So I live in a quite temperate zone, and I am not very good at handling temperature. You’d think that a region with a middle of the pack, basic temperature range that doesn’t go into either extreme would be mild enough for me, but alas, I am but a little autistic white boy who can handle no spice 😔 for most of the year, even in the early spring and fall when the days are somewhat warm, the mornings are chilly enough that I have to bring a heavy coat to the bus stop. Then, depending on the season, it could either be nowhere near warm enough or way too warm for the rest of the day. So to cope, like literally everything I do for some god-forsaken reason, I think a lot about how temperature regulation would feel if I was an Amphimorpho. And let me tell ya, it would not feel good.
So Amphimorpho are extremely large, often standing a good couple inches taller than their human forms while also being thick as hell and possessing tails that can extend to up to twice their body’s length. That’s a long noodle! And if there’s one thing we know about large animals, it’s that their bodies can get hot. The square cube law says that as an object’s length doubles, its area squares and its volume cubes. I don’t know that much about math so I might be wrong about the actual law itself, but what I do know is that the volume of an object increases exponentially faster than the surface area of an object. What this means for large animals is that as the amount of cellular mass producing heat increases, the amount of skin through which the heat can diffuse fails to keep up. A super-sized alien noodle like our own would be fairly warm-bodied, potentially too warm for our brains to survive in. That’s before we even mention the two biggest issues we have; fur and shapeshifting. Our fur is dense, and rather fluffy at that. While this protects us from minor cuts, scratches and parasites, this would also cause us to retain even more heat. Now, I don’t know that much about biology, and I know that different kinds of fur can absorb, insulate or diffuse heat differently, so I’m willing to believe that our fur wouldn’t have us baking like a reindeer in a rainforest, but it would certainly compound the next issue. Our shapeshifting involves our cells grasping onto each other, pushing and pulling each other around, rearranging and repurposing via the breaking down and rebuilding of the structures that make up a cell’s body. How does a goo cell become a muscle cell? Well, it would presumably have to strengthen its cell membrane, form connections to other cells, and develop a stronger cytoskeleton. This would require a lot of chemical reactions with all kinds of enzymes and acids, not only making the change happen, but also copy and transmitting DNA instructions in accordance to some automatically-translated signal from the brain. This would obviously take a lot of energy, and they don’t call it burning calories for nothing. Shapeshifting would bake you. It would be especially bad when going to your human form. Remember all that thickness I was talking about, and the crazy long noodle tail? Well, your body doesn’t just shed a bunch of goo when you get rid of them. Then you would be leaving massive goo blobs everywhere, and you would need to regenerate all those cells. No, your body absorbs it back into the main body, compressing all those cells down into one super dense goo patty. Just as many cells, just as much heat, so much less surface area. And all of this goes without saying how taxing it would be to constantly force liquid muscles in a rigid structure.
But, all this makes me think of the other hand. Our cells are fluid. This would make things tough, sure, our bodies would have to put in the extra effort to keep us solid, but aside from that it would be a massive boon. Our more malleable cells would be able to expand and compress with ease, not only giving us greater strength and flexibility, but allowing us to fill our larger volumes with less cells. This less densely-packed arrangement would produce less heat for the same surface area and volume! Probably! Not only that, but it would also assist in circulation. It would not just be our blood flowing through our bodies, soaking up heat deep within before carrying it out to the surface to be diffused and dismissed. No, our whole body could flow like that! Not necessarily the way our blood does, where a single cell would flow freely throughout our whole bodies with zero structure or solidity, rather it would be localized. A muscle is made of many cells, and so long as they all stay linked as strong tendons, they would presumably all be functional. What would go wrong if a tendon that has been building up heat inside the body were to migrate outwards to catch a cool breeze? Best of all, since these advanced temperature regulations mechanisms are all based around our fluid biologies, they can be completely controlled by our minds! We could keep them on autopilot, let our biologies maintain our equilibrium, but if we’re feeling too hot or too cold we could just say “fuck it, I’ll spend the extra energy” and crank it up a bit! Growing extra thick fur on an extra cold day, panting with extra deep breathes on an extra warm day.
Ultimately, I’m not a biologist like the creator of our little species is. I don’t know how much of this is right or wrong, and I don’t know how much I’ve actually thought out. I just went down a long, very neurodivergent rabbit hole and came out the other side with a collection of very specific theories built on some very shakey factoids. I’m pretty sure I’ve got something good here, and I think I got it pretty right. It’s the middle of the night and I have school tomorrow, so I hope I did or else I wasted this time on nothing 😅
I think that, as an Amphimorpho, I’d like to live someplace cool. How cold exactly is up to personal preference, some people like the Swedish heights and some people are used to New York winters. Either way, so long as it’s not too warm for my hairless form, I could always manage. After all, I could just grow more fur if it got too cold!
But alas, I am but a boring human boy, and I am subject to the whims of the weatherman. Forever doomed to be just a bit too warm to fall asleep at night, but then too cold in the morning to get out from my covers.
