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Deep-sea merfolk (Abyssugens hispida), sometimes written as deepsea merfolk or deepsea siren, are sentient creatures that inhabit the abyssal zone, unable to survive naturally at low pressures, especially long periods out of the water.
Despite their misleading name, deep-sea mermaids are not part of the merfolk family, although deep-sea mermaids were once mistakenly classified as Maregens hispida.
Abyssugens are mysterious creatures, statistically almost never coming into contact with surface creatures. They are highly intelligent, but any rare interaction with other sentient creatures has invariably labeled them "weird": speaking a completely different language and living a solitary lifestyle in the deep, where concepts and priorities are markedly different from those of the surface waters or even on land, can make communication with a creature unlike themselves difficult.
Abyssal sirens have been reported to be capable of creating exquisitely effective magical artifacts; they are resourceful alchemists and artisans, inventing any trick to make their lives easier. They are true opportunists, seeking maximum yield from minimum effort, a trait necessary for them to survive in the harsh environment of the abyssal depths.
They are also called abyssal merfolk, people of the abyss, or simply abyssals.
Conservation status
Appearance and Physiology
Deep-sea merfolk have decidedly less human-like features than their surface counterparts, the Maregens. Their heads are more flattened, with a blunt but more prominent snout, slightly upward-pointing, revealing a pair of mouths, both functional and equipped with thin, sharp teeth, designed to tear flesh and hold prey during their lightning-fast attacks. Their nostrils are slanted and sensitive.
It has been reported that, although both are perfectly functional for both sound and feeding, many deep-sea sirens prefer to eat from one mouth and sing from the other. Over time, the singing mouth's tongue thickens and becomes more trained, making it visible to the eye which is which; both tongues are mobile and pointed, smooth, and pink.
Their skin is thick and tough, covered with tiny, adapted scales whose structure and shape are vaguely similar to those of the placoid scales of sharks and rays, which leave room for photophores. As pups, they lack these, so their internal organs and veins can be seen through their delicate skin.
Deep-sea merfolk have an elongated, almost tapered silhouette, with a distinctive posture that sees them hunched forward. They tend to remain static, upright when at rest; they have a prominent, jagged-looking dorsal fin, an anal fin, and a large, modified caudal fin, which has split to be flanked by two smaller fins (more abundant in photophores; it is uncertain whether these are decorative or somehow enhance their swimming ability). On the upper body, they have two double-jointed limbs (at the elbow and wrist), called arms, capable of rapid, wide movements, culminating in bony, webbed, prehensile hands with opposable thumbs. They also have backward-pointing bony tips at the elbow.
Their large, round eyes are lidless, revealing the large white ring of the sclera. They are surrounded by photophores on the skin that emit a pale blue or aquamarine light on command, allowing them to pierce the darkness of the abyss and gaze around comfortably. Due to the arrangement of the photophores, it might seem as if their eyes themselves are glowing, but this is not the case. Unlike fish, they are not fixed, and a deep-sea mermaid can rotate them in their sockets to direct her gaze at will; at rest, they exhibit a certain lack of focus.
In addition to their eye contours, deep-sea merfolk have a high concentration of photophores on their tails, which can create impressive light displays. These patterns are generally slightly different from one individual to another, and they do so from birth, which is why a single flash is enough for a deep-sea mermaid to recognize a previously encountered individual. Deep-sea merfolk' bioluminescence is possible thanks to specialized mitochondrial cells within their bodies called "photocytes," which create light internally by oxidizing a protein called luciferin, bringing it into contact with the enzyme luciferase. These photocytes are found inside the photophores, organs contained in the skin of deep-sea merfolk and several other deep-sea organisms. They have a glandular portion, from which the light emanates, a reflective layer lining the bottom, and refractive devices, a sort of organic lens that condenses the light.
Given the low temperatures, the most delicate parts of deep-sea merfolk's bodies are protected by thick gray or white fur, which grows around the head and throat, leaving the gills exposed. These are protected by both a gill cover and tufts that grow on the jaw and cover the respiratory openings when viewed from the front.
The bones of deep-sea merfolk are light and relatively flexible, yet fragile due to the difficulty in obtaining calcium at the depths where they live.
Their stomachs are more elastic than those of many other animals, allowing them to eat and store as much as possible if they manage to find a large amount of food at once.
Average life expectancy
Unknown, even to deep-sea merfolk. Deep-sea merfolk have a hard time keeping track of time, and their perception of the sequence of events is confusing and often almost nonexistent, so much so that their language has no word for "time," nor even for "present," "past," or "future." For them, the world is divided into "what I know" and "what I don't yet know," thanks in part to their incredibly precise memory.
Sexual Dimorphism
There is marked sexual dimorphism in adults, making it easy to distinguish males from females at a glance. The first factor to consider is size: including the tail, the male rarely exceeds 1.4 meters, compared to the impressive 5 meters of the female. This is clearly a phenomenon of deep-sea gigantism: the large size of a deep-sea animal would result in less heat loss, crucial in deep waters that rarely exceed freezing points, and a reduced need for constant activity, a characteristic of small organisms.
Furthermore, males tend to have more delicate colors, generally cool shades of blue, gray, and purple, with dark streaks and patterns running across their bodies. In contrast, females rapidly darken as they grow, reaching pitch black as adults.
Habitat and Diet
Deep-sea merfolk have made the saltwater between the deep bathyal zone and the beginning of the abyssal zone their home, moving up and down depending on the water's turbidity and the time of year, almost always finding themselves immersed in the aphotic zone, the area inaccessible to sunlight. We are therefore talking about a variation between 1,800 and 2,000 meters deep.
Their diet is exclusively carnivorous, which has forced them to become very unfussy and excellent predators. They would not disdain feeding on human flesh or that of other mermaids, sometimes even resorting to cannibalism.
Behavior
Sociability
Deep-sea mermaids mostly lead solitary lives, except for the time mothers and their young spend together during the young's early development.
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| A deep sea merfolk baby with active photophores. |
The mother remains with her young for the first five years of their lives, providing protection, food, and teaching. The fries group together in small platoons (a term that in Maregens and Abyssugens indicates medium-sized groups of four to thirty individuals). The mother's attitude, while loving, is far from purely altruistic: to avoid getting lost in the darkness of the deep sea, the young deep-sea merfolk make extensive use of bioluminescence and sing small, high-pitched, melodious calls to signal their presence to their family. However, by doing so, they also attract various predators, which the mother, using her young as bait, can catch and devour much more easily. The song of the young deep-sea sharks has been compared to that of a songbird: high-pitched, sometimes modulated, but somehow "eerie" or "nostalgic" to human ears.
By the time they're five years old, deep-sea merfolk have become too large for their mother to benefit from sharing food with them, so she stops feeding them and encourages them to find a different area to live in. At that point, the young disperse and will likely live isolated lives that may or may not be interrupted by a brief encounter with another of their kind and, perhaps, a fortunate mating.
Even as adults, they retain charming, harmonious voices, a characteristic likely unique for creatures of their habitat. They are significantly less capable of ranging the sounds they emit and replicating the speech of other creatures than merfolk, especially considering that speech has little or no use for them beyond the age of five; the long-distance call they emit to advertise their location and availability to potential mates has been described as a sort of melodious "whine," a mix between the song of a whale and that of a great black-throated loon.
Hunting
Deep-sea merfolk are opportunistic hunters, rarely wasting energy actively chasing and searching for their prey. Much more commonly, they use the stun technique to hunt: they have a very keen sense of smell, and when they sense something approaching, they activate all their photophores in a flash that can stun the intruder. If it's dangerous, they immediately turn off their photophores and flee; if it's potential prey, they lunge to grab and kill it instantly. Their approach is different if the prey is a conspecific (see Courtship and Reproduction).
Several deep-seamerfolk can also use tools and artifacts they create themselves, based on lessons taught by their mother and on long-term experimentation. They are voracious predators that will readily devour any animal smaller than themselves that is safe to eat; This could make female deep-sea mermaids decidedly dangerous to humans, were it not for the fact that the two habitats are so distant that the danger is merely hypothetical... especially considering that the current human scuba diving record is "only" 332 meters.
Alone
Deep-sea merfolk are not territorial. When not interacting with another creature, they usually remain still or swim lazily without a clear direction, occasionally changing course, with their bioluminescence turned off. They travel, carrying with them the artifacts they have created over time, in bags fashioned from the skins of other animals or by hand.
They are very often found immersed in a sort of meditative state, a practice thought to help them conserve the enormous energy a sentient being expends on brain activity. When "wandering," their mental state is similar to Vipaśyanā meditation.
Courtship and reproduction
In the deep, the extremely low population density makes it difficult for the sexes to meet. For this reason, when this occurs, neither the male nor the female refuses the opportunity to mate unless the prospective mate is seriously ill.
Once sexually mature, if a deep sea merfolk discovers traces of another merfolk's passage (an olfactory trail, for example, or objects left behind), she begins to sing intermittently to signal her presence. Females' songs are lower and more vibrant, while males' are slightly more modulated: the differentiation of their songs is useful for immediately identifying whether one is dealing with an individual of the same or opposite sex.
Deep sea merfolk are virtually always available for mating; since females undergo induced ovulation, several matings are necessary to achieve fertilization. Even if the female already has young she is caring for, it is not at all unlikely that she will respond to a male's advances.
During mating, male and female swim parallel to each other until the male inserts one of his two hemipenes into the female's oviduct. The hemipenes are normally covered inside the body, and are exposed during reproduction through the erectile tissue. Erection is caused by the pumping of water from the outside into the body, which an organ called the siphon introduces into the corpora cavernosa of the erectile tissue through a special orifice. Just like Maregens, Abyssugens are virtually impossible to mate out of water: not only would an erection be impossible, but even the expulsion of sperm, due to the engorging of special structures that pump it out, occurs through the use of water.
Males are further gratified by finding a mate because, between matings, she takes on the task of hunting for both of them and keeping them both in optimal conditions to produce many healthy eggs. At the end of their lovemaking encounter, the two go their separate ways, as remaining alone would invariably lead to competition for food and resources.
Deep-sea merfolk are ovoviviparous: the mother incubates the eggs inside her until they hatch, at which point the newborn deep-sea mermaids are finally ready to enter the world. They have litters ranging in number from fifteen to forty, with an interesting infant mortality rate that hovers consistently below three percent when the young are in the mother's care, but rises sharply as soon as the young begin living on their own.
Paradoxically, one of the dangers, albeit rare, that young deep-sea merfolk face is a possible encounter with an adult other than one of their parents: if sufficiently hungry, a mature specimen might attempt to devour a young deep-sea merfolk.
Gallery of images (Click to enlarge!)
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