Reef

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

I don't remember the details but I recall how the guy had the looks of a rough life written all over him, ragged clothes in contrast to the police officer's pristine uniform - though obscured by motion blur as he was rapidly approaching with hateful intent - and the much finer burial clothes of the deceased. A small, skinny man with black hair, holding onto the bottle that's about to be confiscated like it's something precious to him.

I felt like something wasn't adding up and went to the comments to see if there was additional context that was missing from all this, and there was: The son and the father were Romani, and at least at the time it was still very much a tradition in Swedish Romani culture to bury the dead with little gifts - not necessarily extravagant or expensive, but things that the lost loved one would have liked.

Had to go find the photo, it's indeed Swedish. Taken by Åke Borglund and photo of the year 1958, apparently.

One day, something in space is going to look at humans the same way. You go to a new galaxy and there's freaking humans in there, like they just spontaneously manifest on random planets that have the ability to sustain them. All you need is an atmosphere with enough oxygen, some form of water, and that's pretty much all you need before they seem to just pop out of the ground and start terraforming it.

The mystery of the lake fish has been solved, by the way. It's waterfowl. Much like the birds that eat seeds and spread them around, waterfowl consume roe from the water, and while the number of fertilised fish eggs that pass through the digestive system of a duck or wild goose alive and unharmed may be small, it's not zero. A goose will shit in the lake water, and through comes the roe. It happens just often enough that lakes and ponds become - and remain - populated with fish.

Humans don't pop up on unknown planets and and unreachable galaxies on purpose. They couldn't get in there any more than they could get out of there, they have no choice but to claim the most viable-looking planet they can reach and start terraforming it. But how did they even get there?

Perhaps my greatest disappointment regarding The Legend of Korra was the lack of many new animal hybrids to chew on. I hope The Seven Havens can give us more in that regard. In the meantime, I have to admit that the animal designs we did get from TLoK are absolute bangers. Maybe it’s just because I’m a sucker for ungulates, but the arctic camel has quickly become one of my favourites.

The question arises- why choose a camel as the base for an animal that lives at the South Pole? It’s not generally the kind of animal you’d envision living in a tundra. It’s possible that this is the reason it was chosen, as yet another fantastical part of the Avatar world. But interestingly, the idea of a camel braving cold and snow is a lot more realistic than you might first think.

In the modern day, there are two surviving lineages of camel: the one-humped dromedary camel, which hails from Northern Africa and the Middle East, and the two-humped bactrian camel, found in the deserts of Central Asia. Avatar’s arctic camel is obviously based on the latter. Atlaculture has previously pointed out that certain aspects of the Water Tribe are based on real-world Mongolian cultures; I have to wonder if this is the reason camels were chosen as mounts for the Water Tribe.

Photo by Nurlan Kalchinov

The Central Asian deserts are highly seasonal. Temperatures swing from -20°C (-4°F) in the winter to 30°C (86°F) in the summer. Bactrian camels are thus not just adapted for the searing heat, but also the frigid cold. In the winter, they grow long, shaggy coats, and wild bactrian camels have even been seen eating snow.

If we go back in time, we can even find truly arctic camels in our real world. The record for “furthest north camel” is currently held by the Ellesmere Island camel (binomial name pending). For those of you who are like me and don’t know anything about North America, this is Ellesmere Island:

The fossil of the Ellesmere Island camel is highly fragmentary, so unfortunately we don’t know anything about it except that it was Very Big. This makes sense, as arctic animals tend to get larger than their equatorial counterparts (see: Bergmann’s rule), which may be because larger animals lose less heat. It’s important to note, however, that this animal was not living in today’s arctic climate. It lived about 3.5 million years ago, before the current era of northern glaciation. That’s why, while there are no trees on Ellesmere Island today, there are some in the background of this delightful paleoart by Agustin Diaz:

The Ellesmere Island camel is only one example of the “High Arctic camels” that lived before the ice age. So… why were arctic camels a thing?? The truth is, camels and their closest living relatives- llamas, alpacas, and so on- are just a modern snapshot of an ancient and diverse lineage called camelids. We can see just from camels and llamas an adaptation to many different environments- hot and cold deserts, mountains, and the high arctic. Camelids first evolved in the North American prairie, as small antelope-like creatures. My favourite extinct camelid is Aepycamelus, which convergently evolved with giraffes.

Art by Carlost1205

Since camels first evolved in North America, they had to cross the Bering land bridge- a sunken steppe that once connected Siberia and Alaska- to make it to their modern homes in Asia and Africa. They had to adapt to the arctic to make this crossing, and their relatives left behind in North America are now all extinct. So, if arctic camels really were a fantastical pipe dream… we may not have camels at all. Funny how that works.