Jatheel

The Jatheel were a race of fish-like humanoids originating on the planet Haperis VI, which they called Ikushika. They became known to the Imperium early in the Second Era, and there was hope that they could be brought under the rule of the Imperium as a lesser people. However, difficulties during the first real diplomatic mission led to the jatheel and the Imperium becoming implacable enemies for decades.

Biology and Anatomy
Like the altrasians (often mistakenly believed to be a related race) the jatheel are amphibious humanoids with both lungs and gills. However, jatheel lungs were less highly evolved, meaning that their gills were often their primary method of respiration. They were also not evolved for speech such as a human might think of, though they were capable of vocalisations and in fact had a complex language made up of the susurrations which they could produce.

The jatheel had a rigidly defined male-female sex division, and there were no actual known cases of intersex or transsexual individuals, though such ideas did exist in ancient jatheel theological works.

An ectothermic race, the jatheel preferred the temperate waters of their homeworld to any other locale, though there were groups which took to the cooler areas. Once the race had achieved space travel, they maintained their bodily temperatures and functions through the use of specialised pump-suits and "wet" stasis tanks.

A Two-Step Lifecycle
Young jatheel were spawned in the warmest waters near the equator of Haperis VI. Most births resulted in twins, the infants released from the mother in a membranous sac. The sacs were kept in a crèche-like building in the waters near the Grand Temple and were tended to by older youngsters. After thirty to fifty-five standard days of further development, the sacs ruptured and the youngsters were removed. The lungs being immature at that stage, young jatheel were exclusively water dwellers for the first six to ten standard years of life. Once the lungs showed sufficient signs of development, the youngsters would take their first tentative trips onto the land.

Older jatheel, while capable of traversing the wider world, and indeed "swimming" in the air due to a combination of light bone structure and inflatable air-bladders at strategic points within the body, did require return trips to the water. Usually, by twenty standard years of age, they could spend a majority of their time out in the open, though after thirty-five lung maturity would begin to decline and trips back to the home waters would become more and more frequently necessary.

Hybrids
At some point during the back-and-forth in the earliest days of the Jatheel-Imperium war, both sides made attempts at hybridisation, for espionage purposes and to exploit possible biological weaknesses of the other side. Very few of these attempts are known to have been successful in any degree, with only one product of the experiments, a female known as Targa Nonka, surviving into anything like adulthood.

History and Culture
Little was known about the jatheel before the war of 1670-1681 EI, but some information did come to light through capture and interrogation, as well as incursions onto their home and colony worlds.

Jatheel society as it stood at the time of the conflict was around 6000 years old (TV: Strike Count/PROSE: The Law of Ancients) and had developed at a fairly sedate speed until about two decades before official first contact with humans. (PROSE: Mustheeli)