Okay. So. @zod-off this may be a bigger yap than I first intended it to be but-
Hasty late-night essay about baby nautolan headcanons under the cut: (and free nautolan baby doodles at the bottom!)
As we all know, nautolans are semi-aquatic oviparous mammals. The growth of breast tissue seems to suggest that they do have nipples contrarily to the other oviparous mammals we know of.
(I did not define if as genitals they had four-headed penises like echidnae or cloacas with hidden genitalia inside like platypuses but I'm sharing these very specific informations about the only two known oviparous mammals for the perverts (affectionate) who want free headcanons)
Now, in legends canon, nautolans spend two years chilling as tadpoles underwater, before growing limbs to become a fully-fledged humanoid toddler. And even then, they still spend a little more time underwater because their muscles are a little too weak to support them on land properly
BUT I want to draw fucked up freakish amphibian newborns so here's MY take on nautolan babies' development:
Underwater growth vs land growth:
As semi-aquatic creatures, nautolans have the ability to survive both on land and underwater. However, for baby nautolans to develop right, they require a strictly underwater environment from after the egg hatches to the end of their second to third year.
The first reason being that they come out of the egg without any way to breathe on land, and the second being that even out of the tadpole stage, the mortality rate is higher when they are taken out of the water before having developped a higher bone density (second year of development, see below). And if you need a third reason, they develop numerous problems later in life if they do manage to survive: nautolans who grew up on land have a higher risk of articulations hurting and being hard to use as they grow older, a higher risk of developping bone structure and muscle mass issues, a higher chance to develop heart and lungs problems, and without fail, lower sensitivity in their tendrils, and troubles with the underwater motion that they should have learned as newborns. It takes years for a nautolan who grew up on land to get a full reeducation to underwater motion, and very few of them get the sensitivity back in their tendrils.
A nautolan baby is usually forced to develop on land because of slavery. As soon as they're out of the tadpole stage, they are either put in an underwater work camp, or straight on land. Getting a baby out of its underwater environment a few months in its development has a lower mortality rate, but a higher chance of causing issues to the bone structure.
Some parents raising their child on land have tried to develop alternatives to help lessen the risk of their offspring developing life-threatening issues later in life, like always keeping a source of water close by to keep their child in as much as possible, making them drink more water, etc. If it does make a change, it is only a small one, as statistics tend to show that these practices as wishful thinking at best.
Mobility:
The nautolan babies develop mobility faster than human babies.
In their underwater development, they are already able to easily move around a few weeks out of their tadpole stage, and get more and more agile every month. They become casual swimmers by the end of their first year, so the next one can be about developping communication through speech and their tendrils while practicing swimming a bit better.
They develop the bone density necessary to go on land by their second year, after which they learn how to move on land. They are very disgracious at first, but learn how to walk faster than human babies, as they have already developped a little more understanding of their own bodies and agility. It takes them a few months to waddle away like little toddlers, and their growth continues as normal. By age 3-4, a nautolan's mobility on land is indistinguishable from a human's if it has had enough opportunity to develop its land mobility.
Learning to walk on land is considered an important part of growth, as, the later a nautolan infant learns how to be on land, the harder it will be for them to pick it up.
If they were forced on land after the tadpole stage, they will stay weak newborns for six whole months, their body focusing on creating a better bone density to survive the surface, and suddenly go through all the on-land human-like baby developments at record speed, sitting barely a few weeks after learning to raise their head, and being able to stumble around on their feet with ease by their first year, if not earlier. This accelerated growth is the reason for a lot of the problems most of them develop in their articulations, bone structure, or muscle mass.
Tendrils:
In underwater nautolan babies, tendrils grow in the first few months and develop at a steady pace. The speed of that growth can vary, until puberty: after then, the tendrils grow less than one centimeter per year in average.
In land nautolan babies, tendrils struggle to grow until the second year of development. Once they really start to grow, they sometimes do so at a much slower pace than they should, or a much faster one, causing nautolans growing up on land to have shorter or longer tresses in adulthood. Puberty seems to stabilize their growth as well, thankfully, to a similar pace of a little less than a centimeter per year.
One day, one day i'll make a more comprehensive document about all of this. Maybe even illustrate it if I have the time haha
And because conclusions are hard, instead, have doodles of my OC's baby daughter for who he learns how to swim for so she can have a normal development:
And she's not ugly enough yet.
(I. I have more, but I'll post them in a separate post because it's more about her than nautolan babies in general)
But seriously, this was so much fun to write. Thank you so much for asking me about this :)
