#avelevians

[sunstormbudgie]

Here's an infographic I drew a few months ago on the reproductive cycles of Avelevians.

While the exact social structure varies from culture to culture, Avelevians typically have a pseudo-eusocial family structure, living with their siblings in groups of 5-10. Generally, only one member of the sibling group will engage in courtship at a time.

Female Avelevians will lay one large egg at a time. This egg contains a single haploid cell, which splits into 5-10 cells before undergoing external fertilisation from a male. The embryos then develop in the egg together, hatching after about 40 days.

Because of the way the haploid cells split, siblings that come from the same egg will on average share 75% of their DNA with each other, and because they have a ZW sex determination system, they will all be the same biological sex.

Hatchlings are usually raised through the cooperation of their parental sibling groups. It takes about a year for the young to develop from fully aquatic tadpoles to semi-aquatic adolescents. Once their lungs have fully developed, their tails slowly begin to atrophy over a period of about 2 years, but they don't reach sexual maturity until they're about 12-15 years old.

[sunstormbudgie]

Life in the desert isn't easy for Avelevians, but with the help of modern technology, these semi-aquatic aliens have managed to live there anyway.

Avelevians have thin, sensitive skin that is prone to water loss, so desert dwellers will typically wear clothing made of a water-retaining material that covers as much skin as possible, usually with lighter colours to help reflect heat.

While there are many clades on Avelevia that have adapted to living on land, two stand out due to their great size and diversity: the first is the terrapods, a group which includes the sapient Avelevians. The second is the endoostea, also known as "featherspiders", a group including the livestock seen in this image.

The plants of Avelevia are typically yellow or orange, as seen here. Plants on Avelevia are divided into two main groups: The plumaphytes, or "feather plants" and the arthrophytes, or "segmented plants". These plants here belong to a grass-like clade of plumaphytes.

[sunstormbudgie]

This art's a few months old, but still good enough for me to post it here:

A trio of Avelevian aliens sit beside a shining pond. Avelevia is a warm planet with yellow/orange vegetation, and the second life-bearing planet in the world of the Zanqila Chronicles to be discovered by humans.

The Avelevians themselves are a bit weird as far as sophonts go. They're so far the youngest sapient race, having only existed for about 3000 years at the point where the main storyline takes place. They are semi-aquatic, having both lungs and gills, and they communicate by sending electrical signals to each other, which they pick up via special organs in their barbels. This method of communication allows them to convey highly detailed sensory information to each other, and as such they tend to be very detail oriented creatures and have an almost photographic memory… with some exceptions.

Kimmy (the one on the left) has a condition analogous to aphantasia, and as such he has trouble communicating with other Avelevians. Luckily for him, Kimmy feels much more at home on Earth, and has much less difficulty communicating with humans and other aliens. But he still occasionally returns to Avelevia to meet up with his friends there.

Here, Kimmy is seen hanging out with Sakura (centre) and Edgar (right). One thing to note here is that because none of the Avelevians really have pronounceable names in their native "language", they tend to go by human names when interacting with the inhabitants of Earth.