yeerk pool sludge

it's always bothered me that yeerk pools are described as full of dense, opaque, lead-colored sludge, but the human hosts show no signs of heavy metal poisoning despite being repeatedly exposed to it for years. so the additive can't be lead or mercury, and probably isn't iron either or there would be a lot more rust build up.

it's graphite. it's got to be graphite. yeerks communicate through sonar but also have some kind of electroreception, and graphite is conductive. it's also largely nontoxic to humans, being only carbon. long term exposure to graphite-saturated fluid, even internally, would take years if ever to present some kind of health problem. the alien proteins and lipids in the fluid contributed by yeerk mucus would probably be more likely to present a hazard.

the yeerk pools are electroconductive graphite and mucus soup, and it helps the navigate and communicate by electric fields, while also probably providing sonic baffling so their thousands of commingling sonar pings don't just ricochet around unmanageably as they would in the same volume of clear water.

obviously this makes the yeerks underdogs, but it also means that instead of violent invaders, they need to be seductive, diplomatic infiltrators, with way more voluntary hosts. they need to offer their human hosts significantly better benefits for joining up, since with a two-hour time limit they’re going to have to rely on competent, conscientious hosts who actually like them, like illim and tidwell.

i think their best bet would be homelessness and drug addict outreach-- they could give people food, shelter, a cause to believe in, a sympathetic friend who can help them with self-control, and a people to help.

instead of ‘we are going to take over earth whether you like it or not, so you might as well get in with the winning team early’ they might actually find a number of sympathetic ears (heh) with people who are, themselves, incredibly disenfranchised from normal human society. who would hear ‘we’ve lost our homeland and our way of life and our very ability to operate most of our salvaged technology-- join us, help us, let us make use of your incredible skills and your wonderful body, and you’ll never be hungry or despised or alone again!’

i mean, if i was homeless for a couple months, or years, and i found out there were homeless aliens out there too, and that with my help we could together be safe and warm and fly spaceships together, i’d sign on in an instant. i’d carry my little friend thermos around very happily. and if i ended up shooting a laser gun at cops and politicians, even better!

Remember to change the water in your Yeerk Pool every so often so that your little buddies always have clean, fresh water to swim in. Be sure to monitor the pH too so they don’t get chemical burns.

Contrary to common thought, a yeerk cannot survive indefinitely in a fishbowl or any other small containor. While clean tap water will do in a short term emergency, their permanent setup needs a proper size tank with filters, oxygenation, temperature control, and adequate Kandrona ray permation. The liquid needs to be maintained with the proper additives and consistency for ease of movement and communication. Yes, communication! Yeerks are colony dwellers and prefer to have lots of companionship in their pools! A “colony” is loosely defined as three or more individuals, with some wild colonies numbering in the hundreds or thousands, but on average a household colony is between ten and fifty yeerks depending on enclosure capacity.

The best setup for your yeerk colony is similar to that of an aquatic turtle*, with a full bio-filtration system tweaked to compensate for the preferred sludgy nature of the liquid, a water oxygenator, a Kandrona/heat lamp combo, and a number of interesting decor objects for exploration via sonar for enrichment and play. Your population should never increase beyond one yeerk per gallon to prevent over-crowding. When upgrading your tank size, be wary of introducing new yeerks to your colony, as extra space in a healthy environment can trigger spawning among colony mates.

If you notice some of your yeerks have spawned, remove as many of the grubs as you can find with a fine net and place them in an incubation setup. This is actually easier than it seems since grubs have slightly different nutrient and temperature needs compared to adults, and in an artificial set up, they tend to stay at the surface of the water, closer to the heat and light. There can be as many as 800 grubs in an average batch! The highest count recorded was 947, with one instance of twinning (two yeerks forming from a single grub). Grubs are tiny don’t need as much space as adults (about 100 grubs per gallon is ideal), but they will grow quickly and will need a permanent setup in as little as two months.

Yeerks enjoy staying with their spawn-mates long term, as they would in their natural habitat, and a single batch of grubs is actually a very stable colony! But we understand not everyone can keep several hundred yeerks together in adulthood and the batch will need to be split up for rehoming. This is best done while still in grub stage, as their senses are much more limited, and bonding between batchmates only begins upon entering the second stage of maturity. It’s not recommended to separate colony members past this stage.

With proper care, you can maintain a happy healthy colony of these fun little guys indefinitely! They are excellent friends and companions!

* Do NOT, under any circumstances, house aquatic turtles with your yeerk colony!

This is the most definitive guide for taking care of your little Yeerk friends that I have ever seen.

This is horrifying.

Yeerks are not cute little pets you keep in an aquarium. Yeerks are people. Pools are not adequate long-term habitats for them, they are spawning and feeding grounds; a Yeerk’s long-term habitat is inside a brain. Keeping Yeerks without access to body they can move in and use a full sensory suite with is equivalent to keeping humans in solitary confinement, i.e. torture; if you’re managing a Yeerk pool with a permanent unhosted Yeerk population you are a prison warden. They are not your “friends” or “companions”, they are your victims, and if you spent even a second hearing what they have to say you’d know this.

Do not, under any circumstances, keep a Yeerk pool unless you are a Yeerk yourself, or you are helping out in a Yeerk-managed project. If you don’t believe me, stick your head in there and listen.

#i will not answer any questions regarding my species or yeerk-infested status

i have completely forgotten if this was canonical or not but i am of the firm opinion that yeerks and yoorts share a common spacefaring ancestor, and yeerks are descended from the guys that found a significantly less hospitable planet than the yoorts' ancestors did.

it's entirely possible that the gedd didn't evolve on that planet either, but were the spacefaring yeerk-ancestor's domesticated partner species, like dogs are to humans, only even more so. they're not particularly intelligent because they didn't have to be, the yeerk-ancestors ran everything, but they're not mindlessly stupid either because you don't really want to take brainless panicky livestock on an interstellar colonization trip. gedd are fully capable of fending for themselves even without yeerk management.

also, yeerks definitely enjoy having *willing partners*, rather than miserable slaves or animals. they definitely benefit from perceiving the universe alongside another self-aware mind. and the yoort love trading memories and experiences. there's arguably a species-specific drive for yeerks to seek out and connect with other people.

anyway i just think it's all very neat

Yeerks really present a moral minefield. If you attack them when they’re in the pool, they’re helpless. If you fight them as Controllers, you’re killing enslaved innocents. If you capture Controllers and hold them for three days, you’re torturing and starving prisoners of war. The Andalites seem chill with making consistently appalling choices but if if you have any reservations you really end up in a bind here.

I feel like the ‘cleanest’ outcome is capturing Controllers and threatening to starve them of Kandrona rays if they don’t leave their hosts, and once they leave locking them in like… a pool jail or something, but that strategy doesn’t scale when you’re fighting a guerilla war against an invading colonizing force.

A bit out of left-field, but I feel like this ties in really well with how Agents are presented in The Matrix(being programs that hijack the minds of innocent humans, very likely to kill you whether you fight them or not, but in the event you DO manage to defeat them, all you’ve done is kill an innocent and they’ll manifest in someone else anyway). So both end up acting as symbols of oppressive, controlling social systems and how they make potentially ANYONE your enemy the minute they realize you challenge that system.(insight courtesy of me watching This Cool Video Essay on the matrix sequels by Curio and Sarah Zedig two days ago)

This, of course, raises the question: are the Wachowski sisters Animorph fans :| :| :|

also about that comment on yeerks smothering each other: i’m pretty sure one of the really big social problems yeerks faced was that yeerks in their natural state cannot individually murder each other. they’re softbodied aquatic invertebrates. they have nothing to murder each other with. 

killing a yeerk would be a group effort: they would either have to bury a yeerk in the silt of the bottom of the pool and guard him for days, or slowly push a rock on top of that yeerk until he’s crushed, or by group effort isolate and then shove the yeerk out of the pool on to dry land and keep him there until he dries out. these group efforts would be exhaustive and require extensive, determined coordination. basically, yeerks have only ever executed each other. 

unfortunately, yeerks gain the capacity to murder people in the space of… a day. a week at the outside. monday: no yeerks had ever murdered anyone. friday: they’d shot like three andalites and were starting in on shooting each other.

yeerks are not emotionally equipped to understand murder. they understand death, and predators, and maybe even socially-mandated execution. but a species with no real form of organized warfare or interpersonal violence gets its hands on guns and spaceships and goes basically fucking nuts. think about it: humans know we can fuck each other up. all our cultures acknowledge and regulate our capacity— and our desire— to kill people we hate. 

yeerks don’t have that. yeerks have never had that. they suddenly get that and they go fucking nuts.  roughly fifty years later they are still fucking nuts, only even more so because they’ve locked themselves into this completely unnatural, artificial social situation— a highly regimented life of total war— and any yeerk with a host now has the capacity to kill. and they kill each other a lot. their whole ranking system boils down to ‘who is allowed to kill who’. esplin 9466 gets an andalite body but still has a yeerk’s mind, a yeerk’s total lack of… control, awareness, something, and he just fucking starts chopping heads off and never slows down. 

the ultimate fridge horror of the animorphs, i think, is that the yeerks themselves are child soldiers: terribly young people in a terrible situation, born into a war they didn’t start, forced to use alien technologies that mutiliate their sense of self, their capacity for pain, their ability to relate to noncombatants, even their fellow combatants. the first victim of the yeerk empire was the yeerks themselves.