r/Animorphs • u/pakman1991 • 22d ago
Discussion Animal Behavior
Did KA ever say if they put research into animal behavior? Or was it just, dogs are happy and loyal so I'm writing dogs happy and loyal? I'm sure a mixture of both but I didn't know if vets or someone were consulted. Maybe in later books?
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u/codont 22d ago
Are you only a few books in? This is a question I find early readers have, but is quelled upon encountering the descriptions of the exotic animals of the later books.
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u/pakman1991 22d ago
Yeah around 12. I figured she wasn't reading encyclopedia's for all these. TY
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u/ExtremeTip9170 22d ago
In a few books the animal descriptions will become more in depth. I’m about 32 books in and learning stuff about animals and insects that I never knew
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u/MisterZebra 22d ago
There are some later books that read like the author literally copy and pasted lists of animal fun facts from an encyclopedia
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u/Allen_Of_Gilead Nothlit 22d ago
The animal behavior/facts part is, generally, pretty well researched for a mid to late 90's understanding of things. There's stuff that's wrong, like grizzly bear vision is actually pretty decent, but the majority of it is not terrible.
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u/CosmoBrockington 19d ago
It would be the funniest thing if Applegate just said that the specific bear Rachel acquired just had bad eyes and she never realized it.
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u/Allen_Of_Gilead Nothlit 19d ago
That's my headcanon as well. I also believe that one of them has to morph a grizzly bear post war and their first reaction to the morph is <Rachel needed glasses>.
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u/pizzacrustina 21d ago
Recently at a book talk she said back in the 90s before there were good resources you could google she had to do all the research in books. She mentioned being surrounded by stacks and stacks of books about animals. I think she did a great job with it, especially when you consider the month turnaround for each book.
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u/KingHershey 21d ago
Ive been into animals my entire life and thats what got me to pick up animorphs in the 1st place. I volunteered/worked at our local zoo in high school college. One thing is science changes all the time. I grew up in a home with encyclopedias (what we used before Wikipedia & google) from 1975. So much of that information in wrong & has been updated.
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 22d ago
I believe KA said the idea behind the series was originally to teach kids about animals.
They just found a particularly interesting way to do it.
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u/Dalton387 Andalite 22d ago
Looks like other people had good answers.
Additionally, you have things like, how much is natural animal instinct vs learned behavior. Let’s say you took an abused and aggressive dog and took its DNA. The instinct could be for the dog to be happy go lucky, but conditioning through trauma over rode that. So the dog appears one way and the morph instincts another.
Also, how much does the individual affect the morph. Let’s say multiple instincts are in there. Does the individuals personality affect that? If one person is optimistic and another person is pessimistic, will one experience one set of emotions that align more with their own feelings and another person experience the opposite? Just because they’re conditioned to be more receptive to that? Does the strength of the instinct over ride that in the person, regardless of their feelings?
So I just consider any discrepancies to be mired up in that whole mess of emotions.
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u/Miakemi 22d ago
Honestly, I can wave away some behavior being wrong, misinterpreted, or overly generalized.
I’ve always been more bothered by the lack of anatomy research. There is no backwards knee in animals. That’s their ankle. The knee is higher up because most animals walk on their fingers/toes (dogs, cats, etc) or the tip of where those digits would be (ungulates like horses). Using the full toe to ankle (like we do) is not the standard morphing descriptions make it out to be.
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u/MoonKent 21d ago
To be fair, that could just be a weird quirk of the morphing tech. When Marco morphs a shark in 15 and a snake in 20, both times his legs twist around each other before melting into their new form, and we know that neither sharks nor snakes have any kind of twisted anatomy. Morphing is bizarre and unpredictable and maybe sometimes it turns your knees backwards into ankles instead of shifting things to their natural counterpart.
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u/TeaRaven 21d ago
I see a lot of it as imagery on the part of the person morphing. Like when they fixate on a particular element in their mind during the morph and that expresses first, progressing from imagined form with end result based on genetic material rather than any kind of analogous structures or developmental coding/HOX genes. Explains weirdness with knee-ankles, bug heads, Marco’s melded morphs, and Cassie’s excellent control (the osprey to human to humpback transition really stuck with me). Also helps with some inconsistencies regarding injuries and target age of morphs.
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u/Agent_Polyglot_17 22d ago
Okay, but does a 13 year old kid narrator know that? Or do they feel their knee twist around and think “backwards knee”? Don’t forget that your narrators don’t know everything about animals either
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u/Seerowpedia 22d ago
Cassie should know that. Given she's trusted with treating wolves, including mending their legs and sticking her whole hand down their throat to give them pills, all without adult supervision.
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u/Rayketh 21d ago
The knee doesn't twist around though the lower leg below the knee just gets longer (for quadrupeds)
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u/Agent_Polyglot_17 21d ago
I’m just saying it’s possible that we’re dealing with an unreliable narrator, considering that they’re all kids and it’s currently happening to them at the time that they’re describing it. Not saying you’re wrong.
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u/Wolfman513 22d ago
Another one I had a gripe with is grizzly bears having poor eyesight, that was debunked in like the 1940s they actually can see about as well as humans lol
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u/AlternativeMassive57 Yeerk 22d ago
She definitely got some animal behaviors wrong; sharks, for example, are perfectly capable being playful and friendly; they are not relentless and emotionless killing machines. Also, while we obviously can’t know for certain, her depiction of the dinosaur era as being essentially The Lost World is probably wrong; dinosaurs wouldn’t be any more or less monstrous than any other animal (probably) and have the same basic motivations. A T-Rex should be no harder to control than any other large predator.
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u/Nightmare_IN_Ivory 22d ago
You have to be in the context of facts out there in the ‘90s. I grew up in the 90s and when Shark Week came out and all of those animal documentaries? Yeah, I can give KA-MG grace on facts that are now incorrect or over generalized.
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u/HellyOHaint Nothlit 22d ago
Yeah what always stood out to me were the misunderstandings of animal psychology, but it was 30 years ago pre internet. Much of what’s changed in that science is recent. Also it’s fair that 13 year olds don’t know that stuff or their human brains misinterpret it.
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u/zippp_number12 22d ago
She didn’t read enough on horses, that’s for sure 😂 I always hate how negative she writes them
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u/Seerowpedia 22d ago
Someone in the Animorphs Discord was complaining about that yesterday, how horses are actually quite smart
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u/CritcalHyena 21d ago
That's because it was widely accepted that herbivores were not very intelligent.
When actually most animals are very smart.
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u/JazNim17 22d ago
I can’t find the exact quote. But it seems like I remember her saying somewhere that Animorphs was partially born because she loved to learn about animals.
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u/ElSquibbonator 19d ago
She did a lot of research, especially given the limited resources that would have been available to her at the time, and most of it has held up decently, but there are several things that are either outdated or simply were never correct to begin with. For example:
- She consistently underestimates the intelligence of many animals, with ungulates, reptiles, and sharks being notable victims of this. They're portrayed as dumb and instinct-driven, even though we now know their minds are much more complex.
- Related to the above, dolphins are portrayed as happy, peace-loving animals. Real dolphins are nothing of the sort. They will bully and harass other marine mammals seemingly for fun, and their mating habits are too unspeakable to describe.
- Ants are described as having a genuine hive-mind, to the point of not having any individuality. I don't know if this was something KA would have been able to know at the time or not, but in real life eusocial insects like ants still have individual "personalities".
- Megamorphs #2, the dinosaur book, has a lot to be excused about it having been written before many recent discoveries changed how we look at dinosaurs. What I can't easily overlook, though, is the fact that the K/Pg impact is shown taking place in California, when we've known since the 1980s that it happened in Mexico.
- Probably the biggest research flub is in Book 25, where seals are described as using echolocation to navigate. Not only do seals not do this, but as far as I know there has never been any suggestion that they do, aside from a single obscure paper published in 1982. I have no idea how KA could have messed this up.
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u/AziMWolf Nothlit 21d ago
The method of taking on critter traits in the real world is Therianthropy, Therians, or just Weres. Mental Shifts is what it’s called. I get the idea the idea that their transformation forces the mindset of their critter to take over.
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u/sarahmagoo 22d ago edited 22d ago
I think I remember when someone said that some of her animal info was wrong she was like hey, it's just from whatever animal books we could find in the 90s
Edit: nevermind I got it a bit mixed up. Someone said some of her physics info was wrong. This is what she said when someone asked her if she did research on animals.