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Systematics of the Rosharan fauna


Oltux72

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We can try to order the Rosharan native fauna into phyla, like the Earth has vertebrates, molluscs, arthropods and many smaller phyla. This has the added complication that Roshar has alien lifeforms as well. Going through the books, I am pretty confident of four major native phyla

  1. The Fish - Purelake fish, Skyeels. We know very little of their anatomy other than that they basically look like terrestial fish in the narrow sense
  2. The Tentaculous - we have some animals that snatch pray with tentacles
  3. Lurgoids - I am a bit unsure about them, but they have an anatomy that just does not fit elsewhere. No shell, strange appendages, silk, an endoskeleton.
  4. Shells - that fits the great majority: axehounds, greatshells, chulls, ... . The characteristics are segmented appendages, antennae, violet blood, carapaces, but in contrast to terrestial arthropods no compound eyes

There is a group that may not be native: Insects. Flying insects seen around rotting fruit are mentioned. Are those imported fruit flies or native?

And there is the great unlnown: The Singers. At first glance they might be greatly modified shells, who have lost most limbs and their antennae. There is a problem though. Their blood has the wrong color. Are they related to Lurgs instead? Have we ever seen a Lurg bleed? That requires the assumption that somewhere in the ancestry of the Lurgs as a species specifically the carapace was lost.
What do you think? Anything that does not fit besides invasive mammals and chickens?

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The way I see it, there are two major native animal phyla on Roshar:

A. "Vertebrates" - fish and amphibians (lurgs). Because of the presence of Highstorms they probably never fully colonized the land

B. "Crustaceans" - pretty much everything else, including axehounds, chulls and greatshells. Santhids are related:

Quote

Questioner

Is there a relationship between the santhids and the chasmfiends?

Brandon Sanderson

Uhh… Yes.

Questioner

Besides them existing in the same place?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, direct relationship? No, but in the family trees there is, y’know.

Calamity Philadelphia signing (Feb. 20, 2016)

and have tendrils, so I would include the tentaculous group here as well.

As for singers, I would place them in the latter group. Real-life crustaceans might have either haemocyanin or haemoglobin in their hemolymph, so blood color is hardly a deciding factor. Given that the whole ecosystem was designed by Adonalsium rather than left to evolve naturally, we might not see any proper evolutionary links between shelled animals and singers, but the presence of gemhearts might indicate a relationship (I don't think skyeels need gemhearts to bond luckspren, but I can be wrong)

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21 hours ago, KandraAllomancer said:

The way I see it, there are two major native animal phyla on Roshar:

A. "Vertebrates" - fish and amphibians (lurgs). Because of the presence of Highstorms they probably never fully colonized the land

Whart justifies the assumption that either of them has a spine?

21 hours ago, KandraAllomancer said:

B. "Crustaceans" - pretty much everything else, including axehounds, chulls and greatshells. Santhids are related:

and have tendrils, so I would include the tentaculous group here as well.

So has a barnacle. The question is whether they are appendages or true tentacles.

21 hours ago, KandraAllomancer said:

but the presence of gemhearts might indicate a relationship (I don't think skyeels need gemhearts to bond luckspren, but I can be wrong)

How else do they store Stormlight? To be frank we don't know any native lifeform that is sure not to have a gemheart.

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2 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

Whart justifies the assumption that either of them has a spine?

Lack of an exoskeleton combined with flexibility of movement (e.g skyeel catching a rat here or lurgs being able to jump). I'm not an expert on biomechanics, but it seems rather hard to achieve this without a well developed internal skeleton similar to the one found in vertebrates

2 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

So has a barnacle. The question is whether they are appendages or true tentacles.

Fair point

2 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

How else do they store Stormlight? To be frank we don't know any native lifeform that is sure not to have a gemheart.

We don't really know how native lifeforms use Investiture, really. That's pure conjecture for now, but they could theoretically produce it from food, like Lift does

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On 5/10/2021 at 0:43 PM, Oltux72 said:

Whart justifies the assumption that either of them has a spine?

well for starters one of them is a fish.

 

I'm going to say that singers are probably some wierd cross between vertebrate and crustateon.

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