hm. I wonder what all the dresses and cutesy cr*p was for then… she’s clearly too small to wear it yet.
Dave said that it was just overexcitement on Sai Fen’s part. She got them earlier than they’re useful.
ah, thanks!
Hahaha! I totally get a Ponyo vibe from this. ❤️
It will be interesting to see how her body morphs as she grows. We know she’ll develop legs and lose the tail but I’d like to think it wont be like a tadpole does it. Given that she swims by beating her tail up & down instead of side to side she could repurpose the same muscles for walking if her tail split down the middle to become legs.
making the “selkie” association even more appropriate
okay i need to say something, there’s something seriously wrong with the commenting system here. I have to rewrite every comment I make before it stops triggering the spam filter. if i elongate a word by adding extra vowels, that gets it. if i use single quotes instead of double, that gets it
Yeah I’ve been noticing, with your comments specifically, that there’s a high amount of “double posts” where one post is visibly seen and one is in the spam folder. I did not, however, realize you were manually re-typing your entries. I thought the system was taking your posts twice for some reason.
I apologize for the trouble, let me check my settings and I’ll see if I can’t get it to stop.
possibly it might have something to do with the URL in his screen name going an off-site webpage?… anyone else that has their name show up as a URL only has it going to a post that’s already on Selkiecomic.com… the spam filter may be taking his screen name as a spammer website and continuously blocking it
No, because my username also links to an offsite web page, and I haven’t been experiencing any such problems. If it’s a spam filter triggering on the content of the username, well, ColdFusion does just happen to be the name of Adobe’s commercial web development platform. The filter might be getting confused by that — though I don’t really see why.
That’s a good idea, let me try adding Coldfusion to the whitelist and we’ll see if that helps the issue.
Thanks guy. Yeah sometimes I notice a double post too, so I guess if I get the spam filter message I should ignore it? But I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work consistently.
Basically how it works is that once a comment goes to the spam filter, I still see it in my email notices as if it were a regular comment. So for your Zora comments made on the strip after this, I saw both of them just as if they’d been posted normally, but outwardly only one is visible.
I’m trying to be quicker on approving them until I can figure out why your comments are being singled out like this.
I appreciate it. If it’s just me, no big deal. I was mainly concerned because I thought it was everyone.
I’d really like to figure it out, it’s a strange problem. Nothing in your username or email or weblink matches my blacklisted keywords. It’s weird.
Actually, true seals (not sea lions) swim using their hind flippers in a side-to-side motion. They don’t use their tails at all.
So, in this universe, examples of what were called the Fiji Mermaid could have been partly developed baby Sarnothi. That thought is one I wish I hadn’t had.
Whenever I read the “Reeeeooohhh” I can’t help but think of Spore
Do they nurse that? Why would they be able to stomach milk if it’s not part of their life cycle.
This critter ain’t terran, that I am fairly sure of. Ain’t part of any order I can think of.
I’ve had a disturbing thought:
Baby Sarnothi strongly resemble fish. Humans eat fish (as do Sarnothi of course, but we expect them to recognise that is not an actual fish).
Part of the secret Sarnothi-human treaty is that fishing is now illegal in Lake Superior. Maybe that’s not just to keep the human population in the dark?
How many baby Sarnothi have humans eaten? O.O