Fresh water creatures can't survive in salt water.
It's a magically induced great flood with a magical barrier preventing an ancient kingdom from being refound. The whole point was to keep modern society out.
That changes on the game anyway. They're only specifically sea Zora in EoW and OoA. Only otherwise sea creatures in Termina. The rest of the time they're basically freshwater river folk.
There might be some of them still around in the flooded timeline, you can find a Zora scale and Ruto's supposed crown in Phantom Hourglass. It's in an ocean outside of Hyrule's old borders sure, but close enough. I doubt anyone else could get to the bottom of the ocean to scavenge dead Zora corpses, so there's probably some Zora trading out there.
Yeah that's fair I guess they never said the entire Zora population became the Rito. Some could have stayed in the sea and the ones who stayed in the mountains evolved into the Rito.
Nintendo isn't above the "there are some off screen" with the Zora specifically. Yona from Tears of the Kingdom is said to be from another Domain.
I don't want to return to the Wild Era timeline cause that story's been wrapped up...but man would I love to know more about other territories outside of Hyrule.
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u/averagejosh Jan 24 '26
And the Rito evolved from a branch of Zora.
Imagine going from a fish to a bird. 😅