A typical Athyrmatherian, a single "animal" made of four zooids.
Athyrmagaia is a Speculative Biology worldbuilding project by Batterymaster
, that focuses on the extraterrestrial planet Athyrmagaia.
Athyrmagaia is a very Earth-like planet, with seas, continents, and even biomes akin to those of Earth. Even its fauna, at first glance, resemble familiar Earth animals like birds, ungulates, bovines and dinosaurs. But what makes the Athyrmatherians so unique is the fact that they are not single animals: they are a colony of four zooids, developing from four larvae that metamorphose into interdependent zooids that assemble to form a whole.
This work contains examples of the following tropes:
- And I Must Scream: One form of capital punishment in the sapient Astutocentaurinae is the cremation of the head segment but the artificial prolonging of life of the headless body-segments. This too is the fate of elderly Astutocentaurinae where the head segment always naturally dies first, and thus the individual's "self", but the brainless body segments, or "vessels", can continue living for years if they are cared for by their families.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: The dominant clade of fauna, the Athyrmatherians, are formed from four separate animals that are born from four different larvae that metamorphose into the head, thorax, abdomen and rear of a single modular animal. These parts are not connected and can separate if need be.
- Body Horror: All the Athyrmatherians are formed from four zooids, including the herbivorous mock oxen. However, in rare cases, the head segment dies, and the resulting headless calf instead develops into a a gore child, a malformed mutant that is carnivorous and aggressive like its ancestral form.
- Fusion Dance: Larval Athyrmatherians are born separately, but as they mature four of them group up and pupate, emerging as a modular adult. Some species have two separate adult forms regardless of whether they fuse or remain single, and others bypass the modular adult entirely and remain as singular animals.
- It Can Think: The Boreal Oliphant is an intelligent and sophisticated creature somewhat similar and equivalent to earthly elephants and gorillas. True sapient species are eventually finally introduced in the Astutocentaurinae.
- Losing Your Head: The head is a separate animal all its own, and can survive detached from the body. Unfortunately, this leads to a predator clade called the headhunters to attack their prey by detaching the head zooid, and eating it still living, before going for the rest of the body.
- Meat Moss: The tumeofauna is a free-living fungus-like organism descended from cancerous cells from a long-extinct clade wiped out by transmissible tumors.
- The Worm That Walks: Each animal is comprised of four fused components. It's theorized that such cooperative morphology arose from eusocial ancestors that took their specialized interdependence to the next level.
