Amber's Weird Alien Species

Zeborans are aliens that look superficially human-like, but have a number of biological oddities:

-While Zeborans are viviparous and have 9 month gestations like humans, they are like seahorses in that the male is the sex to gestate and give birth. Their sexual dimorphism evolved around this: as a result, males look like human women, and females look like human men.

-After giving birth, Zeboran fathers nurse their babies up until they start growing teeth. Once they can eat solid food and are weaned, their mother takes over as their predominant caretaker.

-Zeborans do not have distinctive genitalia. Instead, they have cloacae which they pair to mate, like birds. The female’s ovum is flagellated, allowing it to swim into the male’s womb, where he secretes a pool of sperm waiting to fertilize it. Once fertilized, the still flagellated zygote swims up to and implants into his uterine wall.

-They have an estrus cycle, not a menstrual cycle, meaning that Zeborans have distinctive breeding seasons. Both sexes go into their own “heat”: in females it’s triggered by ovulation, while in males it’s triggered by them developing a uterine lining and their womb swelling with sperm.

-They have blue blood, which is not hemocyanin but rather something very fundamentally different. More on that later.

-They’re entirely carnivorous, and have undifferentiated, conical teeth like carnivorous dinosaurs. They swallow large chunks of meat which are further chewed with a crop.

-They vocalize with a syrinx, not a larynx, which makes their voices sound somewhat similar to a talking bird.

-Male Zeborans are generally taller than females, but the females are a lot heavier and more powerfully built.

Zeborans and the whole tree of life they belong to, originating from planet Zebora, are the only known instance of naturally occurring alkahetic life, the same basis that Fordians are built around. However, alkahest pigment is not sexually dimorphic like it is in Fordians; it’s always a royal blue-ultramarine color in both sexes, similar to oxygenated hemocyanin but more blue.

A plesiomorphic trait of all alkahetic life is that reproduction by egg-laying is impossible, due to the fundamental property of alkahest where it requires an endless source of fresh alkahest to constantly replace it or it will very rapidly destabilize and the compounds will disintegrate to their elements. A yolk simply would be unable to supply the sheer amount of alkahest that fetuses of these organisms burn through in order to develop to a point where they can produce their own. As a result, all alkahetic lifeforms more complex than flatworms (simple organisms can utilize binary fission just fine) must reproduce by viviparity.

HOWEVER, a viable option is implantation of fetuses into other species, where they develop as parasites or parasitoids. This is more common in the more primitive species, but in the lineage that became their planet’s version of mammals, the females started using their own mates as hosts, which laid the evolutionary foundation for the males evolving wombs to gestate their offspring in and the animal class going full-blown seahorse-meets-placental-mammals.

only in this lineage is male gestation normal. in most other alkahetic animal classes, the female gestates the young like most earth animals. nature is weird and unpredictable.