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I may add an additional image to this later but it can be reviewed/approved without it

I'm not done reading this yet. Since it's so long, I'll give feedback in parts.

"it has the intuition" Instinct, you mean?
"parental instincts" Do the Seashrogs look like infant Wolvershrogs?

"Fully aware are a different species" I wonder if animals can even recognize "natural kinds", much less species...do cats know that they are cats and humans are humans, or do they consider humans weird cats or "those big two-legged things"? I recommend rephrasing it to "they are aware of the big physical differences between them" or "aware that they are reproductively incompatible", if the latter can be assumed a proxy for species recognition...and I'm not sure whether that counts.

"beams also serve to support additional floors, shelves, and various ramps" That seems rather sophisticated architecture. Great apes are highly intelligent and regularly create fairly sophisticated nests; judging by Wikipedia, the closest parallel to the Wolvershrog's architecture may be how orangutans may add "pillows", "blankets", "roofs", and "bunk-beds" to their nests.

Since the "furniture" may lead one to conclude they're sapient, I recommend relating them to orangutans in the description.

" Wolvershrog has borrowed ideas from the Maineiac Rivershrog" I don't think they can communicate. Did it simply observe them making nests and eventually imitated them? Certainly, animals can imitate other animals, but borrowing nest-building "ideas" seems rather complex.

"due to their close relation" Using it as a noun suggests they have a cousin between them or something of that sort. I suggest, "due to being closely related".

Wow, that's a long description...it's about 500 words longr than for the Pollooks genus group, though substantially shorter than for the Seashrog.

I recommend splitting this into subheadings, like I did for the Pollooks and you did for the Seashrog.

This post has been edited by Coolsteph: Mar 30 2021, 09:08 PM

I do mean intuition; I chose that wording based on a comparison I saw between earlier humans and later ones in terms of how they gather materials for tool-making, with earlier species just getting any old rock and later species knowing intuitively to look for the good ones.

Seashrogs would somewhat resemble a juvenile or subadult wolvershrog in a shorter summer coat, though it's more "small shrog alone and cold" that activates the parental instincts than actual resemblance. Shrogs are smart and can tell the difference between their own kind and another species, as animals far less intelligent on Earth easily can as well.

The internal architecture would better resemble the nest construction of those ants that weave nests out of leaves, though with use of pillars to keep everything from collapsing. A lot of it is just logs laying around.

Glad you liked the barbed spear suggestion. Now we just need some manner of Orca analogue to team up with them and drive large prey to surface, that way they can get speared repeatedly.

I'm still not sure whether it would be capable of deliberately making jerky, much less by splashing it in seawater and leaving it to dry. Brine is not simply seawater, unless we presume Sagan 4's oceans are very salty compared to Earth's. Seawater has a salinity of 3.6%, which is on the extreme low end of things called "brine". If anything, splashing the food with seawater would just make it more moist, delaying its proper drying.

There is the option of using super-concentrated salty urine, as seals and sea lions have urine up to 2 and a half times saltier than seawater (theoretically 9% salt), but that's probably too gross. According to Wikipedia, at least 20% salt is necessary to kill off most decomposition organisms, though I'm not sure whether only applies to fresh meat or includes dry meat too. Even if it did use super-salty urine, 9% probably wouldn't be enough to delay decomposition to last it through most of the winter. I don't think it could smoke the meat to reduce the salt needed. I'd recommend either dropping the "splash of seawater" part for just dried meat, kept in a dry, enclosed area, or adding some very potent, special preservative herb species it uses before this one is approved.

(There's the fairly plausible, low-tech options of pickling and maybe using honey from beach Xenobees, but that's far from jerky.)

Some references:
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/que...erve-their-food
https://www.reddit.com/r/Survival/comments/...ival_situation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt-cured_meat

Made it more generic preservation.

This post has been edited by Disgustedorite: Apr 2 2021, 07:26 PM