Andalite speculation: Spooking.

[i-stalk-piccolo.livejournal.com]

It's said they evolved from prey animals. I do remember that.

Which leads me to wonder--Could Andalites spook like horses do? I mean they won't flip out the way a horse does. Andalitse have the brain to assess what they see and realize it's not a threat. But still, they'd have that moment of "gasp OHSH-- oh, it's just a plastic bag in the wind." Especially if only one stalk eye is focused on something and the other has to whirl around to grant depth perception.

Baby Andalites would probably be the ones who would take off running in full flip-out freak mode.

And poor Gafinilan. His eyesight was going bad because of the Soola's disease. Can you imagine if his instincts to spook were triggered worse by his failing vision?* Poor guy.



_{*Horses can sometimes spook if they see something, but just don't see it CLEARLY because they're using their monocular side vision. Same as when you see something in the corner of your eye that can look distorted, like a shadow, so you jerk your head to look. A horse's instinct is to just GTFO. My mom rode and lived around horses a lot when she was young.}


Gaffy probably couldn't see too well in the final stages of his sickness, so just a person walking into the house without identifying themselves could send him scurrying or whipping his tail. O_O Depends on how sick he is and if he can still use his tail by that point. That has to suck so bad for him.


Thoughts?

Comments

[penguinsane.livejournal.com]

I imagine that they're so far removed from their prey ancestors that it's not as severe.

Also, given that they have four eyes and it's reportedly incredibly hard to sneak up on an Andalite unless it's from below, they probably don't startle often unless it's a loud noise. Even then, I can't really see one dashing off ... I'm imagining their reaction to be similar to people. A jerk and if something's flying towards them, probably using the blunt side of their tail first.

[i-stalk-piccolo.livejournal.com]

I didn't say they would. We wouldn't even notice there's a moment of fear, but we might see Ax suddenly focus both stalk eyes on something. Logical mind vs. primitive mind.

Come to think about it, I think baby Andalites are born with a very small or even no tailblade at all, because think of the damage it could do to the mother before/during birth. I see Andalites as giving birth like horses do. Front hooves first, then the head, maybe a pause and then the lower half is born. It wouldn't do if the baby could accidentally cut its own umbilical cord or the inside of its mother. The tailblade could come in immediately after birth, like in days there's a stub and in a week it has a hard stump it can use for minimal self defense. I think the blade wouldn't come all the way in until the child has full control of its tail. Otherwise, again, the baby could hurt itself or somebody else. (Think of a baby elephant's trunk and how they can't control it right away).


...baby Andalites. Now I want to squee imagining one figuring out how to stand up just a few minutes after birth.

[charreed.livejournal.com]

I think a baby Andalite's tailblade would be present, just dull and stumpy like a baby rhino's horn :)

[mattiris.livejournal.com]

Andalites could hatch from eggs for all we know ;)

[sylverlining.livejournal.com]

Dude why is that the cutest mental image ever?

OHHH, IZZA FUZZY LITTLE BABY ANDALITE. HATCHIN' FROM AN EGG. <3

[sylverlining.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I just had a cool thought. :3 Pre-natal thoughtspeak! The mama Andalite and baby would be able to 'talk' before it was born! Nothing... uh, complex, but just a general connectedness.

Ohgod. Sweetest. Concept. Ever.

[fishwithfeet.livejournal.com]

I find the image of an andalite spooking at a plastic bag, or garden hose, or different shade of dirt, INCREDIBLY AMUSING.

For this I will use my doubly relevant icon.

[i-stalk-piccolo.livejournal.com]

LOL

They wouldn't bolt, but it'd be that moment of OMG...oh okay. We wouldn't see it.

Baby Andalites I can see as more prone to taking off to hide behind mommy or daddy, though.

[i-stalk-piccolo.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't call it all out panic. Like I replied earlier, we would just see Ax suddenly focus both stalk eyes on something. At most his pulse would jump for a second. We wouldn't know it's happening because he can logically assess that something darting out of the bushes isn't dangerous.

A horse sees a bag fly by in the wind and goes DANGERDANGERBOLT, an Andalite might go DANGER--oh wait, bag. Never mind.


Regarding Gaffy(oh he'd hate that nickname), it's not clear whether his vision is blurring or tunneling or just going dark. I can rule out going dark because he didn't seem to suffer night blindness. But if his visual field is shrinking and his eyes don't focus as well, his brain could try to fill in the blanks. Even with stalk eyes, he'd have to scan more to get the full picture. So if you pop up out of a blind spot and you look like a blurry colored blob to him, he could fire his tail and whack you unconscious because you spooked him, and his instincts are all he has left.

Granted, if it's Marco and he speaks up, "Hi, Gafinilan. It's Marco." like you SHOULD with a blind person(personal experience, there's a lady in my choir who is completely blind since birth) then Gaffy is less likely to get upset.

And if his vision dissolves to little more than light, dark and color, all the more reason to identify yourself before you come close.



Also btw, when I said "if he can still use his tail" I meant as in if it's not too painful to move it. I don't doubt he'd swing it anyway, but you never know. Elfangor tried to slash the hell out of V3's arm right before he was killed, and he had a fatal injury that had to be agonizing.

[mattiris.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting thought, yeah. We encountered, or at least were told of, a decent number of Andalite species - and wasn't there a line from Ax or Elfangor about how much they marvelled at the diversity of life on Earth, because their world only had a few hundred species? Most of the stuff we came across seemed to be cute and small (eg. djabalas), birds (kafit) or random fuck off huge creatures (eg. the thing from Ellimist Chronicles). There doesn't seem to be any creatures that would give reason for spooking - like snakes. Any animals that were able to pose any serious threat to Andalites seem to be big dangerous animals, which I think would provoke a more immediate reaction. I mean, I freak out when I see something in the corner of my eye that might be a spider; but if a lion or tiger or bear suddenly appeared in my room, it'd be a very different type of freakout. Not so much spooking, as "oh shit, I'm dead". Andalites may have a similar reaction.

One thing I've always wondered about Andalite evolution is how they made the jump from hand-signals to thought-speak. I get that, seeing as they're a species with what appears to be a limited physical alphabet, most of it would be based on images or concepts rather than specific words (and boy do I wish we'd seen more of that in the series - apart from Elfangor giving the Animorphs a mental infodump, it wasn't really used again). Humans evolving to use spoken language makes a lot of sense because vocal communication is a huge part of our cultural and biological development, but thought-speak would be a whole other game. How does that even work on an evolutionary scale - female Andalites preferring mates with more highly developed telepathic abilities doesn't really make a lot of sense. Would the first Andalites to develop thought-speak have just been totally freaked out by the voices in their heads? Would Andalite society have been impacted by everyone being able to hear everyone else's thoughts until they realised they could control it? Honestly I could extrapolate questions like this all day, they're such a fascinating species.

[roachpatrol.livejournal.com]

I thought the implication was that the Ellimist's kids inherited the thought-speak thing, and it somehow spread through the population, either by genetic dominance or just that a sudden batch of telepathic geniuses would have an obvious advantage over a bunch of guys who's vocabulary was apparently a hundred clumsy hand-signs.

[mattiris.livejournal.com]

I dunno - didn't the Ellimist have like five kids, and some of those died? That'd mean the entire Andalite species is descended from the three or four children that he produced, and even for a biologically unfamiliar alien species that doesn't seem like enough diversity.

[roachpatrol.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, it would mean that the entire Andalite race would also be related to every other Andalite that had babies with those kids, or their descendants. Three living kids means at least three other Andalites to reproduce with, assuming monogamy, and then a larger crop of grandchildren, etc etc. A dominant gene can really spread far in a population over the generations... Something like a third of the Earth's human population at the moment can trace their lineage back to Ghengis Khan, and we're doing okay!

[i-stalk-piccolo.livejournal.com]

Maybe somebody threw a bone in the air because they saw a big, black monolith? *brick'd*

[rayerai.livejournal.com]

I have wondered that several times over the years. How does telepathy evolve?

/nerd

[roachpatrol.livejournal.com]

I think that Andalites would probably startle at unknown noises coming from where they couldn't see it. They've got so many eyes, though they mention here and there that they've got to be trained to always keep them alert and pointing in different directions, so it's possibly a childish/civilian/lazy thing to use all four eyes to just look at one or two things at a time. So stuff that they /couldn't/ see would be really scary, especially as they seem to have graduated from a plains animal to a forest one, and that forest was apparently full of giant monsters. Probably the scariest noises would have been heavy crashing footstep noises-- sticks breaking from somewhere else, stuff falling over, things snapping unexpectedly. Humans get most alert at high-pitched noises, because that's what most species on our planet, from birds to prairie dogs to us, use to say 'something's wrong'. Andalites don't communicate vocally, so probably their alarm calls would be some kind of hoof-stomping, and this combined with the crashing of something bad coming through the forest would be a serious signal to be on the alert. Andalites would probably be most sensitized to percussion meaning danger-- maybe this is why they think our music is terrible!


As for horse-like spooking, I think they wouldn't. Horses have no effective defenses against predators besides outrunning them or attempting to trample them before they themselves get killed. Andalites have giant blades on their tails and apparently a decent reach, even the females, and they seem to work cooperatively even very early in their history. I think they would spook more like buffalo or musk ox: get your weapon up and back quickly over to the nearest buddy, kids in the middle of the group. They would run once it became apparent they couldn't fight or bluster, but I think their first startle reflex would be to look big and scary and grab for a friend. An Andalite alone would probably be a lot more jittery, obviously. And the female Andalites, since they're smaller, are probably more prone to run than fight, or to be more intensely insecure about having to fight alone.

[i-stalk-piccolo.livejournal.com]

Unless it's a mom with a baby. I imagine then they'd be a lot more fierce since it's not just their own life at stake.

Like I said above, though, it wouldn't be total freakout mode. You'd just see Ax swing his other stalk eye in the same direction as the first one. Sort of OMGWTF--oh, a bag.

The buffalo idea is a neat one and makes a lot of sense. Maybe the whole vecol thing stems from back in the days when it just wasn't prudent to keep protecting somebody who can't protect himself. Predators go for the sickly and slower members of a herd.




...now I have visions of Marco smacking a kettle drum and watching Ax jump to alert. A prank he wouldn't pull twice, I'm sure! :P

[charreed.livejournal.com]

My first thought at your question was that blind, overbearing OPTIMISM Andalites have probably gets in the way of/ compensates for the "spook" drive that Andalites probably poses. Hell, humans are predators and a sudden loud sound or something out of the corner of our eyes can make us jumpy or spooked.

I remember making a whole fan-fic where the aliens that stole Lauren (name? blanking here) caught some of those ancient prehistoric Andalite predators for their zoo and bred them and one of the the Animorphs aquired it as a morph. I had Ax primordally afraid of the thing, even though they'd died out eons before he was born :)

[charreed.livejournal.com]

Man, after writing this comment, I went upstairs to check and see if I had any of these drawings from my fanfic and I doooo! I should scan them and post them up someday. Then I should redraw the creature to be way more bad ass than I drew it... almost 10 years ago :)

[sylverlining.livejournal.com]

:B I love how Gafinilan is well-known enough in this community for us to call him Gaffy and have people actually know who we're talking about. NOT BAD AT ALL for a minor character who only appeared in one book! xD Man, he and Mertil are some definite ensemble darkhorses here. (...Darkandalites?)

But yeah! This is a really cool thought and I love this possibility. It'd probably be something they'd learn to control as they got older, probably growing out of most of it (or at least learning to get a grip on it) like Aldrea talked about with that patch of insomnia.

Thought that is a seriously fascinating character dimension... and naturally now I want to write something about it too. xD

Especially with Gaffy going blind. ;_; Fuck. I know it's weird, but every time I even think about that it feels like a punch to the sternum. I DO NOT BELIEVE FEELINGS OF THIS MAGNITUDE FOR MINOR FICTIONAL CHARACTERS IS NORMAL. D:

[i-stalk-piccolo.livejournal.com]

I just put up a fic that'll make you BAWWWWWW so bad. I did ;_;

Erek tries to call him Gaf in it, though, and Gaffy gets grumpy as usual. He's only cute when he's ALONE with Mertil. >>;



I gave him a good death :( He deserved it.

[sylverlining.livejournal.com]

I SAAAAAWWW. And will love. I just. Seriously. Can't handle emotional crap like that right now. I KNOW how much that WILL fuck me up, and. Not tonight. ;__;

Thank you. <3

[i-stalk-piccolo.livejournal.com]

I tend to write things that fuck people up XD I have a huge fic going on about an OC of mine and Elfangor, and she FINALLY confesses she loves him right before he gets on the damn GalaxyTree. We readers know...she doesn't...so it's PAINFUL watching her happily bop around making plans until Noorlin drops the bomb on her. ;_; That fic fucks me up too to write because I love Elfangor so hard.