#this almost brings up the idea of a eusocial species with sentient individuals and what that could be like

[ferallindsay]

yeerks don't have three sexes

well not necessarily. I've seen all you animorphs fans saying this and I'm sorry but the source cited for this never says that at all. this is pure fanon, and fanon is fine, but it is treated as canon for reasons I can only assume are poor zoology education amongst the fans, so...

first, while we don't really know the fine points of yeerk biology, I think we all agree it's ok to extend terrestrial language to extraterrestrial beings when it's appropriately analogous. yeerks might not be true gastropods but they're slugs. I'll use the language of earth biology here even tho it's technically wrong in some instances

now. what aftran does say is that yeerk reproduction involves three individuals, for whom it is fatal. that does teach us a lot! a semelparitous mating strategy is presumably very unusual for sentient species, but possible living in such large colonies. but the thing is, everything we learn about yeerk reproduction is about their mating system, not their sexual system

mating systems describe which individuals of a species reproduce together and under what circumstances. sexual systems describe which reproductive functions different individuals can possess. my gripe here is that mating systems don't reliably tell us anything about sexual systems. the number of individuals involved in a mating act and the number of sexes a species has simply don't correlate

as examples, take dwarf mussels and western honeybees. dwarf mussels are trioecious, ie they have three sexes, but mating involves two individuals. how to classify sexes for western honeybees (and similar eusocial superorganisms) is its own wonderful discussion, but during nuptial flights, several male drones will mate with the queen and then die. mating involves 3-7 individuals but only two sexes

now I'm not saying it's impossible (your fanon is valid), but a trioecious species requiring one member of each sex to mate seems like a dangerous overspecialisation. maybe you think this is appropriate, since yeerks are already overspecialised so much in other ways, and I do like that interpretation

my own interpretation however, was always that yeerks are sexually undifferentiated, whether through isogamy or universal simultaneous hermaphroditism or something completely alien. it's also possible they have dozens of sexes, or worst of all, they could even be gonochorous (this is not a valid headcanon tho. grow up)

tl;dr just because mating requires three individuals doesn't mean there are three sexes. they could still have any number of sexes, or none, which seems mostly likely to me. this isn't really about whether they have three sexes, which is a fine bit of fanon, just about some biology that explains why it isn't absolutely canon

anyway I hope this was interesting or whatever. share your thoughts if you have em, or ignore me and continue talking about your space slugs and psychic centaurs

#animorphs #side note tho #this almost brings up the idea of a eusocial species with sentient individuals and what that could be like #the yeerks are not this but I think based on TAC the taxxons were meant to be something like that #speculation on taxxon social structure is welcome too #if you're a biologist I'm sorry for stretching the meaning of some words but... they're aliens... you get it