u/arthur_0920

Known narwhals are exclusively found in the Northern hemisphere, but there have reports of cryptid narwhal species in the Southern Ocean. [1]

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Sightings

1615

In 1615 Dutch explorer Willem Schouten was on a trip in the Southern ocean which his ship was attacked by an unknown animal. The day after they found a horn lodged in the ship about 1 foot or 30 centimeters long.[1][2]

1620

French general Augustin de Beaulieu saw two dark porpoise-like animals below South of Africa. He said it had a horn about 1.5 feet or 45 centimeters long. He also described a high fin on the animal, while known narwhals only have a bony ridge.[3][4]

1892

In 1892 the Balaena saw a narwhal by the Bransfield Strait, pretty close to the Antarctic Mainland. The men on board were experienced whalers who clearly saw the horn, even using the whalers term for a narwhal, Uni. [5]

Island habitats are often notable for the unique, sometimes unexpected ways their endemic life can evolve, for such environments may lack conventional selective pressures found on continental regions. Serina itself in its beginning acted as a sort of island too, its earth-derived plants and animals being shaped by conditions where they have far fewer competitors and predators than they did before. But now, in the early Tempuscene 25 million years post-establishment, the canaries have filled a world once empty and filled most niches in the ecosystem. Canaries are now the plant-eaters and the predators. They range in size from fliers not much larger than hummingbirds as they sip nectar, to raptorial hunters (the falconaries), to multiple lineages of flightless land-predators and several more kinds of long-necked giants weighing up to a ton, some related and others only similar due to convergent evolution. With the wider world no longer quite as insular, the actual islands still isolated far from the mainland by sea and surf are now where some of the most unusual canaries have evolved, where enemies are still fewer, and widespread competitors like the efficient vivas have not yet reached. Time on such places seems to move a little slower, and indeed it was on isles like the Kyran Islands that the first, most experimental megafauna of this new world survived the longest.

Giant, slow-moving songbirds - the womblers and their relatives - died out nearly as soon as they appeared on mainlands due to predators, but survived until much more recently here, a least until new predators found them. Now, a second wave of flightless herbivore canaries has spread here and taken their place: the galliwalts, a group of chicken-like birds which until recently remained capable fliers even though they spent most of their time running on the ground. On the continents, it is the aardgeese that are rapidly becoming the new global herbivores (due to their ability to brood their eggs internally and so avoid predation on their chicks), and galliwalts remain small, pheasant or rail-like birds, some species becoming crane-like at their largest. On islands, these species find new opportunity. Some still remain similar to their ancestors - we see a small one striding along the forest floor, pecking at insects, nearby a large land-crab that now must forage for scraps in the absence of the defenseless giant baby birds its ancestors enjoyed. With the large herbivore niches empty here, where vivas never lived and the womblers have now gone extinct, some of the galliwalts have now grown gigantic.

Titans that have evolved here, like the tree-browsing megamoa, are now much too big to fly (they stand 23 feet tall and can weigh 1,500 lbs), yet they are much less vulnerable to both avian and crustacean enemies because their chicks are precocial and can walk and keep up with their parents within days of hatching, not months. Adult females of this species are twice as heavy as males, and too big to brood their eggs without cracking them. This responsibility thus falls entirely to the dad, and the mother does not stick around after laying her single beachball-sized egg in his nest - it is at once the largest egg laid by any bird, and yet compared to her own size, is the smallest in ratio. Two or three females will visit a single male, leaving him in charge of their eggs and to raise their chicks. For now they are the ruling class of these islands, with no predators as adults. They shape the forest with their feeding, plowing paths through the undergrowth with their trampling footsteps, from which smaller creatures scatter. But they are not alone here, for living in the undergrowth, in a hidden shadowed world under the forest canopy, stranger and older residents of the Kyrans make their living, little noticed by their giants.

Softbilled birds are survivors of an early radiation of early island-dwelling birds, named for a trait shared by most living species in which most of their bill is covered in sensitive soft skin, and only the tip of the jaw still supports a keratinized beak-tip. Their ancestors reached the Kyrans within a few thousand years of Serina's colonization, at the same time as the chubbirds, now extinct. Some of them soon lost flight, but not every species has done so. Still, even those which did trade in their wings survived, while their other flightless cousins did not, because they had evolved to partition their niches. As chubbirds were active by day - and vulnerable at night to enemies like land crabs that raided their nests - softbill ancestors evolved to be nocturnal, and remained small enough that they nested in burrows which were more easily defended from predators. Active by night, their vision has worsened, and their eyes are often small, but their senses of hearing, touch and smell are highly acute to compensate. The more derived species longer see in color, having traded it for better acuity in low-light conditions, and so all of them are mostly brown, though a few primitive ones (usually species which have not lost their flight) still see the world in shades of blue and yellow. Their chicks are semi-precocial, spending only a couple of weeks helpless in a nest before they can run and walk and flee, an intermediate condition between ancestral canaries and the galliwalts. It's enough to avoid most dangers, especially as the adults usually nest in burrows and aggressively defend their offspring from nocturnal dangers to which they are more perceptive and so far less vulnerable.

Softbilled birds are not as large as the grandest galliwalts, but there are already more species of them here. Basal forms which still fly and still see some color include the pinchpiper at left foreground, which is very similar to the common ancestor of all softbilled birds and superficially resembles a woodcock. Its bill is very long, but only the tip is really a beak - the rest is a soft, sensitive snout covered with skin that is lined with bundles of nerves, letting it feel around in the dark for a meal. In wet conditions - which it prefers to feed in - its snout is slightly electro-sensitive, too, detecting the tiny electrical discharges made as muscles are fired by tiny fleeing prey animals, which it hones in on. Muscle attachments on its bill let it flex its upper and lower jaws apart at their tips to push out and expand the narrow burrow-holes where its victims dwell in sediment underwater, in soil, and in rotting wood. The tweezer-like beak then has more room to grab earthworms and beetle larvae. Detecting anything in its beak, it closes tightly, pulling them from their hiding places to eat them.

From such an ancestor as this, more derived birds have already appeared. Vibrirhynchans, or vibries, are flightless, vaguely duck-like birds growing to about 40 lbs. They are terrestrial, foraging nocturnally, with sturdy legs and large claws for digging, and somewhat flattened snouts compared to the pinchpiper. They are omnivorous, digging up worms and insects as well as feeding on roots and fallen nuts and fruit, often in complete darkness. Their snouts are soft and fleshy, lined with rows of short hair-like papillae that increase the surface area of the skin to improve their sense of touch; these structures are mobile, able to quiver back and forth and effectively "sniff" the ground to pick up the slightest vibrations or electrical signals indicating prey is moving just below the soil. The nostrils are at the very tip of the snout as well, improving its ability to find hidden food by scent by pressing its beak into the mud. The beak is very small and formed from two nail-like growths on the tip of both upper and lower jaw, used to dig out and grab food before it is swallowed. Hard keratin structures are also still present inside the mouth, including fine superficially tooth-like pecten (similar to the inside of a goose's beak) that give it a firm grasp on wet and wriggly prey.

Both sexes of vibri cooperate to incubate clutches of two to five eggs in a burrow and to tend the chicks. One parent always stays at the nest while the young are small to drive off predators, but in only 14 days the chicks are able to leave it and follow their parents to begin finding their own food. They are self-sufficient by a month of age in foraging for food, but will stick with their families for about 4 months total for protection before they are nearly adult sized and can fend entirely on their own. Numerous species of vibri already exist, some favoring feeding in water, while others live on the forest floor and a few have even begun to browse low-growing vegetation, becoming more herbivorous. For now, they all still live and lurk in the shadows of the island's great megamoas, vastly bigger than any of them. They hold the night shift, unnoticed by the daytime's rulers.

But their time in the sun may come yet

On a still spring morning, a wombler calls from a high hill, singing a deep and resonant melody that could carry over two miles to the ears of distant females. For hours - from before the dark ends until the sun is high in the sky - he inflates the tremendously large sac beneath his chin with air and expels from it gurgles, clatters, rumbles, and chimes that roar in varied sequences across the plains. The volume of his voice tells of how big and strong he is. Each summer, during his molt, he goes silent, but is always listening and thinking. In the winter he begins to sing again, quietly at first, combining sounds in new ways and adding to his tunes to make them longer and more rich. This one's complexity, a song that rises and falls and never is sung quite the same twice, shows he is mature and has lived and learned for many years. He should have no difficulty in finding partners and perpetuating his genes to a new generation. He pauses his call, just for a moment, to listen. He cocks his head, peers out across the plain.

Yet only silence responds.

This one, in his prime, is the last of the womblers on the mainland. Once evolutionary marvels for their enormous size, they are now reduced by newly-evolved predators to relics of simpler times now at the very brink of extinction. It is not the adult, a gigantic animal as large as three men, that fears the spread of the hunting-birds. It is their eggs, laid in the open on the ground, and their defenseless young which cannot even crawl until almost a month old. They are a walking banquet to hunters, now. And they have not had time to adapt. They will not get that time. For others are already replacing them - fitter birds, not quite as encumbered, faster to run, or fiercer to fight. All things this giant, for all his grandeur, could never be.

Though his lineage is not wholly extinct (related species will survive on some small, offshore islands for some time yet), here he is alone. No one in range of his voice understands his song. No one knows its value, or cares to learn. He is not yet old, and yet he is no longer young. He has sung each spring for the past twelve years. He has had several mates, now very long ago. But they are gone now, and with them his chances at saving his kind have gone, too. Still, he sings. Each year better than the year before. Nothing threatens him. Food is plentiful. He thrives.

But he is the end.

And with nothing else to do, he begins to sing again, if only to pass the time. For if he will not be remembered, then he can at least still be known today. His voice bellows and echoes and glides down the grasslands, impossible to ignore. And if we could understand it really, truly, it might say, "I was here, and I lived. I am here. I still live."

Every story has a beginning, and every story has an end. Some are long, others are short. None lasts forever. But it's the journey that matters.

And though he and all before and after will one day be forgotten in the falling sands of time, that day is not today. Today he matters, too.

And life's beautiful song carries on.