Just how vast is the Last Sea, capable of supporting whales, giant squids, and monstrous crustaceans?
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…that random encounter table is dumb. Just, holy cow, that is dumb.
1 Dragon turtle
2Kelpie
3Strangleweed|
4Sea Lion
5Athasian dolphin
6Puddingfish
7Skyfish
8Kreel
9Athasian shark
10Athasian lizard man
11Tako
12Squark
13Dragonfish
14Electric eel
15Lamprey
16Manta ray
17Sting ray
18Giant seahorse
19Common whale
20Killer whale
It is equally likely that you will encounter a lizard man, a manta ray, and the one-of-a-kind immortal megapredator that spends most of its time asleep on the sea floor.
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And the table just to the left of it has horses.
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Horses can swim, lolz.
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Using a pixel measurement tool on the second box set map, I get about 71-72 miles in longest dimension and 36-37 miles across at the widest point. It’s vaguely triangular, so the surface area is probably somewhere around 1200 square miles.
That’s a large lake but pretty small for a sea - much larger than the Dead Sea, comparable to Great Salt Lake (though its area varies a lot).
While it’s a lot deeper than Great Salt Lake, I don’t think dragon turtles living there makes sense at all. Killer whales are also extremely questionable.
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Probably not, but its also an animal sanctuary, holding tons of animals from an otherwise vanished ecosystem, so its bound to have wacky stuff.
But i personally totally agree that dragon turtles and killer whales are maybe a bit too much.
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Hmm, did the Mind Lords introduce sea creatures that weren’t originally native to Marnita to preserve them?
Or was Marnita at one time connected to a larger sea?
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My position is simply that Marnita probably holds the last remaining dolphins, lizardfolk, and fish on Athas, so any other aquatic or semi-aquatic creatures might also be fair game.
The possibilities for DMs are (apparently, if you follow that encounter table) endless. 
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Lizardfolk and dolphins absolutely, but I don’t think Marnita is the only place on Athas with fish.
I can see reasons for fish to be absent from the Lake of Golden Dreams (too hot), the lake on Lake Island (possibly too new), and the Vanishing Lake (not continuously present), but that leaves several good possibilities. Lake Pit is a pretty good-sized lake (23 square miles IIRC), and doesn’t seem to be boiling hot, hypersaline, or otherwise deadly, so I think it ought to have a variety of fish. There’s a lake near Thamasku which looks even larger. There’s a good-sized river running through the Kano Swamp, and a small lake at its source in the Koschak Mts. (as well as a rumored larger body of water somewhere beyond the kreen empire). Rajaat’s Swamp might also have fish, though they’re probably weird mutant fish.
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Also, apparently rice farming benefits from having live fish in the flooded fields (source, an infotainment video I once saw). So maybe some plants would be like rice.
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The Vanishing Lake opens the possibility of lungfish, too.
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But if the Last Sea is home to so much life—and such large species at that—it doesn’t have enough capacity to sustain it. The plankton and krill that serve as nutrients for the lower levels of the food chain cannot be enough.
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New theory: The Last Sea has a portal to Water at the bottom; some of these creatures are just visiting.
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Rice does canonically exist on Athas, grown in Draj and I think Nibenay as well. But iirc there’s a reference to “mudflat rice” so Athasian rice may not grow in standing water like our rice does.
Entirely possible!
You would think, but OTOH this is not entirely a natural environment. The Mind Lords have messed with things. It might be more productive than you would naturally expect due to something like aquaculture.
But there’s a lot of large predators in a small space.
That could work!
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Lovely thread! Getting late so I have no thoughts to add just want to add some positivity 
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