Deep-sea merfolk

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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

Data Deficient (DD): The available information is insufficient to provide a direct or indirect assessment of the risk of extinction.

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.

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!)

	Baby	Babies with mother
By mrsketchy	By senkar	By LovelyWingsArt
Comparison with other species	Colonna 2	colonna 3
Colonna 1	Colonna 2	colonna 3
Colonna 1	Colonna 2	colonna 3

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Pistrix

A male pistrix.

Pistrix (Apocapisces regalecus), also known as pistrici (singular pistrice), or as serpents rouge in France, or even by the evocative name of reddragon sirens in English-speaking places, are a genus of sentient aquatic creatures.
Unlike the more well-known and common merfolk, pistrix cannot breathe atmospheric oxygen, lacking lungs. They share a number of aesthetic and physiological characteristics with the pacific oarfish (Regalecus glesne), so much so that the other merfolk species themselves often refer to pistrix simply as "oarfish".

They are sadly known as harbingers of bad news and, according to some, even of the apocalypse. 

 

Taxonomy

Despite their humanoid torso appearance, pistrix are not mammals: they do not give birth, but lay eggs, and are unable to produce milk. Taxonomically, they are much closer to the regalecus (Regalecus glesne) than to humans. 

The distinctly humanoid appearance of their torso (at least at first glance) is due to two factors: 

1. Phaneric mimicry. By imitating a distant species, such as the common merfolk, pistrix may appear less desirable, or simply elicit more empathy among the merfolk themselves, who have hunted them for years and continue to do so (albeit less heavily, perhaps thanks to the deterrent of the pistrix's humanoid appearance); 

2. Evolutionary convergence. Long before developing a more human-like face with frontal eyes, pistrix developed arms, through intense modification of the muscles of their pectoral fins, and with these they learned to construct objects. The rest of their torsos later adapted to the arm muscles, giving them greater dexterity.

Not all pistrix, however, have a particularly human/merfolk appearance, and their "atavistic" appearance is clearly visible in the body shape of young ones. 

Appearance 

Pistrix have a humanoid torso, with two arms, generally slightly longer than a human's, and hands with opposable thumbs, contrasting with a lower body that is extremely similar to the rear of an oarfish. 
Their body is completely devoid of scales. 
Adults have a pale silver, ribbon-shaped body from the waist down, laterally compressed and extremely elongated, with a dorsal fin extending the entire length. Their color ranges from pale pink to bright red, passing through orange and rust, although deep scarlet is the most common. 
The body often features wavy dark spots, sometimes in the form of dots and sometimes stripes.

Typical adult female

A series of faint horizontal stripes, similar to "grill marks," is evident in some specimens, while absent in others. After death, specimens rapidly lose all color and pattern. 
Pistrix have extremely long bodies: the longest specimen ever measured exceeded seventeen meters in length from forehead to the tip (autotomized, therefore without caudal fin) of its body. 
Adult pistrix rarely possess a tail, due to the very common autotomy, or voluntary detachment of the last portion of the body (similar to the way lizards shed their tails). For years, it was believed their bodies abruptly ended without a tail fin. Now, the true appearance of these creatures' tails is known: they have a unique "webbed" appearance, reminiscent of a dragon's wing, and, like the dorsal fin, are very vividly colored, generally scarlet red. 
Their skin, although scaleless, is densely tuberculatized, especially on the ventral area, where these small, horny protuberances resemble small, sharp-tipped cones and are one of the few defenses these creatures possess against predators.  

Color and nutrition 

A malnourished specimen

An unbalanced or insufficient diet can cause a pistrix to completely change their appearance. The color of a pistrices' fins and mane is primarily due to natural molecules called carotenoids, such as astaxanthin, which are introduced into their bodies through the consumption of carotenoid-rich animals, primarily krill, which in healthy specimens constitute nearly 90% of their diet.

A specimen that hasn't been able to consume their adequate amount of crustaceans will rapidly lose the color in their fins, but that's not the only side effect: to function in the frigid depths where they live, pistrices must consume fatty foods, such as crustaceans, and limiting this will make the individual much slimmer.

Almost always, a malnourished specimen is unable to maintain their full body length, which requires a constant supply of calories, and will autotomize, losing part of their tail through self-detachment. Specimens with an incomplete diet will therefore have pink fins, rather than carmine red, slimmer bodies, and almost always lack a caudal fin. If the incorrect diet persists, the fin rays can suffer structural damage, becoming droopy, rather than erect.

 

Behavior

Although their serpentine appearance has inspired legends of these creatures moving on land, pistrix are fully adapted to living in the ocean, at depths of at least 150 meters. 

Not only are they unable to crawl on land (unlike their naga cousins, also belonging to the Apocapisces genus), but being forced onto land is a highly traumatic experience for them. Their delicate bodies, lacking the protection of scales, are easily damaged when dragged along the ground, especially given their weight, and they are too compressed laterally to crawl on their bellies. 

Furthermore, they cannot breathe on land, unlike merfolks. 

If a pistrix manages to survive on dry land for hours, it is only thanks to their extraordinary resistance to low oxygen concentrations, but if they are not re-hydrated with salty water, they still risk dying of dehydration within the first fifty to sixty minutes.

Sleep

Pistrix, like all fish, sleep with their eyes open, as they don't have eyelids, but curiously, they prefer to sleep in particularly dark environments.

Unlike many other fish (especially non-deep-sea ones), their primary way of perceiving danger is not their eyes, but their highly sensitive lateral line and their electrical field. Pistrix fish are able to emit electrical impulses and then detect changes in the electrical field that forms around their bodies, thanks to a series of delicate sensors on their skin (which is bare, completely scaleless), allowing them to perceive their surroundings with extreme precision even in total darkness.

Their highly sensitive electrical field is also one of the reasons they dislike being physically touched by others: this is perceived by their sensors as an interruption of the electrical field, and therefore a source of stress (their brain may interpret it, for example, as the approach of a predator).

To avoid interrupting their electrical field, pistrix fish sleep without touching any surface, remaining stretched out and upright in the water.

They typically sleep in pairs, about five feet apart, and their combined electrical fields reassure them of the safety of the water and their partner's presence.

They can dream, but they lack rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, so they lack the bizarre, rambling dreams that humans are capable of producing. Their dreams are more mundane, resembling memories or deep meditation.

 

Typical adult male

Culture

The pistrix once knew how to create pages that were impervious to water, by spinning chitin from shrimp shells into tissues from which they cut pages and then injecting ink into the semi-transparent surface layer of the page, much like tattooing. 
Today, this art is lost, due to the fall of the pistrix civilization and the impossibility of its stable reformation due to threats from the common merfolk, who are much more numerous and aggressive. 

Time and aging

Pistrix have no real concept of the passage of time, or at least nothing close to the way humans perceive it.

Since ancient times, humans have measured time by observing the passage of day and night, or even by the changing world around them through the seasons. But in the abyssal depths, where sunlight doesn't reach and seasons have little meaning, pistrix don't count hours, days, or years.

It goes without saying that celebrating a birthday is obviously not part of their culture.

Considering the events pistrix remember, however, it's possible to establish that they are an extremely long-lived species: some specimens remember the Gray Age and even the time before Ragnarok, more than three hundred years before the events of "Fish Don't Cry."

Their bodies are of indeterminate growth, although after a certain size, they slow down considerably. The size of a pistrix is ​​determined by many factors, not only by the time it has been around, but also by its diet, water temperature, amount of movement, and even its subspecies.

Sometimes, ancient pistrix can be shorter and smaller than younger specimens, especially if they have experienced long periods of malnutrition or have undergone several autotomies. It goes without saying that it is not easy to determine a specimen's age without laboratory testing.

Sangreal, one of the few specimens that have consented to tissue study, is estimated to be around 40-45 years old: he may appear middle-aged compared to a human, but he is young, albeit already mature.

His grandmother, a much more imposing specimen than him, was already as tall as she is now when Sangreal was born, which makes it safe to assume she's at least a hundred years old, and given her memory of certain past events, she's probably well into her 250s or even 300s.

 

Diet

Despite their imposing size and menacing, sharp appearance, pistrix are harmless to most marine creatures, feeding almost exclusively on small crustaceans.

Life Cycle 

Unlike merfolk, pistrix lay eggs; these are able to float in the water column thanks to a few drops of oil present under their thin, semi-transparent shells. 

The eggs hatch into extremely ornate young, with long-rayed fins and small, poorly muscled arms, which only over time take on the "human" appearance of those of adults. Pistrix hatchlings are overall much more fish-like than primate-like, and lack the characteristics that make them anthropomorphic: their eyes are very large and lateral, their hands are tiny and webbed, their torso somewhat flattened laterally, and their gill covers are very prominent.

Sex change 

To maximize their reproductive opportunities in the vast ocean, pistrices can change sex if their chosen mate is of the same sex. The larger individual always becomes, or remains, female, to maximize egg production.

Females tend to be heavier and thicker, with slightly fatter tails, but they also have less dense beards and manes, and shorter fins, unless they have sufficient access to food to maintain both their greater weight and their prominent fins, but this is an extremely rare occurrence in nature. 

Reproduction 

Pistrix are strictly monogamous and bond with a single partner for life, a characteristic that underpins all their social interactions, their way of life, their hunting, and their raising their young. 

Their courtship is lengthy and complex: the choice of a mate begins when the pistrix are still young, and consists of a series of approaches that will ultimately reduce the social group of young to about twenty individuals. Each individual in that group will then be subjected to a test known as the "love knot": a dance in which the two pistrix circle each other, trying not to touch, despite being very close together—an extremely difficult task given their great body length. 

During the love knot, the two individuals must demonstrate a strong connection and be able to reliably predict the other's movements. If the two individuals touch each other more than three times during the dance, the courtship has failed, and the two pistrix will attempt to court someone else in their social group until they manage to tie a perfect love knot with one of them. 

Their breeding season occurs during the cold months, specifically October, November, and December, and when it arrives, the individuals move, obviously in pairs, to specific locations in the sea known as "hatching grounds". 

Hatching grounds are territories considered "neutral" by other merfolk, and therefore uninhabited. However, specific tribes of Maregens may attempt to conquer these territories, which the pistrix consider crucial to their survival, and in these cases, fierce clashes between the species can occur. Defending the hatching grounds is the only circumstance in which pistrix are willing to fight with Maregens in modern times. 

Hatching sites often develop around human-made structures, such as weather buoys, abandoned oil rigs, and floating garbage islands, where newborns can hide.

Fertilization in pistrices is ​​external, occurring through the simultaneous release of milt (seminal fluid) and eggs, which are then mixed together to ensure fertilization of each egg and better oxygenation, through an extremely fascinating ritual:

1. The two individuals, the male and the female, arrange themselves in a cross position, with one male vertical and one horizontal. This position is also called the panopticon, due to the fact that it is used not only as a starting position for mating, but also, traditionally, to check for dangers around them, at different distances and depths in the water.

2. The two individuals then close their bodies into a ring, touching their tails with their hands, one around the other, somewhat like the "classic" interlocked wedding ring illustration. This position is also called "the rings," and for pistrices, it is an extremely private and intimate position, performed only by romantic exclusive couples, and only during mating season.

3. In this position, the gametes are released, and will be located at the center of the two rings.

4. The two rings, formed by the bodies of the parents, begin to rotate, creating a water movement that keeps the genetic material within the formation and simultaneously mixes it.

The eggs have different hatching times, depending on the ambient temperature and the amount of oxygen in the water, and can range from 60 to 90 days.

Trivia

• Since pistrix is ​​a Latin word, the plural of pistrix is ​​technically pistrices, but the plural is often left unchanged, simply as pistrix. They can also be called "pistrici", but pistrices is more correct.

 

Gallery (Click to enlarge!)

	By  Samifer	Panopticon pose, stylized
Size comparison with deepsea merfolk and common merfolk	Vertical swim (with oarfish)	Young adult female
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🌵🎨 All the drawings in this page (and probably in all the other pages, if not differently specified) were realized by our artists, Furiarossa e Mimma. You can see more of their works and support them on their Patreon page. Become patrons of the arts! 🌵🎨