First Night in Kugane – Two Nerds Having an Epic Ramen-Eating Contest
“…Ah’m,” Ferai swallowed, “Gonna ‘ave three more! Oh what do this be…” he paused in devouring his bowl of soup and noodles to pick up one of the dough balls and popped it, steaming, into his mouth. He chewed some and then grinned, “Oh takoyaki!”
“Takowhat now?” Seda’li paused mid-slurp at that word. He looked ridiculous with a mouthful of noodles hanging from his lips but he was honestly too hungry too care. “…Hey,” he grinned after swallowing his food. “Wanna make a bet?”
“What… kind o’ bet?” Ferai looked up from the two pieces of sushi he’d stacked and was halfway into cramming into his mouth, and snorted, “Seda, ye silly git, ye are adorable. Tell me then, what kind o’ bet… also, what kind o’ things t’win an’ lose aye?”
“I bet I can stuff my gob with more ramen that you, yeah?” Seda’li pushed his now empty bowl away and waved the owner back over. “Tell him we wanna try something new every time, yeah? How about shrimp this time? Three bowls each… and we’ll see what happens from there…”
For the love of Halone, don’t you dare suggest giant snake orgies…
But the lore is that they bear eggs with all-female children by nature of Sri Lakshmi’s blessing. Only comparison I can think of is the 1990’s Godzilla (but not really Godzilla, because copyright) movie where the all-female monsters reproduce asexually and are born “pregnant” with a clutch of eggs ready for when they mature.
The way our (and other animals’) anatomy works is that females have a storage of unfertilized eggs at birth that are then regularly released at pubescence, which need to be fertilized by a male. Through some means, either the Ananta can fertilize themselves or that they’re born with embryos that only start maturing after they’re laid and incubated by a greater heat than the body (and for cold-blooded animals, they can’t stay warm). But it’d be genetically chaotic to have a bunch of mini clones of yourself who are all as vulnerable to the exact same stuff as you are and there’d have to be SOME diversity among the Ananta, particularly with height and .
Or SE just uses the age-old MMORPG/DnD excuse of “magic” and it’s Sri Lakshmi who grants some boon that gives them eggs to lay—in which case, I’m vastly overthinking the logic behind snake-centaur women living in a world where shiny rocks can summon godlike beings who realistically can cause an apocalypse, trees that can talk to children, large chickens (and even the fattest among them) that can fly, dudes can get powers from lizard eyeballs, the shiny rocks and/or a Yu-gi-Oh! deck, with a cyberpunk distopian future that’s actually in the past and this one guy born every couple hundred years or so with godlike powers to stop the godlike beings and the other powerful dudes.
SE def uses the “lol magic” explanation for a lot of things, though in the case of FFXIV it’s “lol aether”. Same thing though.
I mean, you can explain everything in the game with “lol aether” since that’s the main building block of, well, everything.
BIOLOGY LESSON THIS SHIT’S MY JAM (disclaimer: I’m not a real biologist I’m just REALLY HYPE ABOUT BIOLOGY OK)
So, okay, there are multiple reptilian species in the real world that are obligate parthenotes, which is to say, their sole method of reproduction is via parthenogenesis, aka they lay fertile eggs without external fertilization. All of these species are all-female, even. And there are species categorized as facultative parthenotes, which means they can reproduce sexually OR asexually, and we’re gonna talk about both.
How’s that work, though, shouldn’t that really be horrible for genetic diversity? Well, buckle up, we’re gonna start with how meiosis works, and I’m gonna try to break it down simple for y’all.
You start with one cell, which has a certain number of chromosomes (it’s different by species, so we won’t dwell on the exact number). Usually, when a cell divides during mitosis, it makes copies of all its chromosomes, and then divides them evenly between the two resulting new cells. During meiosis, though, the cell makes copies of its chromosomes, and then via a process called crossover, it swaps around corresponding bits of DNA, so that the new copies aren’t exactly like the old ones. And then it divides. Two cells, full complement of somewhat new DNA each, right? Well, yes, but that’s not what you need for normal reproduction. That is a diploid cell, since it’s got a complete set of DNA, and you only want haploid cells, which is to say, cells with half the full DNA. Normally you’ll be fusing one haploid cell from the female with another haploid cell from the male to make a complete set of DNA, with a bonus of diversity from both parents. So the cell splits again, into four. Bam! Meiosis done.
-Ish. Nothing is ever that clean in biology. Another thing called a polar body can be created, which is basically a very very small cell that usually just dies and goes away, so that all the inner cell goo can go to one big cell. The process can easily end with one viable egg and three polar bodies that go bye-bye.
Some parthenotes, though, keep those polar bodies, and can re-fuse one back into the viable egg to self-fertilize. All that DNA? Actually did undergo crossover, thus shuffling up dominant and recessive traits, and like any other cellular reproduction it has a slight chance of (admittedly usually unhelpful) mutation. So the end effect actually is children (female) who are not exact clones of their parent (also female). Facultative parthenotes tend to use this route.
But how about those obligate parthenotes? They self-clone, for the most part. “Ah but wait,” you say, “there it is, they don’t have any diversity.” Eh, they’re doing fine, actually. Why’s that, then? Well, they resulted from hybridization with a related species (which has happened at least 13 times, just for whiptails alone, 6 for geckos, 8 times for Caucasian rock lizards, and twice for night lizards – it’s pretty successful!), and since they’re hybrids, they’re starting with much more diversity than the average species. What’s more, a recent study found that they begin meiosis with twice the expected number of chromosomes, and tend to pair genes differently than expected too in order to maintain that diversity. They’re not actually hurting for diversity at all – they’re kicking ass at it, regardless of the lack of sexual reproduction.
And, just to make this even more possible without divine intervention, in the case of whiptails, they still perform female-female courtship – and this actually works, causing increased fecundity in the ‘female’ of the pair (the other takes the ‘male’ role and they pseudocopulate. Lesbian lizards, man, I can’t even make this stuff up).
So, what I’m sayin’ is…you could absolutely have a pile of all-female snake ladies, they could meaningfully romance each other, and they could still maintain genetic diversity. And there’s not one but at least two routes they could self-fertilize and neither would harm the survival of their species, if you assume they start with great enough genetic diversity.
TL;DR: It could be “lol normal biology” without even leaving the realm of real-world examples, because truth is stranger than fiction.
Well, fuck…
That’s more than my high school biology class taught me. So it CAN be done!
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