Car·ken (kar'kēn)

Culture:
Carken enjoy war and fighting, they will gladly join other people’s wars as well as create their own out of false pretenses. However, they are at least polite enough to ask before joining other people’s wars. In short, they are opportunistic pirates, not evil, but gray. They are dominated by males, since females are birthed so rarely and they cannot leave the home world due to specific conditions needing to be met for offspring to hatch.

Government:
Chiefdom

Natural Climate:
Muddy swamp world

Home World:
Iiieeeiiiewn (or just Home)

Physical:
Have tentacles and mandibles and big buggy eyes, leathery skin, look like octopi. Their bodies also have sufficient cartilage that they are able to survive on land, moving across it in a tentacle-crawl. Their planet is mostly swamp with often rains, making tentacles more useful, they eat bugs and things they find in the mud, searching for it with their tentacles. Males often cover themselves in whirling tattoos that are coded to show their victories in battle.

Breeding Habits:
Females are fertile throughout the year and mate whenever they want, but only lay eggs twice a year and those eggs only hatch when conditions are exactly right. A female will have a hundred eggs fertilized every time she mates and lays about four or five hundred thumb-sized eggs.While the Carken have tried to artificially create a habitat so females could breed off-planet, they did not succeed. There were too many factors involved, which means that females do not leave their home world. Females when they hit puberty will go off and look for a cave to take as their territory, then settle there and wait for males to come find her and feed her. She encourages the more experienced males to hang around by breeding with them and when the eggs hatch, she pushes the hundreds of tadpole sized babies out to the waiting males who will scoop up a basket full and take them off to raise. There are no ways to figure out male from female until puberty, so a male hopes that he's captured one female and raised it, making her more inclined to take him as the one she mates with most frequently. If a male only caught males, he takes them out into space to get them some experience- they follow his orders for the most part and are loyal to him, just as he's loyal to the one who raised him, and loyalty flows upwards to the oldest and most experienced Carken.