- singular: sela; plural: sela
- Name origin: from "seal"
- Lifespan: 150–200 years
- Average height: 8'–10' (2.5–3 m)
- Average weight: 1100–1700 lbs (500–800 kg)
- Diet: Obligate hypercarnivores
- Dental formula: I 2/1, C 1/1, P 4/4, M 2/2
Sela
rumbling & shining
You're very cold, traveling along a wide river with white foamy rapids in the gray early morning. Far away, across the taiga, you see soft shimmering blue-green hills along the horizon with its weak winter light. As you trudge closer to investigate, shivering, you can feel the grass around you start to shake slightly, and the hills resolve into large, voluptuous bodies. The iridescence becomes spotted with clusters of perfect, glowing circles all fixated on you.
Sela are large, four-eyed, and muscular semi-semi-aquatic mammiles with broad feet and hands that resemble bipedal elephant seals, hence their name. They have four dexterous fingers, two of which serve as opposable thumbs, and their feet have well-developed toes to keep them stable when upright. Unlike elephant seals, which have significant sexual dimorphism, sela are unisex: everyone gets a beautiful proboscis nose. Adapted for cold, dark environments, they have a thick layer of blubber and excellent low-light vision. Little bumps help make their striped skin iridescent. They are capable of generating infrasonic sound too low for humans to hear, but loud enough to make objects vibrate.
Senses
Vision
Sela have two pairs of eyes. Their primary visual system is their forward-facing eyes situated above the proboscis. Tetrachromatic color vision gives them a visual color range between red and ultraviolet. Smaller, elevated upper eyes that are simpler, lower resolution, and more light-sensitive serve as a secondary visual system. These were adapted for light-level monitoring, movement detection, and overhead awareness.
They have a tapetum lucidum at the back of all four of their eyes, which enhances low-light vision and causes their eyes to glow like cats' eyes.
Hearing
Sela have small ear flaps like sea lions, allowing them to hear better in the air than true Earth seals, which lack external ears. Their hearing is also very sensitive to low sounds.
Proboscis and the chemosensory system
The sela proboscis's primary function is to reabsorb moisture from exhaled air. In cold environments, the moisture-trapping cavities help sela conserve water. It also helps them detect airborne scents at great distances because, after all, it is also just a very big nose.
Like the other sophont species on Mutania and snakes, lizards, and some mammals on Earth, sela have a vomeronasal organ (VNO), also known as a Jacobson's organ. It detects close-range chemical signals like pheromones. Sela can use these signals to detect reproductive status, emotional state, or sickness in other sela. Sela can pick up signals from other sophonts, but what the signals mean has to be learned like a language rather an innate biological understanding.
Whiskers
On their faces, they have whiskers around their snouts and above their primary eyes. As bipedal animals, their whiskers are primarily used for social touch and communication.
Speech
Sela have simpler laryngeal structures than other sophonts, so their voices are less varied in volume and texture. They're capable of generating infrasonic sounds, with a total speech frequency between 50 to 1200 Hz, compared to the 85 to 8000 Hz a human can generate (although there's a comfortable overlap: human speech usually stays between 85 and 255 Hz). Their proboscises add a beautiful nasal resonance layer to their speech.
Skin
Sela skin is marked by horizontal brown and cream stripes that vary in color between individuals and populations.
Their skin is covered in small beaded osteoderms across the dorsal part of their body, including the top of their head and backs of their arms and legs, like a Gila monster. The small beads are textured, making them bumpy in ways unique to each individual. The bumps also contain iridophores, which give sela a subtle iridescent sheen that shifts between blue and green, depending on the light and what angle you're looking at them. With their UV-capable sight, sela can see these colors very clearly on each other.
Respiratory system
Sela have great lung capacity, especially compared to animals that spend all of their time on land. Their lungs have collapsible alveoli, limiting gas exchange at greater depths where pressure is higher, which decreases their chances of getting decompression sickness when they come back up for air. Robust airways and good breath-holding ability also help them maintain sustained infrasonic vocalization.
Cardiovascular system
Sela have a slow heartrate, about 45 bpm. Their lower metabolic rate means that their hearts don't need to circulate blood very rapidly, but they have high blood pressure to ensure that their blood vessels stay open all the time.
Sleep
REM sleep, which is required for healthy brain function, memory consolidation, and emotional processing and regulation, comes with muscle atonia. Sela can sleep upright propped up against something or in shallow water, and often do so multiple times a day for short periods, but they must fully lie down to get REM sleep. Once a sela is completely recumbent, they're very vulnerable because it's hard for them to get back up. Many sela sleeping spaces are placed such that sela can roll into deeper water when they wake up and use buoyancy to help them stand back upright before going about the rest of their day.
While sleeping, the already-slow sela heartrate drops even lower, dropping to around 30–35 bpm.
Digestive system
Sela stomachs are split into two halves, left and right. The right side of the stomach is smaller, and the left side of the stomach is much larger, expanding when the stomach is full. Sela of some cultures take advantage of their biological capability to bulk up and then fast for extended periods while living off of their blubber, even months, as long as they don't move around too much.
Musculoskeletal system
With such large bodies, sela need large, dense bones and powerful muscles. When they're walking on land, their plantigrade posture is straight and tall, and they can only crouch or squat for very short durations. Daily swimming is required to give their bodies a break from their own bulk, where water can support some of their weight.
Broad feet with thick pads of connective tissue and fat help distribute their weight evenly and serve as shock absorbers. The pads are also very sensitive to vibrations, including the infrasonic vibrations of other sela.
Reproductive system and life cycle
Sela have a two-year biennial breeding cycle, so at any given breeding season only about half of sela will be reproductively available. Sela may or may not have their breeding cycle synchronized with any given sela partner.
Sela have a unisex biology that relies on reciprocal egg-trading. After a sustained cloacal kiss, both sela will lay a small clutch of 1-3 fertilized eggs about 3 weeks later. After laying, the eggs are mostly kept in the sela's brood pouch for about 100 days before they hatch. Hatchlings hatch with their eyes open and some mobility, but they require high-fat milk created by mammary glands on the sela's chest to grow big and strong.
Hatchlings can start to eat solid foods about six months after hatching, but weaning can naturally take about two years.
They reach sexual maturity at about 20 years of age, but sela take, on average, about 30 years to grow to full size.
