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| Re: Really 343...*Sangehili Anatomy* | |
| Posted By: scarab | Date: 11/14/12 9:25 p.m. |
In Response To: Re: Really 343...*Sangehili Anatomy* (The Loot) : Good grief! I always stopped with imagining them having a second mouth past : the mandibles, which would just be for pulling food into that mouth. : That way they could have a way to close their throat and a way to, ya know,
No, and chewing would be difficult or nigh on impossible with those mandibles. I don't think they have the mechanical advantage to apply great pressure and anything cut would drop out of the bottom of the 'mouth'. Though later designs seem to have a floor to that region. I thought that, perhaps, the 'mandibles' were part of a food capture mechanism that was retained for some reason. Elite have hands so they don't need mouth fingers to capture food. Maybe they were retained for display purposes - for threats and subtle emotions. There was a paper a couple of years ago that looked at marsupial forelimbs. They compared the range of marsupial mammal forelimb shapes with the range of placental forelimb shapes. Marsupials are born premature (compared to placental mammals) but their forelimbs are already well developed and they use them to drag themselves into the pouch to reach the nipple. The hypothesis was that this put a developmental constraint on the specializations of marsupial forelimbs because any radical changes could prevent them dragging themselves to the nipple. For example: hooves or wings could be a PITA if you are trying to drag yourself through wet fur. When they looked at the data they found that marsupial mammals did indeed have reduced variety in forelimb shapes. So, by analogy, I wondered if Elites also had a similar constraint. If the reproductive organs were held in the throat then maybe they would be constrained to either laying small eggs or give birth to small and perhaps fairly undeveloped young. If we assume that they don't have nipples then how would they feed such small, undeveloped, young? What if their young were vampires? Blood suckers? They could be born with well developed mouth fingers for attachment, a gut, and very little else. They attach to a host and leech of it until they are more developed. OTOH just because they don't have nipples (is this cannon?) this doesn't mean that they can't produce milk. Pigeons produce crop milk which is a highly nutritious fluid caused by sloughing off cells from the lining of the crop. Or the parents could just regurgitate food for their young and maybe the mouth fingers give a visual signal that encourage this. Those young in a litter with small mouth fingers got less food and so mouth fingers were selected for and so retained. : All the rest was "do not need to know to appreciate them". Ah but it's more fun to speculate. I prefer my aliens to be alien.
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