Andalite and Hork-Bajir anatomy

[Noelle]

First off: Andalites

How does their food (grass and stuff) get from the base of their four hooves/feet into their body? Does the "esophagus" in each leg somehow travel around the bone? Does it curl around the bone or just go straight up the side? Or does it go through the middle of the bone, in the center which is hollow? Do they have a four-chamberd stomach? One for each leg? Ruminant animals like cows and herbivores (look it up on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruminant) have chambered stomachs like this, and Andalites are herbivores, right?

It's been stated that Andalites have two hearts. Obviously, one is in their upper torso, where a human's heart would be. The other heart, I think, is in their lower torso, like a horse's would be. They need two hearts for the extra energy that their large bodies require (running and quick-reflex tail fighting). Obviously, they have a trachea/windpipe running from their nose to their lungs (2), which are larger than a human's lungs. (I suspect that fantasy centaurs have larger lungs, too, but I'm not sure about how many hearts a centaur would have. Sorry, I'm digressing.)

As for their stalk eyes, I'm pretty sure that they have three layers. The very center of the stalk eye's stalk is optical nerve, which is directly referenced at the end of The Andalite Chronicles, going directly to the brain, like any normal optic nerve should. The next layer going out is muscle, to move the eyes around. Last, of course, is the skin layer. But how do the eyeballs themselves actually attach to the stalks?

Last note on Andalites: Their upper torso contains two slightly-larger-than-human lungs, a heart, and maybe a pancreas and other respiratory/endocrine organs. Their lower body contains at least one stomach, possibly divided into four parts or four separate stomachs; one heart, a liver, two kidneys, other horse-like organs, and anything related to the digestive, endocrine, and reproductive systems.

My guess has always been for Andalite digestion is that the food was crushed in the hooves, and then transported up within the bone to the stomach.  I think the bone could safely accommodate this if the bone marrow was replaced by four tiny esophagi. (what would the plural of that be anyway?  My main concern with the food from the feet is that the smooth muscle in their leg-esophagi would have to be VERY strong in order to counter-act the gravity not only of just standing up, but the force of their legs constantly hitting the ground while they ate.  I suppose it would be logical to think that the peristalsis in their legs would be strong enough to accommodate for this.

I would think it would go to just a one chambered stomach.  If the food is crushed up in the hooves enough to get it up through the legs I would think just one stomach would be sufficient.

Of course, then you have to think about where all the extra bone marrow would come from to accommodate for the loss of marrow in the legs, but really, they wouldn't need much, because as we age most of the marrow in our bodies becomes inactive anyway (not all, but most), so as long as they don't suffer any massive bloodloss when they are juveniles probably just the marrow in their arms/shoulders could be sufficient.  And there could be marrow wrapped around the food channel on the inside anyway.


As for the upper body, it would have to have lungs that were very large, as well as a heart that was very large, I would think the entire upper body would be dedicated to the oxygenation of the mass quantities of blood needed to keep the body alive.  Then the second (and third?) hearts would be used to keep the blood flowing to the rest of the body, (in the lower half) which would help reduce the blood pressure needed to get the blood circulating throughout the rest of the body. 

Then the lower body would contain the rest of the organ systems.


Insomnia sucks.

[Dogman15]

Coooool. Revived thread. I love reading this stuff. Thanks guys!

[NecrosisDemon]

Glad I saw this thread. I'm still working on my organ and feeding diagram for the Andalite to go with my anatomy sheet for them, and I have a feeling that it was someone from this place who asked me on deviantART whether I was going to do one for the Hork-Bajir as well.

Anyway, my two cents on the topic of Andalite anatomy and feeding: in my head canon both hearts are located in the humanoid torso of their body, and their lungs in the other, mostly to make it look less like two torsos of different earth species (human and deer) pasted on top of each other and their organs combined. Their wind pipe would be larger (extra room because the esophagus is located elsewhere) and strengthened with extra cartilage, allowing them to breathe in more oxygen with each intake of air.
The two hearts would be larger because there's more space in the ribcage (no humanoid lungs) to be able to pump blood through their system faster. Their actual lungs would be a little larger as well because again, extra space, no deer heart.

I figure that they would have some kind esophagus traveling up their legs, though thinner than a regular one, because they have four of them and there really isn't that much space in a deer's leg, especially in the lower part where the metacarpal bones are located. It'd be located close to the bone, following it up, and be protected by a layer of muscle. A lot of people mistake the shoulder area for a deer/horse's upper leg, the actual upper leg for their lower leg and their lower leg for what are essentially hand/feet bones (metacarpals) and fingers/nails (hooves). The upper and lower leg have more muscle layering, so it'd be more protected, but the rest is mostly bones with tendons and smaller muscle groups here and there. An esophagus located there wouldn't have a lot of protection from kicks to the leg.
Either way, it'd travel further up, along the bone of the lower leg and then into the abdominal area, beneath the shoulder joint. Same principle with their hind legs.

Still with me? XD

As for the stomach, I'm not sure if I'd give them a four chambered one simply because they're not earth animals. For all we know they have three, five or even eight chambers. I do think that they'd have a strong stomach and powerful intestines to digest their food with.
Plant material is tough stuff to digest, and it's pretty much impossible to also add teeth inside their legs. They also wouldn't be able to swallow stones large enough to help grind grass once it's insides their stomach.
They'd need some kind of mouth and they should be able to close it so they're not constantly eating 24/7. They're even-toed, so I figure it's like some kind of sphincter located just between the hooves, very roughly textured on the inside (like a cow's tongue) to grab the grass while they're running and push it up their esophagus.

I haven't thought about the location of the other organs yet, but this is kinda how I see it. I haven't really spent a lot of time on it yet, there are still plenty of kinks that I need to work out.

Like I said on the actual Andalite anatomy sheet I'm no anatomy major, I'm just a nerd and I'm bound to make mistakes no matter how much research I do
Though glad that if and when I do the Hork-Bajir, they won't be so complicated to figure out.

[Aquilai]

Something unexplainable? Sounds like a challenge! Went back to Book 26 (The Attack) for a better description but ended up reading the whole book again ^^ Not out of my way since it's one of my favourites.

Noelle, I don't think they're part machine because Jake acquires one and morphing only works with biological DNA. (Arguably living beings are biological machines.) The fuzzy area has always been around symbiotic/parasitic morphing and DNA acquiring. Such cases as: a pregnant morpher what would happen to her child? Would the Isk and Yoort be acquired together or just the individual? This is me wandering off topic though

For the spinal column and nerve endings I entirely refer to your theory! It sound good to me but I'm no medical/veterinary student.

From the book...
[spoiler="Howler description"]

He was not huge. Smaller than a Hork-Bajir. As big as a large man. He walked on two bowed legs with a swinging, almost comic gait. He had two arms, longer than his legs. The hands were almost human, five fingers and an opposable thumb. But from the wrists projected a sort of second hand, a claw that could be lowered to cover the back of the hand, or kept up out of the way. This claw had four hooked, steel-tipped claws. It looked like there was a bearing halfway up his body, as if the top half of the torso was on a living lazy Susan, allowing the body to turn all the way around and keep the fighting claws in the game.

The head was ugly, a slag heap of melted-looking, black pebbled skin. The entire creature looked like he had been formed out of still-cooling lava. Beneath the black, in the cracks and creases of his flesh, were lines of bright red.
 
Within this face were eyes of a startlingly beautiful blue. Robin's egg blue, they call it. The entire eye was blue, with the cat's iris a paler shade.

From a fly's perspective:

The Howlers piled into the room. With my compound eyes they seemed to be made of glowing purple and blue with pulsating black veins.

As Jake is morphing into one and watching himself change:

The morph continued. My skin began to erupt in pustules, blisters that formed all over my body, then burst and oozed out black glue.
 
I looked down and saw my stomach pinching, like I was being cut in two. Like I was morphing an ant or some other segmented insect. Just as the pinching looked as if it would go all the way and the top of my body would topple like a chopped tree, long, flexible threads - elastic blood veins - shot out, connecting the two halves of me, upper and lower.
 
For a horrible moment I could actually see the white bone of my human spine. The interlocking vertebrae melted and reformed as thick, steel-gray cylinders, each able to turn on its base.

Then my center filled in, hiding the spine and the elastic veins and tendons.
 
I breathed a sigh of relief. No one needs to see that happening to their body.
 
I saw my hands change color, the fingers covered by the black-on-red pustules, the cooling lava flesh thick and hard. I still had four fingers and a thumb. But now, from my wrist, the claws grew. Retractable, like a cat's claws.
 
My legs creaked and groaned as bone thickened and twisted. My ears melted into my head. My eyes widened, growing larger and flatter.

My senses began to change. The differences were not as severe as many morphs I've been through. But more complete than I'd expected. I wasn't seeing just shape and color anymore. I was seeing infrared heat. I was seeing trails, like the ones your mouse cursor leaves on the computer screen. It allowed me to follow movement and direction more closely.

And then, with a shock, I realized I could see through the outer layers of skin. I could see faint outlines of Marco's gorilla heart.
 
Of course. All the better to target vital organs.
 
The robin's egg blue-in-blue eyes were far beyond human eyes. Beyond even hawk's eyes. These were target-acquiring eyes.

[/spoiler]
Really the relevant part is in the last quote where the veins are described as "elastic blood veins". (I just decided for completeness to put all the Howler description parts in.) This means their veins can be stretched round (and within) the body then presumably contracted/unwound at a later point. It doesn't really specify how many times around their body they can spin their top halves but since their blood vessels are elastic there probably is an elastic limit before they stop turning or snap.

Since the book never mentions anything about unwinding. It makes sense that the elastic limit is quite high and that they can continue functioning without having to unwind any time through combat. As for digestion and other organs, it's never specified but it's plausible that they're in the top half of the body so that they never get tangled up with the lower half. Maybe Crayak designed them to be highly energy+nutrition efficient meaning little/no excretion^{[Citation Needed]}.

I was thinking though, the description says that they have pulsating veins on the outside of their bodies (fly eyes don't see into bodies like Howlers) so isn't that quite a vulnerability? They could have redundancies but it just seems like an easy target for knives or claws.

Anyway, I think that mostly covers the Howler turntable mystery!