Genus Balaenami

In addition to the obvious baleen of this genus, Balaenami is the genus with the largest animals to ever exist in the history of the planet. Members of this genus have expandable throat pouches lined on the inside with baleen teeth that help sift through any plankton or additional organisms that didn’t make it past the mouth baleen. When fully expanded, these throat poaches can expand in width as wide as the necks are long. Smaller organisms such as krill and even some fish are even adapted to life inside these neck pouches. With some fish being capable of lodging themself within the flesh lining the inside, catching prey that were unfortunate enough to get sucked in by the incredible power of these necks. The krill inside these necks feed abundantly off the clusters of detritus that get sucked in and stuck between the baleen.

Leviathan Hemot (Sea Angel) (Balaenami gaianus)

The leviathan hemot is the largest animal ever to have lived, reaching 30 to 45 m (98 to 148 ft) and weighing between 120 and 350 tonnes. No animal in the history of the planet has approached it in bulk. Weight rises far faster than length since it climbs with the cube of the body. A young animal near 30 m carries about 120 tonnes while a full-grown 45 m adult reaches the 350-tonne ceiling. The heart matches that scale and is the largest of any animal, a thick-walled four-chambered organ that can pass half a tonne in the biggest individuals and beats slow and heavy enough to carry through the surrounding water. Its colour shifts with geography from a light blue to a sleet grey and many carry black and white blotches across the neck and back or pale striping along the broad sweep of the mouth. The body holds the short deep neck of all hemots and the largest throat pouch of any hemot, which drops far below the neck when slack and balloons to a width matching the neck's length when the animal feeds. The pectoral fins are huge and wing-like while the hind fins are reduced almost to nothing, so the animal drives itself forward on its tail and those broad paddles. It feeds on plankton and small nekton strained from huge volumes of water. The catch passes through the mouth baleen and into the pouch where the finer inner baleen sieves whatever the first pass missed. For all its size it's a gentle animal with no aggression to speak of. It moves through the open oceans of the world in fleets and rarely troubles anything it can't swallow whole. What sets it apart from every other filter feeder is the way it makes and hears sound, since the hump and the throat pouch together work as a single acoustic organ. A lattice of collagen runs through the pouch like a drumhead and tightens or slackens under the muscles around it. The animal makes sound through water and flesh and tunes it by squeezing, free of any reliance on held air and unbounded by depth. The returning echoes come back across a pressure-sensitive surface spread over the whole neck, a lateral line grown into an enormous receiving sheet. The leviathan feels the shape of the sea across a body the size of a ship. The same organ carries its calls. The deepest of them are known as the earthsong, a name from seventeenth-century sailors who felt the low booms shudder through their hulls in the fog and took the sound for the groaning of the sea floor itself. The calls differ from one fleet to the next, since every fleet across the world carries its own set and the young must learn that set from their elders over years. Studies of single call types have measured a combinatorial complexity that matches some human languages. The regional traditions and the way they pass between generations are the features the sapience case leans on most. Fleet life reads as more than fixed instinct, since the choices a fleet makes vary with its matriarch and shift with circumstance and draw on events she may have carried in memory for centuries. A leviathan fleet holds a stable matrilineal core of roughly ten to thirty related animals led by its oldest female. The emotional and social depth documented across these groups places the species alongside the arctic tiko at the centre of the debate over personhood in cetophians (see Sapience in Pescanguids for the detailed treatment). The leviathan's calls and conduct founded the Pescanguid Research Initiative. The Initiative's hemot programme has worked since to settle what those calls amount to. Fleets defend their young with a coordinated formation recorded throughout the hemoling era. The adults close into a tight ball around the calves and adolescents and set their bodies above and below and on every side, so the grown animals take the harpoons and the young stay shielded in the centre. When a calf is stillborn or dies soon after birth the mother will often stop feeding and grow sick. Fleetmates have been recorded staying close and tending to her through the period. Some mothers recover in time and others weaken and die. Its scale has marked human record for as long as people have written it down. North Atlantic hemolers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries described enormous shadows beneath their ships and great wing-like fins breaking the surface in the fog. They named the animals the angels of the sea, the source of the sea angel name the species still carries. The Scottish physician Martin Martin set down one of the earliest such records in 1694 and described great sea angels in the foggy waters around the Hebrides and huge wings that rose from the sea though he never saw the bodies beneath. The clearest sign of that reach is Auguste de Fournier's 1827 novel L'Appel des Profondeurs, in which a sailor adrift at sea follows calls he can't tell from the voice of God. The creature behind them is drawn so plainly from the leviathan that no reader has ever mistaken it for anything else. The hemoling era took its share of leviathans, though the species' wide range and steady numbers leave it among the most secure of the hemots today. The leviathan is the longest-lived vertebrate known. A datable hemoling-era harpoon head cut from a living animal fixed that individual's age at no less than 417 years. Growth-layer counts and tissue models put the species' likely ceiling near 500 to 510 years. Breeding runs at the same slow scale. Gestation lasts close to two years and produces a single calf. The calf is nursed by buccolactation for five to six years. The nutrient-dense substance is produced in glands lining the mother's oral cavity and lower jaw and delivered mouth to mouth. The feedings come often in the first years and ease off as the calf begins to take plankton on its own. The weaned young stays within the matriarch's fleet for decades. A female brings a new calf only about once in a decade.

The Leviathan Hemot and a depiction of it filter feeding

Winged Hemot (Balaenami macroptera)

The winged hemot is a baleen hemot of 18 to 24 m (59 to 79 ft) and 35 to 90 tonnes that holds the record for the largest pectoral fins of any hemot. The broad wing-like fins are the longest of any hemot in proportion to the body and carry vibrant patterns in males that the females lack. The body itself is a plain dark tone above that pales below, so the bright fins of a displaying male stand out sharply against it. The patterned fins serve sexual display because through the mating season the males spread and gesture with them to show the patterns to females and to outdo rival males. It feeds as a filter feeder on plankton, krill, and small nekton strained through the baleen and pouch like the rest of its genus. It ranges through the temperate and subtropical Atlantic and gathers in modest fleets that converge on traditional breeding grounds in the mating season where the males display. The North Atlantic leopard thuba is the most aquatic of the thubas and often travels with winged hemot fleets, where it rests on the great wing-fins to save its own energy as the hemots swim. A healthy fleet returning to the North Atlantic may carry up to three thubas across both wing-fins for short stretches and winged hemot calves have been observed playing with them. The arrangement looks more social than a fixed mutualism, though some cetophiologists hold that it shelters the thubas as well since the killer shark that preys on them keeps clear of any animal close to a winged hemot. Demand for the large patterned fins as mounted trophies has driven the species to critical endangerment on top of the old hemoling pressure. It now holds one of the most urgent conservation statuses in the family and most modellers judge recovery unlikely without continued active intervention. It's the shortest-lived of the baleen hemots at around 150 years. Gestation runs close to a year and a half and produces a single calf that the mother nurses by buccolactation for three to four years. A female calves once in four to six years.

The Winged Hemot. A head closeup, fin closeup, and full body

Northeastern Thundersnake (Balaenami lopholochi)

The northeastern thundersnake, known simply as the thundersnake, is the third largest hemot and runs 22 to 28 m (72 to 92 ft) and 55 to 130 tonnes at maturity. It's the only hemot to carry a long neck and that neck earns the second half of its name and the long body shows its full bulk only when the great pouch spreads wide to feed. The thunder in the name comes from the calls and the size together, the deep bellows that roll out of the animal and the mass behind them. The back runs a dark slate that fades to a pale grey along the belly and many carry lighter mottling down the flanks. It feeds as a filter feeder like the rest of its genus, though the mouth baleen and the throat pouch are both large for its size and its gut handles almost anything the pouch draws in, from krill and copepods to small schooling fish and the drift of detritus that comes with them. Its long-range calls are the deepest known among baleen hemots, deep bellows and high clicks that carry across hundreds of kilometres of open water and let fleets stay in contact far past sight. The thundersnake also turns sound on threats as it looses a single broad concussive boom that rolls through the water and disorients a predator or a rival at distance, a thunderclap that rides on top of its ordinary calling and serves only to warn off. For all the noise it makes it's a gentle animal and it gathers in modest matrilineal fleets of half a dozen to a dozen or so. An older female leads the group and the long-range calls hold it together. North Atlantic communities have woven the thundersnake into their traditions for as long as those communities have existed, the bellowing songs reaching shore through fog and storm and it was this same reach that made it an easy mark. Intensive hemoling through the early and middle nineteenth century cut its numbers to critically low levels before protections took hold. It stands today as the most endangered of all hemots. Its recovery is slow and closely watched and any sign of a stable or growing population is treated as a milestone. Most members reach two hundred to two hundred and fifty years. Gestation lasts around eighteen months and produces a single calf. The calf is nursed by buccolactation for four to five years before it weans onto the filter diet. A female calves once in six to eight years.

The Thundersnake. A head closeup and full body

Combtooth Hemot (Balaenami excelsus)

The combtooth hemot is the smallest of the baleen hemots at 7.3 to 8 m (24 to 26 ft) and a slight 4 to 8 tonnes, one of only two members of the genus that stay small while the rest run to giants. It's the most enigmatic hemot of all because it keeps to deep water and surfaces so rarely that fewer than eighty specimens have been documented since the species was first described in 1892. It's pale and all but colourless from a life spent far below the light which is a washed-out look that suits the name of its best-known specimen, Ghost. The comb in its name comes from its baleen that grows far finer and more tightly packed than any other hemot's and works as an ultra-fine sieve for the tiniest deep plankton and the drifting detritus it strains for a living. It's the only baleen hemot to live alone and the only one to spend almost all its life in the deep, two habits that set it far apart from its social surface-going relatives. Those differences drive an unresolved taxonomic debate as some researchers hold that the comb baleen and the solitary deep-water life are enough to place it in a genus of its own called Prospodoidae while others treat the same traits as derived features within Balaenami. The deep-water specimen Ghost sits at the centre of that attention, aged at roughly 300 years at its death in 2017 and now mounted at the Smithsonian. Its confirmed age stands as the oldest of any carbon-dated specimen of the species. Ghost's age and the few other old specimens on record have made the combtooth a focus for the study of ageing itself since its body raises hard questions about cellular repair and immune function that current science is only starting to work through. The species is formally the least known because its deep life leaves even its basic numbers unknown and no one can say with confidence whether it's rare or only unseen. It's among the longest-lived animals known and Ghost's age officially set a floor for the species’ overall lifespan. Breeding fits the solitary life since the only group the combtooth ever forms is a mother and her single calf that she nurses by buccolactation for several years in the deep before it weans and disperses to live alone. Gestation runs close to two years and a female produces that single calf only once in a decade or more.

A head closeup and full body of the Combtooth Hemot

Krakenbane Hemot (Balaenami teuthophonos)

The krakenbane hemot is a deep cold-water baleen hemot of middling size at 16 to 20 m (52 to 66 ft) and 25 to 50 tonnes. It carries the short deep neck and the large expandable pouch common to all hemots, though its head and hump are heavier and blunter than most because of the enlarged acoustic organ packed inside them. The back is a deep slate that pales toward the underside and gives the animal cover in the dark water it occupies. Like the rest of the genus it produces and receives sound through the collagen drumhead in its throat pouch and the pressure-sensitive surface over its neck, which it focuses into a hunting weapon. The weapon is a single tight pulse that cavitates at a distance and collapses a field of microscopic bubbles against the prey hard enough to stun a giant shellsquid through its shell before the krakenbane closes the gap. It has no teeth and engulfs the stunned shellsquid whole into its expandable pouch. The giant shellsquids it hunts are heavily armoured and otherwise contested mainly by the toothed hemots that grapple them at close range, so its ranged stun bypasses the armour those attacks drove. The name comes from the standing of giant shellsquids in folklore as the kraken and marks the krakenbane as the animal that brings them down. It's a mostly solitary animal that ranges the cold deep alone, though loose groups gather over rich hunting grounds. The krakenbane is uncommon across its range and classed as vulnerable as it breeds slowly like all large hemots and depends so closely on the giant shellsquids that any decline in their numbers carries it down as well. Like the rest of its genus, it's long-lived and most animals reach 180 to 220 years. The only lasting bond it forms is between a mother and her single calf, which she nurses by buccolactation for several years in the deep before it leaves to hunt alone. Gestation runs close to two years and a female calves only once in eight to ten years.

Carillon Hemot (Balaenami crepitans)

The carillon hemot is a baleen hemot of 15 to 18 m (49 to 59 ft) and 30 to 70 tonnes that lives in the temperate upwelling zones where dense blooms of small prey form. It carries the short deep neck and large expandable pouch common to the genus and shows a plain dark grey above that pales beneath. Its acoustic organ runs through a wide span of tones in quick succession, which is the source of the common name. The carillon feeds by sound as much as by strain because it aims focused pulses into dense clouds of small prey that the cavitation stuns and packs tight before the animal engulfs the swarm through its baleen. The prey it works this way are krill, copepods, and small schooling fish that gather in thick concentrations. It feeds in coordinated fleets where several animals tighten a single swarm together with their pulses before engulfing it, a cooperative use of sound found in no other hemot. The feeding fleets sit within modest matrilineal groups led by an older female. It's classed as vulnerable as its feeding depends on rich prey blooms and any shift in ocean productivity that thins those blooms cuts straight into its food. It's long-lived like the rest of the genus and most animals reach 200 to 260 years. Gestation runs close to a year and a half and produces a single calf that the mother nurses by buccolactation for four to five years. A female calves once in six to eight years.

Latchtooth (Balaenami claustridens)

The latchtooth hemot is a baleen hemot of 14 to 18 m (46 to 59 ft) and 20 to 45 tonnes and the only member of the genus to carry teeth. The teeth are a recent development and give the latchtooth its name because they latch up through the baleen as a second set behind it. The skull keeps the light wide-gape build of a filter feeder, so the jaw muscles strengthened only enough to grip and shear soft tissue. It filter feeds on plankton and krill for most of its food and uses the teeth to take large soft prey, chiefly the soft-shelled turtles of Insulacoridae that it grips and shears apart. The soft leathery shells are the limit of its reach and the jaw can't break the hard shells of ordinary turtles. Feeding leaves a distinctive byproduct. The latchtooth can't digest the bone, shell, and keratin from the turtles or the chitin and oils from its krill, so its gut binds all of it in an oily secretion the animal regurgitates to float at the surface. The secretion cures at the surface as the turtle collagen and keratin react with the krill oils and pigments. The masses take a warm pinkish colour and range from small drifting nodes to large lumps with the size set by the animal's age, appetite, and recent feeding. The turtle compound in the mass is harvested under the name chelonin, which is refined for medicine and cosmetics with the latchtooth is its only natural source. The floating masses also feed crowds of fish, crabs, marine corvids, and other surface life that pick them apart before they weather away. After the leviathan, it carries remoras more often than any other hemot which ride along its sides or cluster around the body. It ranges the warm temperate seas and lives alone or in small loose fleets. Its populations stay largely healthy, but the species is listed as under watch as it was hunted heavily in the early 1900s onward for the chelonin. It's long-lived like the rest of the genus and most animals reach around 130 to 170 years. The only lasting bond it forms is between a mother and her single calf, which she nurses by buccolactation for three to four years before it weans onto the mixed diet. Gestation runs close to a year and a half and a female calves once in five to seven years.

Oracle (Balaenami vates)

The oracle hemot is a deep-ocean giant of 30 to 38 m (98 to 125 ft) and 90 to 220 tonnes. It carries the short deep neck and large expandable pouch of the genus and holds an acoustic organ in its hump tuned lower than any other hemot's. The organ sends long slow pulses across great distances of open ocean and reads the returning echoes to map the seafloor and to pick out scattered patches of prey far beyond the range of sight. Its eyes work moderately well in young animals but fade as the oracle ages and leans ever more on sound, so the oldest animals see little. It feeds as a filter feeder on the plankton and small nekton it locates this way and ranges across the deep open ocean far from any coast to follow that thin and shifting food. Adolescent males carry a long whip-like tip on the tail where the upper lobe of the fin draws out to a point, which pairs of young males lash slowly against one another as they swim side by side. The tip shortens as a male matures until full-grown males can't be told from females by it. A fleet most often holds around ten animals built around two elder females that travel with the juveniles and calves. The two females are sisters in some fleets and unrelated in others. Fleets of younger animals keep nearer the surface while fleets of older animals stay deeper, so depth across the species tracks age. The name comes from the way it seems to read the unseen deep by sound alone. Its remote deep range keeps it clear of most human pressure, so it stands among the most secure of the hemots. It's long-lived and most animals reach 300 to 350 years. The oracle is the only hemot to carry four buccolactating glands in its mouth where every other hemot has two. It needs the extra pair because a female raises two calves at once. She bears the two a year apart by pausing the second calf's development in the womb, where it rests in a near-stillness while the first grows until she's ready to bear it. The first calf nurses through that year and the four glands feed both once the second is born. She doesn't breed again for several years after rearing a pair.

Dorsal Hemot (Taxi-fish) (Balaenami notopterus)

The dorsal hemot is roughly 20 to 26 m (66 to 85 ft) and 60 to 140 tonnes, shorter than the giants of its genus but built far wider, with a broad heavy body that's its first distinguishing mark. The second is the small sharp curving fin on its back at the base of the neck, heavy with fat and tissue and unlike anything else in the family because hemots have no need of a dorsal fin. Its purpose isn't settled and the obvious guess at sexual display falls flat because males and females carry it at the same size. Most cetophiologists read it as a fat and thermal store, a depot of blubber and well-supplied tissue that the animal draws down through lean migration legs and that bleeds off heat from the hard-working neck and pouch below it. A minority hold it to be a trim organ that shifts the animal's balance for slow wide swimming and a smaller camp still argue it's a faded display structure that kept the form after losing the function. It carries the short deep neck and large expandable pouch of the genus and feeds as a filter feeder on plankton, krill, and small nekton. It travels in fleets of fifteen to forty and makes long seasonal migrations along the coasts. The broad slow body draws a following on these migrations and a fleet on the move is often trailed by congregations of raft turtles, paddlefin dolo fleets, smaller fish, and remoras, with crabs riding the backs of the larger adults and the turtles. The trailing paddlefins have regularly been observed playing and possibly even communicating with the juveniles and adults. Studies done by Fernando Johnston at the PRI in 2019 has recorded that some dorsal hemot fleet members will actively seek out paddlefins, although these recruiters are usually adolescents. That travelling ensemble has earned it the second name of the taxi-fish hemot. The animal stays common across its range and counts among the more secure hemots. It's long-lived and most animals reach 200 to 260 years. Gestation runs close to a year and a half and yields a single calf that the mother nurses by buccolactation for four to five years within the fleet. A female calves once in six to eight years.

Dwarf Hemot (Balaenami minutus)

The dwarf hemot is the smallest of all hemots at 2.5 to 4 m (8 to 13 ft) and a few hundred kilograms, a runt in the genus that holds the largest animals alive. It lives in coastal upwelling zones where small prey is thick and filter feeds on plankton and krill like its giant kin. Heavy predation has shaped almost everything about it because tiko sharks and the larger tikos take it often. Rows of thick bumpy osteoderms armour the neck pouch and run halfway down the back where predators strike most, and bold disruptive patterns break up its outline and throw off an attacker's aim. It travels in large fleets that run to the hundreds for the safety of numbers, and the dense moving mass makes any single animal hard to single out. Its call is a long continuous chittering that's often likened to a creaking door, and it carries louder than the clicks of a dolo. The dwarf hemot is critically endangered from a century of human pressure on top of its natural predators, with coastal pollution and hunting from the early 1900s onward cutting hard into populations already pressed by predation. It was formally recognised as critically endangered in 2003 by the United States, Mexico, and Japan under the Coastal Pescanguid Protection Act, though its coastal range keeps it in the path of the very pressures that threaten it and conservation has proven difficult. It's the shortest-lived of all hemots and most animals reach only 40 to 60 years. Gestation runs close to ten months and yields a single calf that the mother nurses by buccolactation for a year or so within the fleet. A female calves every two to three years.

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