Greetings, MerFriends. This is Professor Darya Aban from Atlantis University, curator of the Aquatopia Amphigory of Lost Creatures. It’s the Dog Days of Podcasting — the annual challenge where podcasting personalities from land and sea attempt to post an episode a day during the month of August. You landwalkers call our mostly aquatic planet Earth. Your record-keeping is similarly questionable. Therefore I bring you this lecture series, introducing you to some of Aquatopia’s more notable creations.

Today’s species both know how to make an impression. The Featherfox does it with a flourish, while the Glasshart simply waits for the sun to go down.

FEATHERFOX (Vulpes plumosus)

The Featherfox is a small woodland predator whose coat consists of dense overlapping plumage rather than fur. Its russet and cream feathers provide excellent insulation and shed water particularly well, making the species common in wet forests and along marshy coastlines. Otherwise, it hunts, dens, and behaves much like an ordinary fox.

The tail feathers form a broad fan that is usually carried closed behind the animal. When startled, threatened, or courting, the Featherfox raises and spreads the fan in a sudden display. The effect is considerably larger and more dramatic than the fox itself, which appears to be precisely the point. Shed feathers are sometimes found near dens and were once prized for hatmaking, although collecting them from an occupied den remains strongly discouraged.

The Featherfox saves its brightest display for moments when it wants to be noticed. The Glasshart is considerably harder to hide after sunset.

G — GLASSHART (Cervus luminarius)

The Glasshart is a coastal deer distinguished by translucent, faintly bioluminescent antlers. During daylight the antlers resemble cloudy crystal, but after dark they produce a soft blue-green glow that becomes brighter when the animal is startled or calling.

Glassharts graze inland during the day and move into marshes and brackish shallows after dusk. Herd members appear to use changes in the brightness and rhythm of their antlers to signal across open water, although the meaning of individual patterns remains uncertain. Older accounts describe lantern-horned deer appearing along dangerous stretches of coast and credit them with either guiding lost travelers home or leading them into bogs. Both are possible. The Glasshart itself appears largely indifferent to the outcome.

Ignorance drowns. Wisdom swims. Remember to check out the megafeed at  DogDaysOfPodcasting.com to hear everyone participating and visit BathtubMermaid.com  to listen to this episode. Keep swimming and resist. Class Dismissed. 

Greetings, MerFriends. This is Professor Darya Aban from Atlantis University, curator of the Aquatopia Amphigory of Lost Creatures. It’s the Dog Days of Podcasting — the annual challenge where podcasting personalities from land and sea attempt to post an episode a day during the month of August. You landwalkers call our mostly aquatic planet Earth. Your record-keeping is similarly questionable. Therefore I bring you this lecture series, introducing you to some of Aquatopia’s more notable creations.

Tonight’s two coastal species have inspired very different reputations. One has spent centuries being mistaken for a monster, while the other has earned its reputation entirely on merit.

D — Driftneck (Diplodelphinia marina)

The Driftneck is a massive marine herbivore whose long neck accounts for a disproportionate number of sea-serpent sightings. It browses kelp beds in warm coastal waters, often leaving only its head and neck visible above the surface. Adults travel in small family groups and communicate in low calls that carry for miles underwater.

Despite their size, Driftnecks are remarkably graceful swimmers and generally indifferent to boats. Juveniles are more curious and have been known to investigate buoys, docks, and floating debris. Boaters who find a Driftneck stretched across a channel are advised to wait rather than approach. The animal will move eventually, and it was almost certainly there first.

The Driftneck is difficult to overlook. The Eavenspike is considerably easier to miss, at least until something valuable disappears.

E — Eavenspike (Echidnoptera alarus)

The Eavenspike is a small nocturnal monotreme distinguished by folding, quill-lined wings and an unfortunate preference for fish roe. It nests beneath eaves and in coastal cliff crevices, laying a single egg carried in a temporary pouch. At dusk, it hunts insects along the shoreline and raids exposed fish nests.

Eavenspikes are particularly troublesome around sturgeon farms, where ordinary deterrents have proved ineffective. Given a choice among several kinds of roe, they reliably select the most expensive. Researchers have attempted to substitute cheaper varieties, but the Eavenspikes appear perfectly capable of telling the difference and deeply unwilling to compromise.

Ignorance drowns. Wisdom swims. Remember to check out the megafeed at  DogDaysOfPodcasting.com to hear everyone participating and visit BathtubMermaid.com  to listen to this episode. Keep swimming and resist. Class Dismissed. 

Greetings, MerFriends. This is Professor Darya Aban from Atlantis University, curator of the Aquatopia Amphigory of Lost Creatures. It’s the Dog Days of Podcasting — the annual challenge where podcasting personalities from land and sea attempt to post an episode a day during the month of August. You landwalkers call our mostly aquatic planet Earth. Your record-keeping is similarly questionable. Therefore I bring you this lecture series, introducing you to some of Aquatopia’s more notable creations.

This pair makes the same argument for stubbornness from two opposite directions. One needs no water at all. The other needed almost none to begin with. Judge for yourselves which of them made the wiser bargain.

Burrowbrock (Meles obstinatus)

Burrowbrock is a badger that never received the memo about needing an ocean. It digs whether or not there is water to justify the digging — a habit our field researchers find almost mermaid-like, and landwalker researchers find simply confusing. It naps half-submerged when convenient, bone-dry when not, and defends its patch of ground with the seriousness of a border dispute. Coastal villagers tell of a guardian spirit that judges travelers by their manners. We have met Burrowbrock. It is not a guardian spirit. It is cranky, and mistaken for mythology by anyone who has never been properly introduced.

Burrowbrock needs no ocean at all. Our second creature tonight needed almost none to begin with.

Camelocant (Camelus latimeria)

Camelocant answers a question no one asked: what happens when a living fossil drifts into brackish water and meets a camel that wandered too far off course. The hump remains, buoyant and useless for anything but flotation. The legs have gone to thick, lobed fins, better suited to silt than sand. The face keeps the camel’s famous indifference; the tail keeps the coelacanth’s total lack of urgency. It can go weeks without feeding — less patience than simple confidence that food will eventually give up and come to it. Desert traders once claimed the ones that wandered too far into the flats came back changed. They were not wrong. They were describing a merger. The least surprising love story in this bestiary: two creatures built to outlast everyone, finding each other anyway.

Ignorance drowns. Wisdom swims. Remember to check out the megafeed at  DogDaysOfPodcasting.com to hear everyone participating and visit BathtubMermaid.com  to listen to this episode. Keep swimming and resist. Class Dismissed. 

You landwalkers call our mostly aquatic planet Earth. Your record-keeping is similarly questionable. This month, I am introducing you to some of the creatures you seem to have misplaced.

Today, let’s talk about the Aukiris — Aukiris frigidorum. Some centuries ago, a colony of auks looked at the sky, looked at the water, and made a decision the rest of us have been quietly admiring ever since. The wings did not disappear. They simply retired from flying and took up a more practical line of work.

Landwalker ornithologists prefer to call it a very committed penguin. I find this forgivable, if a little insulting on the Aukiris’s behalf — the two are not related, and Aukiris, I promise you, has opinions about the comparison. What were once wings are paddles now, oiled and thickened, with a faint feathered fringe still clinging to the edges, the way an old accent lingers after the rest of the sentence has changed countries. On land, it walks like it’s being made to. It has never once apologized for this.

It hunts small fish in short, businesslike dives — no flourish, no wasted motion, the approach of a creature that has never had time for anyone’s applause. It nests exactly at the waterline, because anywhere else would simply be an inconvenience it declines to accept. Its call, when it bothers, is brief. Aukiris has never been a great conversationalist, and has made peace with that.

Sailors once logged the sightings as penguins, wildly lost, and I understand the impulse — though I’d gently suggest that assuming an animal has lost its way is usually easier than admitting it knew exactly where it was going. Others preferred a curse: a bird punished, caught eternally between sky and sea. Romantic. Also incorrect. Aukiris made its choice generations ago, and has spent every generation since looking rather pleased about it.

Evolution, I’ve found, rarely finishes what it starts. Sometimes it simply stops, mid-sentence, and calls the fragment a whole animal. Aukiris is, by most standards, unfinished. It has never once found that to be anyone’s business but its own.

Ignorance drowns. Wisdom swims. Remember to check out the megafeed at  DogDaysOfPodcasting.com to hear everyone participating and visit BathtubMermaid.com  to listen to this episode. Keep swimming and resist.