Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Marsupials are Weird: The Science of Over the Edge


Marsupials are weird.

The "aliens" in Over the Edge are marsupial humanoids. Of course, the term "alien" is a relative term.

Marsupials are classified as mammals because they have four chambered hearts, warm blood and give milk. But unlike us placental-types, the two hemispheres of their brains are not unified--there is no corpus callosum which connects the two halves in placental brains. Double minded by design.

Marsupial eggs are more eggy than placental eggs because they retain a tiny egg yolk and a sort of soft egg shell through which the industrious sperm must penetrate.

In as little as 13 days after conception, marsupials give birth to barely there, practically transparent infants (blood red with black eye dot) who have only developed a couple of arms with which to climb. And climb they must from the opening of the birth canal (which incidentally is not the same canal through which the sperm was introduced) to the pouch, or marsupium, where they latch onto a nipple and remain for months.

Marsupium is Latin for "pouch." Funny how that works. Meanwhile, legend has it that the name "kangaroo" means (my paraphrase) "What the heck are you talking about?" The story went that early explorers asked the natives about the strange creatures hopping like frogs with deer heads standing upright like humans and the natives answered something they took to be "kangaroo" which was thought to mean..."What the heck are you talking about?" The story may not be true, but it should be.

Imagine the folks back home who heard about these creatures standing upright, as tall as a man, hopping around like frogs, many of which had two deer heads (a mother with a joey peering out of his marsupium)! People back home probably wondered what was in the drink.

The name, "gangurru," is from the Guugu Yimidhirr language. Captain James Cook and naturalist Sir Joseph Banks first recorded the name "kangooroo" or "kanguru" in 1770 when stopped at what is now, shock of all shocks, Cooktown, for repairs. Male kangaroos are called bucks, boomers, jacks or old men. Females are called does, flyers or jills. Babies are called joeys. A group of kangaroos is called a mob, troop or court. Click here for more about Kangaroos


Placentals have a things called a "placenta" which is the organ that protects the baby from his mother's immune system and links him to his mother through which he receives nourishment and oxygen and transmits his waste so the mother can get rid of it. Marsupials have placentas, the typically non-invasive chorio-vitelline variety. The placenta doesn't develop right away and are in use only two or three days. "Maternal recognition of pregnancy appears unnecessary in marsupials." Huh, yeah, I think that means marsupials don't ever realize they're pregnant, which might be a good thing since they are permanently pregnant.

Female marsupials have two wombs and three vaginas. The one in the middle is the one the joey uses to enter this cold, hard world and the two on either side are the ones the sperm uses to travel to the womb. (You may (or on the other hand, maybe not, be able to imagine how complicated the plumbing for the elimination of urine is given all this tubing.) Female marsupials can do this thing called diapause. The females can hold one baby in suspended animation while his sibling finishes developing in the marsupium. Or they can carry two babies at the same time one in each womb. And the males have forked penises, but when conditions are bad, males don't even bother to produce sperm. Kangaroos eat grass, but don't produce methane like cows do. Instead they transform the gaseous by-product into acetate which they use for energy.

Marsupials have the ability to see red, blue and ultraviolet. Yes, you read correctly, ultraviolet, one color which is invisible to us. But presumably they don't see green since they don't have what we recognize as the physical equipment for that. Exactly what they see, well, at present, nobody knows.

Many marsupials often don't even drink water. However, the yapok, the water opossum, living in Mexico, Central and South America, is the only aquatic marsupial in existence today. It's pouch faces to the rear and has a sphincter muscle which helps keep the water out. A yapok male also has a pouch where he keeps his genitals safe while swimming.

Marsupials can go into a state of torpor, kind of a mini-hibernation, that allows them to survive really chilly nights. Some marsupials go into torpor daily. The mountain pygmy possum can hibernate almost a year.

The above photograph was taken in the 1930's. The animal commonly called the "Tasmainian Tiger" is now believed to be extinct, though there have been rumors of strange "tiger" or cat-like animals lurking around livestock. Photo credit: Tasmainian Tiger

Why marsupials haven't developed more aquatic talents is probably explained by the marsupium which probably isn't as air tight as a developing baby would prefer. But cetaceans, that's whales, dolphins and porpises, are mammals that have many aquatic talents not the least of which is the ability to sleep with only half a brain at a time. See: specifically: "Cetacean sleep: An unusual form of mammalian sleep." Or Google: "unihemispheric sleep."

If marsupials could overcome the leaky pouch problem, then they could probably do the same trick since they are born double-minded anyway.

The marsupial humanoids of Over the Edge don't have ultra-violet eye sight, but they definitely are double-minded and have the strange genital features...er, let's move on to the next topic, shall we?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

An Exo-Anthropological Study
by Zato Quentin Bahrim on Saturday, March 26, 2011 at 3:55pm
Last night I finished a 17 month study of the Srepsirrhine descended sentient prosimian lineage of QWL 1064B-8 commonly referred to by Travel Egg passengers as "Java-4", home of the Akoun Sriwas Island "lemur people."

Precis : Vocal mimicry is the central and unchallenged Axis about which revolve all issues of personal identity and social hierarchy among these velvet furred humanoids, at their current illiterate neolithic level of material culture. Possessing a dual larynx and a hollow saggital crest as an outgrowth of the orbital sinus, their vocal abilities are significantly more complex than any Terran mammal and perhaps only rivaled by our Psittacidae avians. Their predominant tone languages are divided into more than sixty social stratified and even inter-clan and gendered dialects/ sub-languages. Even more profound is their native facility with vocal mimicry and its unique role in their personal and group identity, for from the earliest age immediately on acquisition of basic spoken language every Sriwasan child begins learning vocal impersonation and its enormously complex attendent set of rules and taboos. Impersonation is not a useful term, however, as Sriwasans under strict clan and intra-clan customs do not believe they are impersonating their peers, they and all their peers firmly believe that they have under these conditions not merely 'borrowed' but become the family member or peer that they imitate with perfect fidelity of vocal, psychological and body language-posture. The enormous implications and complications of this trans-cultural phenomenon (as indeed even pre-verbal infants from a mere three weeks of age begin to imitate idiosyncratic parental facial expressions and tongue gestures) are the substance of this study. No Sriwasan is a discrete individual in any sense a Terran human could comprehend, for when they 'borrow the Voice' (or even three voice(s) simultaneously using their dual larynx and extremely sophisticated linguistic neural multi-tasking, which includes registers both below Terran hearing thresholds in the infra-sonic and beyond in the ultra-sound registers) ; they are for all intents and purposes completely filling the role of the 'character' , and they are only in a sense 'acting', to the point where their fundamental cultural assumptions leave no room to even doubt that it is 'B' now speaking and not 'A'. An individual was not observed on any occasion in any attempt to interrupt or 'claim' their own identity during this 'impersonation', though they were free to take on another peer's identity. Personal nomenclatures are unknown, at most they are approximated by clan and kinship titles. The actual 'finger print' of the unique vocal timbre appears to primarily identfiy an "individual" as much as the word 'individual' can even be usefully applied, which is here weakly at best.

Anonymous said...

An Exo-Anthropological Study
by Zato Quentin Bahrim on Saturday, March 26, 2011 at 3:55pm
Last night I finished a 17 month study of the Srepsirrhine descended sentient prosimian lineage of QWL 1064B-8 commonly referred to by Travel Egg passengers as "Java-4", home of the Akoun Sriwas Island "lemur people."

Precis : Vocal mimicry is the central and unchallenged Axis about which revolve all issues of personal identity and social hierarchy among these velvet furred humanoids, at their current illiterate neolithic level of material culture. Possessing a dual larynx and a hollow saggital crest as an outgrowth of the orbital sinus, their vocal abilities are significantly more complex than any Terran mammal and perhaps only rivaled by our Psittacidae avians. Their predominant tone languages are divided into more than sixty social stratified and even inter-clan and gendered dialects/ sub-languages. Even more profound is their native facility with vocal mimicry and its unique role in their personal and group identity, for from the earliest age immediately on acquisition of basic spoken language every Sriwasan child begins learning vocal impersonation and its enormously complex attendent set of rules and taboos. Impersonation is not a useful term, however, as Sriwasans under strict clan and intra-clan customs do not believe they are impersonating their peers, they and all their peers firmly believe that they have under these conditions not merely 'borrowed' but become the family member or peer that they imitate with perfect fidelity of vocal, psychological and body language-posture. The enormous implications and complications of this trans-cultural phenomenon (as indeed even pre-verbal infants from a mere three weeks of age begin to imitate idiosyncratic parental facial expressions and tongue gestures) are the substance of this study. No Sriwasan is a discrete individual in any sense a Terran human could comprehend, for when they 'borrow the Voice' (or even three voice(s) simultaneously using their dual larynx and extremely sophisticated linguistic neural multi-tasking, which includes registers both below Terran hearing thresholds in the infra-sonic and beyond in the ultra-sound registers) ; they are for all intents and purposes completely filling the role of the 'character' , and they are only in a sense 'acting', to the point where their fundamental cultural assumptions leave no room to even doubt that it is 'B' now speaking and not 'A'. An individual was not observed on any occasion in any attempt to interrupt or 'claim' their own identity during this 'impersonation', though they were free to take on another peer's identity.

Anonymous said...

part II

Personal nomenclatures are unknown, at most they are approximated by clan and kinship titles. The actual 'finger print' of the unique vocal timbre appears to primarily identfiy an "individual" as much as the word 'individual' can even be usefully applied, which is here weakly at best. In the following paper, I will attempt to begin a deconstruction of the vast complexities of this mimicry and its central role in the culture of the Sriwasan Srepsirrhines, but this is a most simplistic and early examination focusing on only the most elementary of their linguistic and social-hierarchical language variants, with special emphasis on the rules and taboos regarding 'borrowed speech' among siblings and the additional taboos regarding the assumption of Voice among mated pairs and their single, unmated peers. Some consideration in all these contexts must also be given to those who have undertaken to speak for life with the Voices of those deceased, as well. One particular case will be examined of a lineage of vocal mimicry which appears to be at least forty generations in duration, and the implications this has for Sriwasan mytho-history, oral culture and political leadership. Final speculation will be included regarding what role vocal mimicry may have to do with the apparent lack of organized violence among these humanoids, and the total lack of mention of conflict or warfare in the entirety of their oral tradition of history and story telling. We were also not able to document in a single instance even one case of personal violence among these humanoids in any adult specimen, though the very young juveniles did have a tendency to rambunctious personal violence which tapers off swiftly in direct porportion to the sophistication of their maturation of verbal fluency.
Like · · Share · Delete
Zato Quentin Bahrim I did a 17 month exo-anthropological study in my sleep last night, and wrote a 909 page paper on it. this is all I can now remember, and it is a rough draft at that
March 26 at 4:06pm · Like
Zato Quentin Bahrim in the dream, wrote all... 909 pages... with extensive use of charts, mathematics and diagrams
March 26 at 4:11pm · Like · 1 person
Zato Quentin Bahrim I had to use special hearing aids to understand their speech that was below and above at times human hearing thresholds. I also had to use a computerized translator that provided a heads up display and did continuous field recording
March 26 at 5:06pm · Like · 1 person
Neil Haverstick Were you tired when you woke up?
March 26 at 5:28pm · Like
Zato Quentin Bahrim very
March 26 at 5:29pm · Like
Zato Quentin Bahrim Do travel eggs exist?

From my own research I can tell you that these egg's do exist but I'm not sure if they "travel" very far. I would guess that the travel experienced by the user is closer to a intense drug trip than a trip to Java 2. You...See More
March 26 at 6:01pm · Like