#baleen

So what kind of critters live in the oceans of the Baleen world? Critters like these!

Tube fish are odd "fish" indeed, having evolved a way to remove up to half their body in an emergency situation or to escape a predator. It's very hard to guess the true age of a tube fish, since many shed their lower halves at at least one point or another. It's a rare gem of a specimen indeed that lives to be long.

They keep most of their organs in the first two segments of their body, with the third and fourth growing back ups as they grow larger.

Tidal Baleens have learned how to raise and farm tube fish, and successfully 'harvest' the lower segments once a year from their costal farms. They make sure the fish are well fed and safe the rest of the year, and as such it's a pretty useful relationship for both.

Unlike on earth, the tri-limb body plan panned out and continued to evolve on the baleen world. Primarily in the ocean.

Spiral Jellies and tripods are all related, where as the spiral fish is related much, much further down the family line. Spiral jellies eat similar to earth jellyfish, where they catch and filter planktons and the like from the water.

Made as part of an ongoing project of mine, called "Pterraforming", featuring an alternate Earth (dubbed "Pterearth") where the K-T extinction event was less severe. Not all that original, I know, but really it's an excuse to work on a group of Pteranodon descendants that survived to become the dominant pterosaurs, and, in the case of the water, the dominant tetrapods; The Archopterans

This is a rework of my Pteroviathans, the largest of the "seawing" pterosaurs ever to exist, and the largest animal ever to live on Pterearth. While (on average) they tend to be shorter than blue whales, they are much heavier, and are built like literal submarines. They fill a similar niche to the blue whale, but are a bit more ornery and able to eat things a blue whale could never dream of. Pteroviathans are part of the "crown" seawings (pterocetaceans), which are the most advanced forms that have evolved. They all share a melon formed from modified salt glands, highly specialized flippers and bones, and a unique respiratory system that allows them to change their buoyancy similar to the chambers within the hull of a sub. They also possess an unusual tissue, derived from skeletal muscle tissue, that essentially acts like fat, but for storing oxygen. This allows them to so saturate their body with oxygen that they can stay submerged for hours!

Another interesting adaptation is the transformation of their pycnofibers that actually mirrors the evolution of teeth. The body pycnofibers are formed into "psuedodenticals", which are convergent and function to the dermal denticles of sharks. In the pterocetaceans, these pycnofibers have actually worked their way into the mouth, forming new "teeth" made of keratin. In "baleen" forms these "teeth" are similar to the flight feathers of birds, whereas in "toothed" forms they mimic both cetacean and shark teeth, depending on the species.

The hearing is especially advanced in pterocetaceans, being extremely hypertropied to the point some species have gone completely blind! Multiple gel-like structures on the jaw and on the forehead (the "melon" mentioned earlier) help both amplify outgoing sound while also helping to focus sound towards the ear, which like whales are internal. The entire jaw is formed into the auditory system, having special sound amplifying properties and having a radar-dish like shape in the back that helps funnel sound. This allows them to hunt for food and watch for predators in a near 360 degree range, even in the dark, while also not needing to put extra resources into reinforcing the eyes for underwater life.

Seawings, as a group, have near total dominion over aquatic tetrapod niches on Pterearth, the only other fully marine animals they share the water with being turtles and snakes. No other group has fully returned to the water. They simply can't. There's no room for them. Seawings were the first animals to return to the sea after the K-T mass extinction event, being able to revert to a more pelagic lifestyle by reactivating genes that laid dormant in the ancestral protoarchopteran. This allowed them to fully return to the sea when mammals were still only becoming semiaquatic on Earth, giving them a head start. This, combined with the young's ability to fly (which allows them to spread far and wide, into bodies of water not otherwise accessible by swimming or walking alone) and the ability to give live birth, meant that they took the waters by storm, and once they were in, they blocked anything else from following the same path. So on Pterearth, the pterosaurs rule the sea completely.

So the only competition they had was from each other.

whale baleen moment! From a minke whale that had been beached ( :( ) and died ( :(((( ) (baleen collected by a marine mammologist, cleaned, and given to me) Very small baleen, only about 10cm or so. baleen can be Metres Long though and that is so weird and cool!

Some fun facts about baleen: 1) made of keratin like human hair and rhino horns 2) grows continuously in fairly solid “sheets” which gain the feathery bristles (shown better right below) by grinding against other sheets of baleen (much like rat teeth, this grinding makes sure the baleen doesn’t get too big for the whale’s mouth!)

3) as the baleen grows and wears down continuously, a piece of baleen will have a temporal arrangement of molecules, in terms of when the whale consumed the molecule (and assimilated it into baleen growth) that means a piece of baleen can be analysed to reveal the whale’s diet and where it has been living (though the assimilation rates of isotopes into the whale needs to be considered here) -- there have been studies into using this to get a better idea of how much pollution a whale has been exposed to so we can keep better track of their health!

ah... remember how I said this was small baleen? Well, the size of baleen can help you figure out how a whale feeds. there are three main types of feeding in baleen whales: lunge, skim, and sediment. Lunge feeding is when the whale rockets forward, opens its mouth, and takes a big gulp of water. Skim feeding is when the whale swims with its mouth open. Sediment/bottom feeding is when the baleen is used to comb thru the sea floor for critters. Long baleen with a high surface area is useful for skim feeding since it means you can have your mouth nice and wide to catch more things... but long baleen wouldn’t be great for digging around in the mud, so sediment feeders have short and robust baleen. And this size difference can be HUGE! for context, here’s my stylishly-censored hand next to a skim feeder’s baleen. The little one next to it is closer to the minke whale baleen in the first and second image (though a bit bigger)... that’s a sediment feeder’s baleen !