Deep Space Leviathan
In deep space gentle giants drift through the void. Known as leviathans, astracetaceans, and space whales, these gargantuan filter feeders are the size of small moons. They are thousands to hundreds of thousands of miles long.
For much of Sol's history leviathans were understood to be extinct. Leviathans had been encountered during early space exploration, but by the age of spacefaring even sightings had become extremely rare.
What was not understood at the time was that they were nearing the part of the Leviathan's life cycle called the Great Migration. Every four or so centuries, the leviathans cease independent crossings. Instead they gather to travel together as one great pack. Some believe that the heller cave art, the earliest known figurative art in the entire Sol System, depicts an ancient great migration.
Deep Space Leviathan by Annie Stein
Gentle Giants
The first Great Migration of the late spacefaring age revealed that not only are the leviathans not extinct — they aren't alone. Each leviathan has ecosystems of their own, supporting life on their backs and in their wake.
Life is most plentiful inside of gaping jaw of the leviathans. Highly specialized creatures hide in the baleen, the keratin plates that line the entire roof of the leviathans mouth. These creatures feed off the leftovers of the leviathans, and may even serve some purpose for the leviathans themselves.
The back of the leviathan is usually covered in a thick layer of mottled regolith, debris from comets, and other impacts. A few simple lifeforms analogous to the flora and fauna of asteroids can be found buried underneath the regolith.
The underbelly is an entirely different biome. Old craters become lakes of sulphorous liquid filled strange lumiescent algae. The stark difference between the back and the underside lead experts to theorize that leviathans generally swim through space with their underside towards the sun.
Leviathan bones are a staple at the natural history museums of Sol. The Jovian Museum is famous for having the full skeleton of a leviathan suspended in the opening aula. The Jovian Leviathan was found buried deep under the crust of Jupiter and was the earliest conclusive proof of the lifeform.
For millenia the Jovian Leviathan was the only full skeleton of a leviathan, but with the discovery of the Great Migrations more museums have sought to acquire their own set. Exhibiting a creature the size of a leviathan poses its own challenges.
The Great Migration
Every four centuries countless whales gather to cross the orbital plane, keeping a safe distance from the planets and their gravity wells. The purpose of the Great Migrations are not well understood. Some speculate it is to breed or to collectively feed on the richer debris caught in orbit. Scientists connect the migrations to the grand solar maximum, when the activity of the sun is unusually high. It is possible that by gathering together, the Leviathans reduce the risk of travelling through a more dangerous plane.
Beyond the dangers presented by the Solar Pulses, each migration now sees an influx of whalers from all corners of Sol. Scientists wish to gather data, while others hope to gather the byproducts of the leviathans. Some even seek to hunt the giant beasts, seeing them as some of the greatest game of Sol.
There are two primary forms of whaling. Asteroid miners are contracted to travel out to the whales and harvest off from their back. Mining the leviathans in this manner does not seem to harm them. However some products can only be gathered from the corpse of a space whale. In pursuit of these hunters use explosives and massive harpoons to kill the leviathans and haul them home.
Products
| Outer Space | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Notice: This article is a stub. It may be expanded later!
"Muktuk is a marbled substance somewhere between meat and rock." I love this so much and really have to remember that sort of phrasing. They sound awesome - big as a small moon, with entire ecosystems living inside / on them. It conjures a really amazing vision. Those have to be some pretty dang impressive harpoons and I'd love to know more about that aspect of things. How common are they? If they're still being hunted, are they at the risk of extinction? Are there any laws or restrictions around interacting with them? :) Awesome, awesome stuff Annie
Creator of Araea, Megacorpolis, and many others.
Thank you! I wanted to help people wrap their head around just how big that is by looking at them less as creatures and more as realms of their own. I think you'd basically need a small fleet to haul something this big, you'd probably want to parcel it up and maybe even install rockets onto it. It'd be a project, that's for sure! Luckily Solaris has crystals to power everything. They have honestly no clue how common they are out there, but they don't seem to be at risk of extinction. I'm sure someone tried to tally how many were there at the last migration, and it didn't meaningfully change since last time. They're so far away from the part of space people live in, so encounters would be incredibly rare, and they cross so far out from the planets that no government could really meaningfully intervene. It's no mans space.
Solaris -— a sapphic space opera
Creator of World of Worlds | Camp Chill | Comment Carolers