It seemed incredible to think that Animalia was now 5 years old, but it was. A "Birthday Week Celebration" was thereby arranged, since it landed on a Sunday that year. While many would focus on either the 'pretty girls' or the 'hunky boys' of Animalia, there were, fortunately, enough child-friendly activities to prevent it from being an adult-only celebration.
---
Probably what was the most anticipated event was Animalia's giant birthday cake. While it was indeed enormous, what was unexpected was the fact that it seemed to be a combination of marbled cake (made with carob, of course) and jell-o poke cake underneath the frosting. While there were some who were surprised about it, it did make for an interesting combination.
---
While Nate and Shuixing's wedding held the most attention on Heiya Island, news of Animalia's Birthday did reach them. While they didn't modify the wedding too much, since it would cause a delay and upset Shuixing even more, Ami did give a speech about it during the wedding reception.
---
Probably the biggest birthday "event" was the Herm Bachelor/Bachelorette Auction. When the "herm gene" was officially announced alongside the auction, the number of applications for herm Animalians had shot through the roof. Of course, due to popular (internet) culture, the majority of requests were for either hyenas or horses, but there were a few requests for other species, including one that requested a dragon. This last one was denied simply because the Virus simply could not create mythical creatures. An early test, combining tyrannosaur and pterosaur DNA, even "reinforced" with the polyamory gene, confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that creating a dragon using dinosaur DNA was simply impossible.
The third most requested conversion out of all of these were shark, since the week before was Discovery Channel's Shark Week. While Animalia as a whole didn't celebrate it, there were a few themed publicity stunts that helped it out, in a way. For example, Dino Island had a giant balloon in the shape of a, life-sized, historical reconstruction of a megalodon with aluminum-forged jaws that were operated by hydraulic power. This, unintentionally resulted in something called the "big bite challenge" where things were inserted into said balloon's mouth to be crushed to see the effect of a megalodon's bite.
Another thing that was, somewhat, expected was that all those who were applying for "herm status" were those who were officially "confused" about their real gender, with roughly 10-15% of them being those who had been butchered by black market surgeons. Fortunately, most of these were able to be reimbursed enough via Project Phoenix.
While they were glad with this, not quite, fix for their gender identity problems, almost all of the herms were a little disappointed that they weren't able to register for the IAC games on any event. While primarily this was because the registration for the events were closed, it was also because they needed, not only acclimation classes, but also time to reach equilibrium with their new hormones. While this did result in some complaints from newly minted herms, the fact that a lot of them were accidentally exposing themselves with spontaneous erections during their workout periods helped justify this stance.
---
While Animalia's "5th Birthday Week" was officially part of the IAC this year, it was considered one of the "low events" compared to things like the IAC Tournament, as well as the comparison between IAC Athletes and Olympic Athletes.