The Optilus can be found in Aurora’s deep seas. It is a predatory creature which hunts by attracting prey to its many bioluminescent lures, attached to long tendrils lined with sharp venom laced hooks. It will then be passed to the mouth along the bottom of the creature. The optilus’ body is covered by a gelatinous mass, held in place by a reflective skin like tissue. This odd almost eye like appearance has been noted by both human explorers and by Aurora’s natives. The exact purpose of the mass is unknown, though it may have something to do with preventing sickness or discouraging parasites.
The Ganduins (Cheuinaevia) are a clade of Deinotheres closely related to the Lunbirds. They’re a primarily aquatic clade with every species being reliant on the water to some extent, but this reliance varies from species to species, with some spending their whole lives submerged, while others can go entire days on land, only entering for food or to cross a small stream.
There are today many species of largely terrestrial species, ranging from small burrowers to towering giants.
There are three clades of Cheuinaevids currently extant on Polaris. The basal archeirids, the fully aquatic Deinorostrids, and the usually semi-aquatic nackavids. Of these the Deinorostrids are by far the most successful clade, being found across the planet’s wide oceans. This does not mean that the other clades are unsuccessful, and the nackavids especially are incredibly diverse, especially in the northern hemisphere
Burrowing Pangophin: The Deinorostrids are usually aquatic creatures, entirely bound to the water. Yet in the inland regions of Johan’s Island, the burrowing pangophin can be found in large rivers and lakes. Like all other deinorostrids, these animals are carnivores, feeding on invertebrates such as crustaceans and worms. They feed primarily on the lakebeds, where they unearth buried prey with their wide beaks. During the late winter, they will also use these talents to construct large burrows along riverbanks to rear their young in.
Wander Gander: During the winter months, the Wander Gander can be found everywhere across the northern hemisphere. But when spring breaks, the entire population congregate on just a few islands in the Blast Archipelago. They gather here to breed and rear their chicks. Male wander ganders are incredibly colourful, possessing a vibrant beak and striking blue plumage, females are comparatively drab, being mostly grey.
Towering Shorestrider: By far the largest Nackavid, the towering shorestrider is distinct for its hight and vibrant purple throat and legs. Native to the Wormlan isles, this carnivore hunts similarly to a heron, eating both aquatic and terrestrial prey. They will usually take prey much larger than a herons preferred food items, and the Towering Shorestrider might be more analogous to a flightless azhdarchid pterosaur in this aspect.
Razorbill Gandbird: The archeirids are the most basal members of the cheuinaevia clade. They are most common in the southern hemisphere, as the northern branch of the clade went extinct around 4 million years ago, and the equator is hard to cross especially for these smaller poorer swimmers. The Razorbill gandbird is one of only 3 species found in the northern hemisphere. Of these it is the by far the most northern species, being found in the polar reefs and sunshine islands on Polaris’ north pole.
Dwarf Ganduin: Smallest of all ganduins, this animal is a resident of the Shevell Isles. They are omnivorous, preferring nuts, fruit and bugs. Their eggs are laid during late spring in small depressions in the ground and covered by leaves to hide them. While the towering Shorestrider only lays one egg in a year, the dwarf ganduin can lay up to 8 eggs in a clutch and may have 3 broods each season.
Duckbilled Shorestrider: Entirely endemic to the Blast Archipelago, these Shorestriders prefer freshwater environments. More herbivorous than their towering relatives, the Duckbilled Shorestrider’s diet includes various aquatic vegetation along with the fish and terrestrial prey more common to this clade. The Duckbilled Shorestrider is also unique for its ability to change colours depending on the seasons, being a bright whitish beige during the summers and a much darker grey to black colour in the winter.
Red Ganduin: The Shevell Isles are home to several Yellekho cultures who share a small group of related beliefs and practices. One common story tells the story of a mythical ancestral figure being taught some sort of skill by the red ganduin, usually either how to make fire or how to make an animal sacrifice. The teacher in the story is often considered the ancestor of all red ganduins and is sometimes associated with a lightning or sky god. The red ganduin is a very important animal for the Yellekho living here, and for good reason. It is a predatory and nearly completely terrestrial, really only entering water during floods. Though competent predators, the Red ganduins are most well known for fighting each other during territorial disputes as these animals are fiercely territorial.
Forest Stripeuin: This is one of the only truly herbivorous species of Ganduins. They dwell in and around forested regions of Shevell Isle. Here, they are often accompanied by their smaller cousins, the dwarf Ganduins, who scramble around the larger stripeuins, enjoying the protection they grant them. The stripeuins are browsers and quite messy eaters, as such they not only feed the smaller creatures who couldn’t reach these food items on their own, but they also help the forest grow by letting nuts and fruit fall to the ground where their seeds can start growing.
Shoreline Ganduin: Incredibly abundant, the shoreline or common ganduin can be found as far north as the sunshine reefs and as far south as the stepping stones, though they are always found near the coast avoid straying to far inland. A true generalist, these animals will eat anything from seeds and weeds to fish, crustaceans and carrion. They may even catch small vertebrates such as fish and cynodonts. They mate in colonies on beaches during early summer. Males compete by singing first, but conflicts can escalate to physical brawls where to males stand on their hind legs and try to knock the other over.
The Dicynodog is a large species of beakfox native to the island continent of Meridia and the surrounding islands. While not as large as the other carnivorous dicynodonts found in Meridia (the Beakbear and Fangraff), the Dicynodog is the largest species of beakfox on Polaris. This means that they don't compete much with any of their relatives, but it also puts them in direct competition with the Crown Jackals and korrets.
To avoid this competition, the Dicynodog has become a true generalist. While the crown jackals specialised to forest environments and the korrets to open grasslands, the dicynodog can be found across the continent and is always on the move to find new prey. This doesn't erase all the competition, though, and these animals are highly aggressive towards each other.
Dicynodogs are monogamous animals. They mate when the dawn breaks in early spring and lay clutches of 2-6 eggs. The welps hatch well into spring when most animals have returned and begun reproducing themselves. The young are reliant on their parents for an entire year, though they start joining in hunts during the early fall. This means that, come winter, the pack is composed solely of large and strong animals, providing maximum protection. Once spring arrives, the young disperse, and the parents begin the cycle anew.
Due to the high degree of competition, most Dicynodogs are very aggressive towards the crown jackals, including many Yeljekkho populations. As such, they are often portrayed as monsters and demons in art and stories. This isn't universal, however, as some populations along the southern coast have begun cooperating with them to hunt larger animals.
Found across East Utasha, the Foldear is a fairly large species of Handbat. It’s a woodland animal, preferring colder regions, and is very common throughout the northern taigas. Like all Handbats, the foldear is a carnivore. It’s capable of catching small prey in their long jaws, but hunting larger prey requires a more advanced method. Foldears are proficient climbers and will position themselves on a tree branch directly above their prey. They will then drop down directly on its back, bringing down any cat-raptor or breaking the spine of smaller jackalopes. The predator will then try to puncture arteries in the neck with their sharp thumb claws.
This hunting strategy is mostly deployed during the summer months, when medium-sized prey migrate into the Foldears habitat. During the winter, most prey are either small enough to be caught on foot or too large to be ambushed, and so attempts are only made out of desperation.
Foldears are primarily auditory animals. Their sense of smell is poor, and they're fairly near sighted. Their ears, in contrast, are huge and can pick up the heartbeat of even the smallest animal hidden under meters of snow. But, in the cold taiga, these ears radiate a huge amount of heat. A death sentence for anything as small as the Foldear.
To survive, these creatures will fold their ears in on themselves. This not only reduces the exposed area but also serves as a sort of blanket, trapping heat trying to escape. This has the added benefit of giving them an adorably puppy like appearance.
Hidden in the densely vegetated eastern forest, the Glaring Spring Catcher can be found stalking small prey. Their senses are well developed, as evidenced by their large eyes and ears, though their sense of smell is notably less acute. They use these senses to locate prey, typically some sort of Ratbat, but this agile creature is known to catch anything it can get its grubby little hands on, even including flying bats and small dragons.
The Spring catchers preferred habitat is dense woodland, something they have found in abundance along Utasha’s eastern coast. The canopy here grows dense, and the understory is covered in bramble, giving the spring catcher practically unlimited hiding spots. Yet this only applies for the summer, as when winter arrives, the trees shed their leaves, and the forest weeds die back, leaving any would-be predator horribly exposed.
The spring catcher's solution is quite simple; hibernation.
It is one of only three hibernating handbats currently alive. The others being the grey bush catcher and Morgland craftsman. When summer ends and the day lengthens, the spring catcher starts preparing for the coming hibernation. This can prove futile when late autumn approaches and the mating season begins. Males can spend entire days fighting over females, burning through their fat reserves in the process.
The vast majority of males don't make it through the winters. When their energy storage runs out, they're forced to wake up and hunt for food. Many will die from predation or exposure, but most fall to starvation. This may seem like a grizzly fate, but it offers the youngsters a much better shot at life with drastically lower rates of competition when they leave their mothers to live on their own.
A (slightly outdated) map of Batworld, also called Arellvik in Warnic, showcasing the major continents. The current geological period, the Pruinian, is much colder than the previous hothouse fracturocene. The Pruinian period has lasted for 50 million years and has seen two separate ice ages, with a brief 2 million years long break. The planet today hosts a wide verity of wildlife including the sapient spuffens, who evolved in western Utasha roughly 3 million years ago and is survived by two extant species. The spuffens have since spread across the world and is found on nearly every piece of habitable land.
More info on the continents and global conditions below
Utasha: the northernmost and largest continent on the planet. This is the birthplace of the spuffens and many other species, though the local wildlife now faces the growing threat of the sophonts. Utasha is split into western and eastern halves, separated by the colossal Morgland Mountains. These halves used to be separate continents, and their collision and the subsequent formation of the mountains caused the first Pruinian ice age.
Notable geographical features:
The Wessian highlands, located to the west, bordered the Warnic Sea. These highlands serve as both a border to different people groups as well as housing their own unique cultures. Its highest peak is located at around 1600 meters above sea level.
The Yarnic plateau, a large relatively flat region of the Morgland Mountains. Located in the north western regions of the mountains, it’s a fairly isolated part of land and is very dry. As such, the animals living here are often quite specialised.
The Cuvail Islands, located to the southwest of the mountains. Very hospitable, though several species now face threats of new invasive species.
The Great Lake, the largest lake on the planet. Many of the animals living here are found nowhere else.
The Fingers, two large islands located to Utasha’s East. These islands split from the mainland before the continents collided and, therefore, serve as refuge to animal groups that went extinct during the biotic interchange. Both the fingers and the Great Lake were formed when their plate split from the Morgland plate and started drifting east.
The Wetten Isles: large equatorial islands hosting entirely unique fauna. It is composed of one large island and several smaller ones.
North Juliko: or just ‘Juliko’ is located in the southern hemisphere. The northern half of the continent is covered in forests and jungles, having a monsoon habitat. The southern half is much drier, colder and mountainous. The transitionary landscapes host unique habitats such as the paper mazes and scorched-wood forests.
Notable geographical locations:
The Lakelands, located in the northeast. A complex network of lakes and rivers surrounded by monsoon forests and wetlands. This is the most biodiverse region of the continent.
Austral Juliko: situated on Arellviks South Pole, the continent of Austral Juliko is entirely frozen over and functionally very similar to earths Antarctica. Austral Juliko only drifted so far south some 20 million years ago, this being the cause of the second Pruinian ice age. Austral and North Juliko used to be the same continent, but split shortly before the start of the Fracturocene and have been separated for around 130 million years (this would be closer to 95 million Earth years). The continent housed several unique genera before it froze over, including various ratbats, balloon foxes, molmice and even a lineage of jackalope that rafted over from Ceia (modern west Utasha) during the early Fracturocene. Though many of these animals went extinct during the glaciation event, some managed to survive by spreading to neighbouring islands, such as the smog-fire islands, or to North Juliko and the dragons already had a global distribution thanks to their ability to fly. Today the continent is only inhabited by animals that came here after it froze over, be it by flight or by swimming.
The maned diver is a species of duck dog native to Polaris’ northern hemisphere, where they’re quite abundant, being found in every major waterway. They are near exclusively carnivorous, favouring crustaceans and other hard shelled invertebrates, but will also eat fish, eggs and smaller vertebrates. This diet is reflected in their broad mouths and otter like teeth.
Their characteristic manes are used in display, growing in during spring and being shed when winter approaches. The mane is present in both sexes, but is more defined in the males. The longest recorded mane was over 30 cm, but averages around 13-15 cm in males and closer to 5 cm in females. Male manes are notably more colourful than females, with red being the most attractive.
During the long summer months, the maned diver spends most of their time floating above the water, only submerging to catch food. This is both due to the mane, as submerging underwater can damage it as well as slow the animal down, but also to hunt and to avoid being ambushed. Vertebrate consumption is at its highest during summer, with up to 35% of its diet consisting of tetrapod prey, compared to barely 2% during winter. Predation is also at an all time high, and so it helps to be on lookout. When it spots a predator the maned diver lives up to its name, as it very quickly submerges itself under the water, where it can stay for over 15 minutes.
Though they mate during the summer, pups are born during the winter and fed a diet of invertebrates for its first months of life. Females can give birth to a litter of up to 6 pups, though usually around three, and will care for them until the next winter.
Maned divers are quite curious creatures and possess little to no fear of humans, this has resulted in them becoming very popular across the community (and the loss of several fingers)
The Penguin-foxes were a once highly successful branch of balloon foxes. Today there’s only one surviving species, the Hardy Penguin-Fox native to Batworlds far south. Found on both Julikan continents and the Austral Islands, these small adaptable carnivores will eat anything from fish and bugs to young and flightless bats and dragons. Despite originating in Austral Juliko, all native ballon foxes went extinct when the continent drifted over the South Pole and froze over. Out of the four surviving clades, only the amphibious Penguin-foxes and volant dragons have since resettled the continent.
Incredibly k-selected, they give birth to only a single pup which they raise for up to two entire year. To make this even harder for the parents, young reach adult sizes at around 4 months, only a month after they’re fully weaned. They start catching small prey at about 9 months and can fully catch and kill their own prey at 15 months.
Found throughout west Utasha’s grassland habitats, the plains runner is a very successful species of jackalope. Currently the largest species of shed horn, growing larger in the savannahs compared to less abundant steppe and plains habitats.
Plains runners live in fission-fusion herds. Most have some close relations consisting of parents, offspring and “friends”. They spend most of their time with at least one of these individuals, who themselves typically have their own circle of relationships who in tern have their own. These herds of loose friends and relatives can grow up to over a thousand individuals and splinter into as few as two.
Around 10,000-12,000 years ago the steppe was hit my a terrible drought, turning the central steppe into a desert scrubland. This caused a mass migration of plains runners into the valley lands and surrounding plains and also the death of several spuffen cultures. Though they quickly died out in the mountainous valley lands, they managed to thrive in the plains and still survive there to the modern day.
Near endemic to the eastern forests, the Red Tailed Eaple is a carnivorous feather dancer species, somewhat closely related to the floffers. This has not gone unnoticed by the native Spuffen cultures, who tend to view them as either dangerous creatures luring people into the woods to eat them or as a strange parallel society who live deep in the forest and occasionally wander into settlements to eat children and replace them with their own young.
In reality they’re actually quite timid creatures who prefer to avoid large settlements, though they are still dangerous carnivores who might attack lost Spuffens if they ever get the chance.
Mating occurs during the end of autumn when males will display their strength in a unique and complicated dance, showcasing their flashy tail feathers and crests. Each male has their own unique carefully crafted dance. Young are born in late winter and are exclusively cared for by their mother for their first year of life. Young will then gather in small groups of 2-6 individuals until they reach around three years. These groups are loose and any individual eaple may join several different groups. Young are both smaller and more omnivorous compared to the adults and will therefore avoid competition.
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