The Pelagans' Struggle

Whalers are daydreamers of the large-prey-specialist ecotype which have adapted to hunt large prey animals in deeper, open oceans. Comprising several distinct cultural groups including warmongers, they are descendents of early pastoralists.

The ancestors of whalers split off from the pastoralists when the climate was less cold. The ice age had begun, but there were only smaller ice caps and so the seas were deeper than they are today. Cold and rich in prey, the icebox seaway between Serinarcta and Serinaustra was a turbulent waterway exploding in plankton, which in turn supported abundant filter-feeding prey animals including sea mittens and other dolfinches. Hunting wild game was a more exciting lifestyle than herding their barely-conscious dough-balls and offered greater freedom. As these daydreamers moved away from the thickly-vegetated coastal shelf of Serinarcta that they had lived along for countless generations and into the open seaway, their bodies were slowly shaped to better survive there. They grew larger and their already robust jaws stronger, as they were now subduing much larger and wilder prey than the domesticated porplets, as well as dismembering such animals to feed on them with their mouths alone.

Whalers are pack-hunters in a way fishers that hunt bite-sized prey alone or in small bands, and pastoralists which live in small family groups, are not. Historically the size of much of their prey, as well as the complex social groups they lived in for protection, required big and closely coordinated units to ambush, separate from the herd, and to kill. But as a single animal could feed such a group for at least a week, hunts were not necessary on a daily basis and so the whalers had much more free time to devote to leisure activity such as creative pursuits, socialization and philosophy than their pastoralist ancestors.

In the last ten thousand years however, the ice age has come to a head, and Serina turned nearly to a slushball earth. Much of the land is now uninhabitable and locked in ice, with nearly all land animals restricted to the semi-thawed southern half of Serinarcta and islands along the equator. And with so much water frozen along the poles, the sea level has rapidly dropped to such a level that vegetation now reaches the seafloor over the majority of it. This has favored both pastoralists and fishers greatly, as the coastal shelf of vegetated waters that used to restrict them has now expanded around Serinarcta and over the icebox seaway nearly to the southern ice. Pastoralists herd their livestock through these underwater meadows and fishers, with smaller bodies and lightweight jaws, are well-adapted to chase fish in the ‘rivers’ of flowing water that crisscross the vegetation and to dive after them when they retreat to cover.

Whalers however rely on large filter-feeding prey species, but as tangled plant life chokes out open water, the plankton and small bait fish that once had to rely on sheer numbers to survive in open water finds shelter to hide from these lower-level predators. Too big and ungainly to navigate the shallows to follow their food as fishers do, the big filter-feeders now struggle to find enough to support themselves and populations have declined. For the whalers this has meant that food is now suddenly much harder to find, and on top of it the once seemingly limitless territory available in which to search for it has decreased markedly. Slower and bulkier than fishers and without a reliably slow and helpless supply of meat like the pastoralist, whalers are now poorly-adapted to live in the habitat type that is now most common over the ocean. Restricted by climate change to ever-smaller patches of open ocean water far from any of the continents, whalers struggle in a changing world. But whalers, unlike their dwindling prey, are sapient species. This means they have a wider behavioral plasticity to adjust to changing conditions, even if they cannot quickly change their physical capabilities. Just prior to the start of the ocean age, when large filter-feeders began dying out in vegetated seas, yet there had been insufficient time for most herbivores to reach very large size and so limit the vegetation’s spread more substantially, whalers came into more frequent conflict, and a once super-social race was forced to compete for increasingly limited resources.

Over the last 10,000 years, whalers have lost much of their wide cultural diversity through prolonged warring over territory and food supply that has left just a few primary surviving guilds. The most successful today are known as the pelagans, a well-organized culture that abides by a political system based on sharing all food resources acquired by any one individual or group with others. Pelagans’ most basic social group, as with all daydreamers, is a community of several families or friends known as a clan, who cooperate to obtain and distribute food with one another. Unlike others, however, each pelagan clan is expected to distribute food with any neighboring clan that may have less success during a given cycle based on the tides over the Serinan month. This encourages unity and close cooperation over a broader scale than fishers or pastoralists have, and a social attitude of sharing and reciprocation. In this way, the pelagans live relatively peacefully despite their uncertain circumstances and most importantly manage to avoid severe infighting that was the downfall of several other cultural groups. But with food resources limited, the pelagans are forced to control their own population growth closely. And unfortunately, their day to day peace comes at a cost.

Pelagans’ population already exists at the maximum that is possible given the availability of food. This means that further growth would be unsustainable, and if unchecked would result in starvation of many. Children in this society are thus only allowed to grow up when an older community member has died - and if born otherwise are most often otherwise euthanized at birth in a somber ritual. There is no joy in this process, which is necessary for the survival of their kind under restrictive circumstances, but it is widely accepted as a cultural norm. Yet there are other methods used to reduce population growth too. Obligate homosexuality is very common in pelagans, and roughly equals heterosexual couplings. Same-sex pair bonding and sexual behavior occurs in all daydreamers (and all sapient species), and certainly reduces unplanned pregnancies, and so makes sense in their context. Yet because pelagans kill those young that they do immediately after birth there can be no selective pressure towards or against either sexual orientation, so this is likely a cultural adaptation, with pelegans normalizing and encouraging same-sex preferences from a very young age, and discouraging “fertile unions” except when necessary for increasing the population. A significant percentage of pelagans, unusually for most daydreamers, may abstain from sex entirely and lack any biological drive to procreate at all. Considered to have unmatched clarity of mind and the purest visions, they are known in their people as clearwaters and are likely to be sages or shamans, whose perspectives others seek out.

Population stability is complicated by pelagans, being daydreamers, having long lifespans that greatly exceed their reproductive years. Daydreamers can live to 130-140 years of age, but only mature in their late twenties, while they often lose fertility by the age of seventy and from then on provide a supportive role to their children, grandchildren and other descendants. Older daydreamers that no longer bear children are often considered the most valuable members of a community for their knowledge. But for the pelagans, who’s populations exist at a precarious balance, it means that entire clans can die out as all of their members surpass reproductive age before being allowed to have children. Pelagan society forbids murder of any more than three days of age, yet it is common for older community members of advanced age to voluntarily leave the clan after imparting all they know to their relatives, and so effectively commit suicide in order to allow for the birth of a new generation. Historically known as wanderers, they didn’t necessarily die if they could figure out another source of food, though many would have no desire to try and would simply swim the seas alone until they starved, treating it as a spiritual test and retreating into their dreams in a meditative state. Some eventually may have found and integrated into pastoralist society, though as the modern pastoralists are very isolationist, this would now be unusual. Bands of mixed ecotypes have also been known to exist; oddball outcasts or social rebels that can come from any background, they have been known to include voluntarily-exiled old pelegans as well as adolescent fishers and pastoralists which effectively ran away from home. Bonds forged through similar circumstances - effective homelessness - produce a found-family effect, and such groups eke out a living using each of their respective skill sets on the peripheries of the primary cultures. They often develop a reputation as pirates, as the easiest way to find food for such a widely varied assortment of beak-shapes is to rustle a meal from the pastoralists, or anyone else they find.