Questions tagged [sea-creatures]

For questions involving creatures in seas/oceans. This tag is useful when paired with a broader creature tag such as "biology," "creature-design," or "xenobiology" in order to provide the most specific information possible.

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3 votes
2 answers
183 views

Spacesuit for Obligate Neusters

There is a neustonic sophont that has reached space. They are adapted to survive specifically at the surface of the water: If they are removed from the water then their world's gravity (or their ...
4 votes
3 answers
166 views

Sea serpent evolved into dragon anatomy?

In my story there are scary monstrous sea serpent like creatures of all shapes and sizes. What the people don’t know, is (reverse whale evolution theory) they came to shore and turned into something ...
  • 43
13 votes
5 answers
3k views

Would merfolk gain any real advantage from mounts (and beasts of burden)?

In writing my merfolk centric fantasy novel, I've largely ignored any creatures of burden used within their society. Animals of burden were very important in the growth of human civilization, and the ...
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4 votes
2 answers
1k views

How does the kraken get its bait? [closed]

The kraken is a great sea monster, with many heads, pincers, and tentacles. Anatomically it is similar to a whale in most parts, but with crab-like features particularly in the pincers, as well as a ...
5 votes
2 answers
2k views

What struggles would a ten-foot tall humanoid face in daily life?

In the story I am creating the fantasy race I am creating is roughly 10-20 feet tall from the tip of their ears to the end of their tail in water, and out of water 8-10 foot tall from tip of their ...
2 votes
2 answers
307 views

What type of diet would be needed to sustain the Seadominians and keep them thriving

I created this fantasy race called Seadominians, they are basically merfolk. They are mostly bipedal, have scales covering all over, and live all throughout the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, also the ...
4 votes
2 answers
97 views

Could a photosynthetic plant form a symbosis with fish in an oceanic environement to get nutriets from the sea bed?

On Earth their are thousands of animals with symbiosis with plants such as honey bees and flowers. However for this question I'm focusing on a very specific kind the one that leaf-cutter ants have ...
16 votes
8 answers
5k views

Why would a species that had never been exposed to light react to light?

Why would a species that lived in tunnels deep under the sea, where there was no light, and never had been any light, react to the presence of light from an explorer?
5 votes
3 answers
138 views

Sea Monster Hunting Crew Roster

I'm coming up with a crew of modern-day divers who hunt sea monsters such as the megalodon, and so far, I figure that the crew will require at least the following personnel: Captain (commands the ...
6 votes
2 answers
91 views

Could sponges swim with their inner currents?

Sponges are sessile animals with a unique way of getting nutrients: Instead of a mouth, they have many pores through which water can flow. This water then leaves through a single canal, with suspended ...
3 votes
3 answers
390 views

Would sailing plankton be viable?

I have made an alien world in which it seems like nekton would be unviable due to the slowness of animal life. Therefore these animals would be restricted to plankton (and slow plankton at that) and ...
6 votes
2 answers
154 views

A creature that turns all water near it into slime

I have an idea for a creature, and I want to figure out if it's possible. I'd rather not handwave it with "magic", so, here I am, asking the Stack. The creature is eel-like, and is capable ...
5 votes
2 answers
81 views

Could this nauplius eat?

The nauplius of my world is a large pleustonic bivalve. It is around 3ft long. It floats belly-up on the surface, with an oddly-shaped shell that exposes the front and middle part of its ventral face ...
2 votes
1 answer
127 views

Could a fish lie horizontally with an air-space in its head?

The polyp-fish is a soft-bodied sea-creature about a foot long. It has in its head an organ that forms an inflated air-space filled with gas, which makes the head appear hard and round. The rest of ...
4 votes
3 answers
1k views

Would Anthropomorphic Bugs and Crustaceans Need Armor?

In my book series, many of the sentient races that exist are anthropomorphized versions of real animals. This has been mostly problem-free with vertebrates, but I have a question regarding ...
1 vote
1 answer
178 views

Ecologically Correct Hōsōgyo

The Hōsōgyo is a sea creature that roughly appears to be a humanoid shrimp Their torso is shrimp-like, with a hard carapace on the pereon and a long, narrow abdomen like a tail. Their body is 2.2m ...
4 votes
2 answers
332 views

I need help with aquatic arthropods

How would an arthropod (invertebrate animals with an exoskeleton)replace and or evolve into a fish-like animal (using terrestrial fish as an example)the question is how would they recrate a ocean ...
5 votes
1 answer
135 views

Could these mermaids have side-fins?

The mermaids are a species of ape that are adapted for the sea. One of these adaptations is that the legs are fused into a single finned 'tail', as in sea-lions. However, I'd also like them to have a ...
0 votes
4 answers
132 views

Could plankton create civilisation? [closed]

Could a species of planktonic beings, with sufficient intelligence, creativity, and physical ability to manipulate objects, create a technological civilisation at the same level as humans? While being ...
8 votes
5 answers
822 views

How might barnacles be made into giant sessile sea creatures?

Barnacles are a type of arthropod constituting the subclass Cirripedia in the subphylum Crustacea, and is hence related to crabs and lobsters. Barnacles are exclusively marine, and tend to live in ...
  • 10.2k
0 votes
2 answers
204 views

How could these sirens move on land?

The siren is an amphibious humanoid. They are mostly like humans apart from the limbs: Their arms are large and flipper-like, being used to swim underwater. Their leg is short, and they always have ...
3 votes
0 answers
119 views

What is the function of this limb system? [closed]

The Globadob is a strange fish with a strange anatomy. Most notably is its lower half, which features a structure that is not seen in any other animal This structure is composed of a ring of legs, ...
1 vote
4 answers
334 views

How could these aquatic humans survive and reproduce?

The aquatic humans resemble regular terrestrial humans almost perfectly as adults. This means they have hands, feet, and all of their bodyparts identically to humans (H. sapiens sapiens) As children (...
7 votes
1 answer
111 views

What’s the ideal form of a jellyfish designed for speed?

Jellyfish also called sea jellies or pain-blobs (my favorite name) are unusual animals to say the least. Members of the subphylum Medusozoa, a major part of the phylum Cnidaria, jellyfish have no ...
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2 votes
3 answers
111 views

Maxed out charisma

The Feridians, marine fauna, kings of the ocean and for centuries unmatched with no predators and capable of eating and surviving on any source of food, even plankton. This thing evolved perfectly to ...
  • 1,752
1 vote
2 answers
172 views

Could whale-sized creatures propel themselves through the sea by expelling water like a cephalopod?

It's incredible that 80-120 ton animals like blue whales can even swim, though water physics helps them in that regard. This got me wondering if a squids method of propelling itself through water ...
  • 10.2k
5 votes
1 answer
279 views

Whale-sized electric eel shock?

How does an electric eels shock change if it were the size of a whale? The problem I'm trying to elucidate is how a larger voltage from a much larger creature would change the range, power and ...
  • 10.2k
9 votes
5 answers
1k views

Why would water-serpents have multi-arched bodies?

There are many depictions of sea-serpents and other similar creatures in a strange pose: The head (and often the tail too) is held above the water, with the body being arched in such a way that some ...
4 votes
1 answer
84 views

How could a nautilus work together with a man o' war?

There are two animals in symbiosis One of these animals is a type of nautilus. It is small, at around 10cm long, and has a smaller phragmacone. They have long, strong cirri, which they use to hold on ...
36 votes
24 answers
6k views

Would oceans filled with long-lived, omnivore, intelligent Krakens make sea travel impossible?

Let's say the oceans' apex predator on a planet similar to Earth is a species of Kraken (octopus, just big huge ones) that live 200 years in average (so they have plenty of time to develop their ...
  • 807
2 votes
3 answers
174 views

How and why would the sea-scorpion wound those who hold it?

The sea-scorpion is an average-sized sea creature resembling a terrestrial scorpion, and which has a rather unique feature: Despite an apparent lack of spines, claws, or other obvious methods of ...
1 vote
2 answers
110 views

How would aquatic life adapt to the oceans becoming highly corrosive?

The reason for the corrosion is relatively unimportant beyond that it is "high tech" in origin, in contrast to the society in my setting (It could be a complex mix of industrial pollutants ...
5 votes
3 answers
870 views

Could this idea for an anatomically functional merfolk "sound" plausible?

This anatomic conception of merfolk (mermen and mermaids) is an amalgam of biological particularities found in in sea mammals (dolphins, whales, manatees, sea lions) and sharks. Some are not found on ...
4 votes
2 answers
259 views

How could exist and how be the lifestyle of a living raft biome?

Raft biome consists of a trunk or a group of plants that float in the sea and cant transports little animals like reptiles, birds, bugs or rodents, with this method many species can travel large ...
  • 2,617
2 votes
2 answers
495 views

How could tentacles as described function out of water? [duplicate]

It is a common sight a lot of speculative terrestrial cephalopods and especially octopuses and not just that also is common see fictional works with creatures or characters with strong tentacles that ...
  • 2,617
4 votes
1 answer
251 views

Scaling anthropomorphized 'ship girls'

Currently i'm building a world where conventional warship is largely replaced by Kantai, anthropomorphized human female posessing power of modern warship. They are basicly a human sized girl that is ...
5 votes
2 answers
197 views

Variations on the "Ginsu Shark" Theme--What Would They Eat?

From 108 to 73 million years ago, the shallow seas of North America, Europe and southwestern Asia were the haunt of four species of a genus of shark scientifically named Cretoxyrhina. The chosen ...
  • 14.4k
11 votes
1 answer
279 views

Fastest fish possible

I am trying to design the fastest pelagic fish that is mechanically possible. The fastest real life fish can swim up to 80 mph. What body design would allow a fish to swim significantly faster than 80 ...
  • 1,304
8 votes
4 answers
1k views

What would mer-folk use as lights and soft surfaces

I'm writing a story where one of the main races is orca (killer whale) mer-folk. Being orcas need to breath oxygen from the surface so do they, this said they live in a halfly submerged cave...but it'...
5 votes
1 answer
196 views

How large could an aquatic humanoid get?

Vertebrates on land are limited in size by various factors. However, in the water, they can get much larger. How large could an aquatic humanoid creature (like cthulhu) realistically get, and what ...
  • 1,304
3 votes
2 answers
483 views

Ningens / Humanoid whale-like creatures

Ningens are an old internet legend/creepypasta. Supposedly living in the polar regions of the globe, these creatures are described as having white-skin, a roughly humanoid structure with clear head, ...
  • 101
9 votes
2 answers
425 views

Anatomically Correct Giant Seahorses

This is a submission for the Anatomically Correct Series Giant seahorses are often portrayed in fiction as being ridden by merfolk or other underwater people. I'm wondering if such a creature would ...
4 votes
1 answer
140 views

creature with retractable spikes

ok so i want to make a creature with a retractable spike in its body, (like it just comes out from its flesh) can this be biologically plausible, if yes, please explain and which part of the body is ...
3 votes
1 answer
218 views

How large could sea creatures grow on a terraformed Ganymede?

If we assume a terraformed Ganymede has a global ocean roughly 800km deep, that food is bountiful, and that it has been populated by a variety of life from Earth, how large could these creatures grow ...
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3 votes
2 answers
383 views

How do donut fish eat?

Imagine a particular species of eel that resembles the shape of a torus or donut. It is capable of generating an alternating electric current in the water as a form of communication between other ...
  • 46.3k
0 votes
1 answer
108 views

Land and sea are infested by giant carnivourous squid/crab things. How do I survive? [closed]

So, recently, a bunch of Kraken eggs have hatched, bringing them back form a few centuries of extinction for unknown reasons. Also, turns out that when their sea-based population gets too high, some ...
  • 2,844
-1 votes
2 answers
141 views

Something came from the sea. What does it attack first? [closed]

There is some sort of carnivorous mega-creature. What it is doesn't matter. What does matter is that it can kill pretty much anything. Imagine a mini-kaiju. Like, only the size of a double-decker bus ...
  • 2,844
14 votes
4 answers
4k views

Hammering under water?

Long before you get to using fire to smelt metals, hammering is a much more fundamental requirement for basic technologies. Hammering lets you Flake stones to make stone tools Process food--grinding ...
29 votes
5 answers
5k views

A fast aquatic predator with multiple eyes and pupils. Would these eyes be possible?

I’m currently in the works of an alien design, one which lives in the ocean most of its life and occasionally surfaces in shallow waters to mate. It has 4 eyes, with each side of the head having a ...
  • 1,606
3 votes
4 answers
509 views

Could a mature (and giant) lobster remain in sea water indefinitely without decaying?

My pantheon of storyline gods includes a "titan" of sorts, in the form of a giant lobster. At one point in time, she returns to the coastal ocean and exists in a meditative state on the seafloor for ...