An Unexpected Bestiary: The Fifth Parchment
It's some years since I last shared an entry in the Unexpected Bestiary series, but here we are at long last with seven more strange but real creatures, with information about them and ideas for how you could use them in writing, RPGs, and any other storytelling or game design you might be doing. If you find this piece interesting and inspiring or have any alternative ideas and comments, please do comment and let me know, and hopefully there'll be less of a gap until I get to writing part six!
You can also read other parts in this series: parchments one (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=5536.0), two (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=5560.0), three (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=5854.0), and four (https://exilian.co.uk/article.php?id=140150), and the Pangolin special (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=5897.0). And with that, let's meet the first of our new arrivals, the worryingly named... Hellbender(https://i.imgur.com/yDuvzlr.jpeg)
Photo by Evan Grimes: via Wikimedia commons.
A large reason for including the hellbender in an issue of the Unexpected Bestiary is simply the name, summoning up an image of a beast prepared to crawl its way through the mud from the underworld itself to eke out an existence on the surface of our world, staying in the damp where they can least imagine the hellfire their ancestors once knew. They are not short of other names, either, including the endearingly icky "snot otters", the bizarre "lasagna lizards", and other hellish names like devil-dog and mud-devil. Their scientific genus name, Cryptobranchus, means "the hidden gill".
The creature itself is rather less frightening than one might be led to imagine from the nomenclature: they're large salamanders from the eastern United States, growing up to 70cm in length and living largely in creeks in Appalachia. Their blotchy red-brown colour might have given rise to the association with devilry: their lifestyle of hiding around rocks and eating small fish and crayfish is probably rather less hell-fuelled.
Another interesting feature is that – again, despite their name – the hellbender is a good indication for water purity. After adults undergo their final metamorphosis, they have rather limited gill function and need fast-moving, oxygenated, clean water in order to be able to obtain enough oxygen to be healthy. They live in a mostly solitary way and defend particularly good spots for their lifestyle, making exceptions for mating where a female will visit a male's patch, lay some eggs which he will fertilise externally, and then leave: the males defend and raise the eggs and hatchlings for seven or eight months.
The combination of the name and habitat suggests some interesting possibilities for using the hellbender in fictional contexts. One could imagine these outcasts and refugees of hell actually being good indicators for e.g. holy water, being desperate to bathe in the purest substances possible to avoid the sight of their erstwhile fiendish predators. They'd make interesting pets and companions for tieflings for much the same reason. If given a bit more sapience and scaled up a bit, they might be more cognisant of the whole situation, living an almost monastic live in their solitary fresh-water hermitages and contemplating how the world might have been otherwise.Ant-lion(https://i.imgur.com/PE68L33.jpeg)
Antlion photo by Scott Robinson. Via Wikimedia commons.
The ant-lion, as we mostly know them, are actually the young or larval forms of the creature – like many invertebrates, the adult is actually quite short-lived, and reminiscent of a lacewing. Most of an ant-lion's life – sometimes several years, before about a month of adulthood – is spent in larval form, and most of that time is spent hiding, usually underground.
The classic ant-lion strategy is to dig a shallow pit, usually in very loose soil or sand and in a dry location, and sit just under the surface: when prey such as a hapless ant wanders above the pit, the creature pounces, using its huge jaws to grab the insect and drag it under the sand to eat it. They rapidly inject their prey with both venom and digestive enzymes, sealing its fate and causing it to start being digested before it even enters the ant-lion's body. The biggest difficulty for the ant-lion is not knowing how long it will have to wait, and they are certainly adapted to long periods without food, to the point where ant-lion larvae literally lack the facilities to poop: nothing is left unstored.
The typical thing to do with an ant-lion in fiction would just be to scale it up to make it a threat to characters. Whilst not mobile like the sand-worms of Arrakis, the similar principle of having areas of a sandy desert where huge beasts, torpid for years until something disturbs them, lurk and wait to kill below the surface would be an excellent monster for that kind of environment. You could also use the original creature in other ways, though: given their sandy hiding-holes, ant-lions are difficult and perhaps delicate to find, so if there was some need for them they could represent a particular challenge for characters whose knowledge of the land needs testing.Cormorant(https://i.imgur.com/qBDMXgi.jpeg)
Cormorant on a branch: author's own photo.
The name cormorant comes from the Latin corvus marinus, literally the crow of the sea: cormorants are medium sized fish-eating birds common across Eurasia. They're brilliantly adapted divers, often seen perched in trees above the water or standing on the edge with their wings outstretched to dry off. They usually try to grab fish from underwater and swallow them whole.
Whilst they're not birds many modern city-dwellers think about a great deal, cormorants are still common and do have a long association with humans. Their fishing prowess has been utilised across Eurasia for both sport and hunting: they can be trained to wear a neck ring that stops them fully swallowing larger fish, causing them to then return the fish to their trainer. These days, the practice is particularly associated with eastern Asia where cormorant fishing is still done for food, but sport-fishing with cormorants was described in the west in the early seventeenth century by the traveller George Sandys.
There's no shortage of cormorant folklore and associations from around the world. They appear as far back as Homer – Hermes is likened to one in the Odyssey, and scholars have suggested that their presence in the cypress trees of Circe's island might give them an association with death. In early modern England, they were symbols of brooding, voracious greed, perhaps due to the way they tend to very visibly swallow fish whole and perhaps due to their black-clad perches looking down on the world – Milton has the devil sit like a cormorant on the Tree of Life. Even more atmospherically, Francis Meres wrote that "As great fishes devoure the small: so couetous cormorants eate vp the poore" and Shakespeare in Love's Labours Lost speaks of the "cormorant devouring time". There are more positive connotations available too, though – some have likened the cormorant's outstretched wing-drying pose (which you can see here (https://imgur.com/5GCfaGn)) to a Christian cross and associated the cormorant with self-sacrifice.
As potential inclusions in fiction, they're fascinating and have no shortage of potential. There are really two angles on this: the physical cormorant, engaged in real life, and the cormorant as metaphor. If you go down the former route, cormorant fishing is a lively inclusion for any imagined world, and a real part of cultures both past and present. As companion to a more fishing village based ranger character, or a core part of life for local folk taking their boats out onto the deep river, the cormorant could add a very distinctive flavour to a world. Cormorants are often somewhat colonial, too, so e.g. "turn at the tree where the cormorants sit" might be a valid landmark in any more water-bound world.
Then there's the metaphorical cormorant: the cross-bound symbol of sacrifice, or the mysterious watcher of greed and death. The open-winged cormorant does make an excellent heraldic symbol, and the association with fishing might help link to ideas of the water and the sea, but also of recruiting and building connections (as with the Christian disciples' concept of "fishers of men"). On the darker side, the idea of the cormorant as the symbol of death and the all-consuming makes a really interesting from difference to giving that role to, say, the raven or the wolf. I love the idea of the time-eating cormorant – not chasing and snapping at it, like one might imagine a wolf doing, just waiting and watching, perched above the very cosmos on a tree both alive and dead, for the moment at the end of everything when it can gulp the very fabric of existence into its belly and fly up into the cypress trees from which none return.Mexican Mole Lizard(https://i.imgur.com/Datp2q7.jpeg)
Photo by caudatejake, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Mexican Mole lizard is a long pink reptile with a rather dim looking face and two strong little front legs, growing up to 24 centimetres long. It burrows through sandy soil, largely staying underground, and like many other lizards can drop parts of its tail when threatened. There's something interesting and odd about creatures that have some of the features we expect but not others: there aren't that many creatures with two front limbs but no back legs at all, which gives a uniqueness to the Mole Lizard's appearance. When designing creatures or monsters, thinking through which parts they can shed or might have lost through evolution can be an interesting way to go.
One particularly grim urban legend about the mole lizards is that they attack people who are taking a dump, burrow inside them and shred them from the inside. Whilst this is an extremely specific method of attack for any creature, real or fictional, there's definitely a gross comedic horror to the idea of the animal that sees any brown stuff to burrow through as just another goal.
For using the Mole Lizards in fiction, there are various options. They're probably a bit too weird (and frankly, their faces are too cute) to be a good giant-scaled terror monster, but they could be good "this place is weird" creatures: just seeing one ambling through an underground environment or having someone use them to help dig tunnels or even send underground messages could be interesting possibilities. The toilet attack vector myth could work in a certain sort of comedy horror – it's something you can see being whispered among settlers in Fallout – so that's a possibility, and could be exacerbated if someone had trained or engineered them for greater aggression.(https://i.imgur.com/vWSs2iw.jpeg)
Treeshrew illustration by Joseph Wolf. Public domain.
Pen-tailed TreeshrewThe pen-tailed treeshrew, besides its distinctive quill-pen styled tail, has a very particular claim to fame. Specifically, it is possibly the most alcohol-fuelled creature in all creation. They drink the nectar from Bertam palms, which has one of the highest concentrations of alcohol in a natural food (similar to beer): given the amount they drink, they should be drunk about every three days on average, something that you'd expect to cause significant problems for their survivability.
However, that doesn't seem to happen, and getting hammered doesn't seem to have been selected against for this species. It's possible that the pen-tailed treeshrew has different ways to metabolise and use alcohol that humans don't – but what benefits the treeshrews derive from their lifestyle are entirely unclear.
There are a few interesting narrative options for the treeshrew. I sort of like the idea of them as the guiding mythic animal of – given the quill-pen look and alcohol combination – drunken poets, maybe bringing bardic luck or providing guidance gently swaying their way through unfamiliar landscapes or dreams. You can also of course just further hype up the alcohol tolerance and have the amusement of a small shrew drinking everyone under the table. Their environment is also notably interesting: natural rather than brewed alcohol sources, which you might find if you can follow treeshrews to their party trees, could have their uses for adventurers seeking the stuff for amusement or indeed medicinal purposes.Hoatzin(https://i.imgur.com/EVc4PH6.jpeg)
Opisthocomus hoazin, image by Murray Foubister. via Wikimedia Commons.
The hoatzin is an immediately recognisable bird of South American mangrove forests. Large, showy, and noisy with a rasping saw-like call, they can be seen Nobody is completely sure where it sits taxonomically, and different genetic studies have come up with quite different ideas of where their closest relatives are. They are certainly the sole species occupying their own entire order – the size of differential category that would be equivalent to "rodents", "bats", or "primates".
One of the most interesting things about the hoatzin is that it seems to have managed to genetically re-trigger some features of ancient prehistoric bird species (a process known as atavism) – in particular, wing-claws, something seen on very early birds like archaeopteryx. For a while it was thought that the hoatzin might even be a close surviving relative of these early birds, but now it's known that they're well within modern bird categories and must have manage to re-trigger the genetic pathway towards claw usage. Wing-claws are mostly a feature of the baby hoatzin, allowing them to climb around the tree-tops before they can fly: adults often flap noisily around a nest site to distract predators while the babies clamber away, or even just drop down into the mangrove water, where they can also swim fine and then climb back up the trunk.
The bird's diet gives it a number of other issues – it mostly eats plant leaves, and has an unusually huge pre-stomach area, known as the crop, that helps digest all the plant fibre, as well as a lot of specialised gut bacteria for breaking down tough leaves. Its crop is, however, so large that it reduces space for chest muscles, which are generally quite important to birds on the grounds that they're what powers the wings. Not only that, but having a ton of digesting and decomposing plant matter passing through a lot of specialised gut bacteria all the time produces a number of other by-products – not least methane gas – which the hoatzin also needs to get rid of somehow. It does so by burping, frequently. Its diet makes it smell and taste absolutely foul, to the point where locals might take the eggs but almost never hunt an adult hoatzin except in dire need.
The hoatzin is a good reminder that as well as the animals that are useful to humans, there are always animals that people stay away from or don't use for what might seem to be their obvious purpose: hoatzin wouldn't be hard to hunt, but also wouldn't reward the effort. This deeply strange creature somehow managed to trade away a chunk of its flight capability and regain prehistoric characteristics in exchange for a life of show, noise, foul-smelling leaf digestion and constant burping: all that makes it an iconically visible part of its landscape and soundscape, but in a way that is primarily for scene-setting more than inviting human interaction.
That said, there's a lot that could be done by getting creative with interactions featuring the hoatzin. In general, for fantasy creature design, birds with wing-claws are definitely something that has all sorts of potential. Besides the possibility of using them for attack or defence, there's something weird, and thus interesting, about the idea of a bird climbing with claws, undermining the expectation of it flying. I think there might also be an interesting possibility for thinking about how hoatzin might be useful in fictional, folkloric, or even science-fictional terms: one could imagine trying to persuade someone that your area wasn't worth conquering by feeding them a meal of hoatzin as an example of how good the local food can be, or having someone try to actively collect the methane it burps (useful for lighter-than-air ballooning, though also highly flammable – a tempting target for some Amazonian balloonist gnomes).Zokors (https://i.imgur.com/DnQDHng.jpeg)
Zokor in the Altay mountains. Avustfel, via Wikimedia Commons.
The zokor is a burrowing rodent from mountainous regions of Asia: most species are from China, but some are from Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia. The latter include, amusingly, the false zokor, an animal whose name pulls a double-bluff as it actually taxonomically is a zokor.
They usually live up to half a metre under the surface, but can have 100 metre long tunnel networks, coming up to the surface to feed and then returning to their burrows. That's about twice as deep as a mole's tunnel network, but still only half as deep as a rabbit warren goes. The zokor burrows can occasionally go far deeper, up to nearly two and a half metres, but this is rare.
Because zokors are herbivores and undermine the roots of plants, they've often been seen as an agricultural pest in parts of China, and studies suggested that they decreased the biomass production compared to zokor-free regions. This led to an extermination campaign which did not have the intended consequences: meadows started having a loss of other species knocking on through the ecosystem, because whilst the zokors had been suppressing the quantity of biomass, they were also aerating the soil, changing which plants could grow healthily: their burrows also helped water move into the soil structure, which significantly reduced soil erosion problems. The zokor has generally been reclassified from a pest to an 'ecosystem engineer' – a category that also includes things like beavers, where their physical restructuring of the landscape helps support other parts of the environment.
Zokors appearing in fiction could have a range of functions – one of the primary ones being what friend of the site James Holloway calls the "not in Kansas anymore". If rather than having moles and rabbits, you have zokors digging up the crops, you have immediately taken your reader, player, etc into a space that is not conforming to standard fantasy Europe and its expected biosphere. This opens up some other possibilities: if one made the zokors bigger or the other characters smaller, one could for example even enter a zokor's burrow system. Because of that sense of the zokor being different, this would avoid players having the sort of Redwall-fuelled expectations of "oh we're in a rabbit burrow", allowing for a different sort of tone to be brought into a similar kind of scenario.
There's also, I think, something to be done with the idea of the zokor as an animal that engineers the world around it usefully. One could imagine the Central Asian steppe equivalent of hobbits or gnomes deciding to actively reorient the landscape or tend the steppes using a good understanding of how they support the meadows and high plateau grasslands. Might well-trained zokors even be used to tactically undermine an opponent's crops or even buildings en masse while keeping your own soil properly stable?
And that's everything for part five! Do let me know what you thought, especially if you do find uses for any of these creatures in your creative work (or to tackle obscure pub quiz questions) - and I'll see you all again when I finally write part six...