Gallery with all the images for "Merfolk".
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This species in featured in:
Their upper body consists of a torso that, in appearance, closely resembles that of a human, with similar muscular development, covered with skin that is less loose than that of the tentacles, and two arms ending in prehensile hands, sometimes with a membrane that connects the fingers and aids swimming, sometimes without any connection.
The head also closely resembles that of a human, with two frontal eyes, a mouth, differentiated teeth, and a hair-covered upper skull.
All body hair on sea warlocks tends to be light in color, from sand to platinum, and even pure white in some rare specimens. Eye color is variable, and according to several observations, changes throughout the lifespan of the specimens; perhaps some chromatophores are also present in the irises of sea sorcerers, but no researcher has yet been able to study a complete Homoctopus head and establish this.
From the waist down, sea warlocks possess eight arms filled with suckers called colloquially "tentacles." They also have a funnel-shaped muscle formation, located ventrally and opening into the palpebral cavity, designed to allow the violent expulsion of water and "reactive" locomotion, which some researchers believe is achieved by modifying an ancestral foot.
Highly intelligent, astute, and often mischievous, sea witches have a peculiar relationship with all other sentient marine creatures, offering them magical services and "wishes" in exchange for a seemingly symbolic payment, but one that always hides great dangers.
Normally, sea witches do not get along with each other and tend to kill each other; When this behavior ceases, and individuals begin to get along with each other, forming friendships or even feeling physical attraction, it means their optic glands have matured and become activated, initiating a process that will lead to reproduction and, ultimately, death.
For reproduction to be successful, all three sexes must be present: males, whose gametes must fertilize the eggs; females, who produce the eggs; and the candleholders, who do not produce any gametes but, through a bizarre evolutionary adaptation, manage, with their mere presence, to ensure optimal hormone levels in both males and females so that reproduction can occur.
After fertilization, the female will retain the eggs for 10-30 days inside her body, depositing them and later hanging them, like thick clusters, from the ceiling of her burrow. The eggs are contained in a white gelatinous substance and are guarded by the candleholder.
Unfortunately, once the optic glands are activated, the end of the sea witch is near, and both male and female will die, leaving the care of the young to the candleholder, which is a specimen without optic glands.
It is believed that the need for a candleholder is precisely this: nature ensures that someone will survive after the parents' necessary departure to care for the young.
The candleholder will obviously be fully invested in the obligation to care for the eggs first, oxygenating them and protecting them from any danger, and then the young, not only taking care of their physical needs but teaching them everything they need to survive in the ocean.
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The ceasg or mersalmons (Maregens salmo), are a species of merfolk characterized by anadromous migration, that is, the movement from salt water (where the adults live for most of their lives) to fresh water, where they reproduce.
Their undersides are covered in cycloid scales with rounded edges, which are silvery or blue when adults are in the sea, outside of the breeding season. They come in two sizes: regular, the most common, and jack, a smaller version that matures much earlier.
Socially, mersalmons are divided into two categories: dominants and gregarious. The dominants, more extroverted, have greater decision-making power and are the reproductive specimens, while the gregarious, although they can still be extremely intelligent, form groups that follow the directions of a dominant.
Each social group (be it a shoal of two or three individuals or a platoon of up to thirty) will be led by one or two dominants, who can be of either sex, although dominant pairs typically consist of a male and a female.
The mersalmon hierarchical system also involves the physical appearance of individuals. Dominant individuals tend to have a heavier, patternless torso, with darker, solid-colored skin ranging from olive to brick red, while gregarious individuals are lighter-colored, leaner, and often exhibit camouflage patterns on their torso and face. Furthermore, gregarious mersalmons, both male and female, are always beardless.
During spawning, dominant mersalmons, both male and female, undergo a color change: their scales take on various vibrant warm hues, primarily red and gold. Although rare, some male mersalmons (an estimated one in four hundred) also exhibit a color change on their skin, which becomes green, with the extremities of their upper limbs (arms and wrists) being particularly dark (and known as "gloves"). The contrast between the green skin of their torso and the intense color of their tail scales makes them particularly striking, but also highly visible to predators. This is why "green" males are so few: it's difficult for them to survive and pass on their genetics.
Gregarious mersalmons, however, remain unchanged.
Dominant male mersalmons tend to adorn themselves with objects found on the seabed, whether organic or inorganic. Many are attracted to human-made artifacts, even those seemingly without decorative value, such as food packaging or floppy disks.
Although dominant male mersalmons are renowned for their displays and ritualistic battles, in the absence of a female to court, they tend to treat each other with marked camaraderie. Even during the breeding season, they can be seen half-beached on the rocks, chatting amiably with each other, waiting to spot females and begin fighting to attract them.
Dominant males who have good friendships with each other (often even brothers) often "choreograph" their skirmishes in the presence of females, thus creating fights that appear much more intense and therefore attractive. Because they don't have to worry about actually getting hurt, as their opponent isn't actually trying to subdue and injure them, they can better display their fins and muscles and challenge each other, even verbally. Male friendship among mersalmons is essential for successful breeding.
Besides gregarious and dominant mersalmons, there is a third type of mersalmon: jacks. Jacks mature much earlier than "regular" mersalmons and, as such, maintain a very small size. Furthermore, even during the breeding season, they don't change color, remaining inconspicuous. Jacks do not have any dominant/submissive relationships with other mersalmons; they do not engage in courtship displays and do not fight among themselves or with other mersalmons. An adult male jack weighs about forty-five to fifty kilograms, compared to over one hundred kilograms for a full-sized male, and would have no chance of winning in an open fight.
Mersalmons live their adult lives at sea, but to reproduce, they migrate to the upper reaches of rivers, to their birthplace, which they recognize thanks to their extraordinarily developed and selective sense of smell, aided also by the so-called "migration memory," the only fundamental memory that cannot be erased, even with the aid of magic.
During the reproductive period, mersalmons exhibit distinctive muscle growth; this hypertrophy is not solely for aesthetic reasons (although it appears to contribute significantly to mate selection), but is necessary to sustain the effort of climbing waterfalls. Unlike true salmon, mersalmons do not stop feeding during migration, but their appetites grow, leading them to become extremely voracious.
During spawning, males readily court not only females of their own species but also those of other merfolk, and sometimes breed with them at sea before continuing their migration back to their birth rivers. Mersalmon genetics are particularly recessive, and hybrids tend to resemble their mothers much more closely.
Pure mersalmon juveniles, born in freshwater, may stay for a period in their natal stream or swim immediately to the sea, but in most cases they remain for a few years in the lakes they encounter on their way to the sea before returning to their home sea. During these intermediate lake stops, the young initially adopt coastal habits but then become semipelagic, only rarely touching the seabed.
Mersalmons are oviparous, and the female lays up to two hundred eggs. Newborn mersalmons are the smallest of all merfolk.
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They are immediately distinguishable from all other creatures by their humanoid torso, with two arms equipped with sensitive, prehensile hands. This contrasts with their lower body, which is extremely similar to the posterior portion of a bony fish—scales and fins supported by rays.
Although there is no phylogenetic similarity and their physiology is very different, some tend to lump merfolk and sea sorcerers together; in reality, as mentioned, there is no relationship between the two species, and it is impossible for them to hybridize.
Deep-sea sirens were once mistakenly believed to be Maregens, but scholars later classified them within the genus Abyssugens. The more recent genus of sentient, pseudo-humanoid creatures, Apocapisces, can also be confused with merfolk by the uninitiated, but scientists have never classified them as similar, and the merfolk themselves consider it a downright insult to lump them together.
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| An adult male |
The upper body, from head to waist, is humanoid, generally furless except for hair on the head or, very rarely, a beard. On the neck, they typically have three pairs of gill openings (but some species have up to six pairs), unprotected by any operculum (except for a particular nordic herring-like subspecies).
They have well-articulated upper limbs, called arms, capable of wide movements, and hands with opposable thumbs and versatile gripping capabilities, not unlike human hands, whose fingers can be webbed or separated.
The color of their hair and skin is determined by the presence of pigments called melanins. Their skin tones can range from very dark brown to very light pink, while their hair color varies from white to black, passing through blonde, red, and brown. It is not uncommon for the skin on the face, torso, and arms to be spotted or striped, with patterns that vary depending on the species, subspecies, and individual.
Merfolk have a dual respiratory system, one of the most complex systems in nature—so complex, in fact, that it's unnatural.
The peculiarity of possessing both gills and lungs simultaneously is the "dream" that guided humanity to create the "water people", the merfolk: to dominate two worlds, land and water, they needed populations capable of surviving completely disconnected from land.
Merfolk gills are like those of osteichthyes, or bony fish, and are covered by a gill cover composed of a thin sheet of bone (which in turn is covered with skin).
The concentration of dissolved oxygen in water is much lower than that of air, so the gills must be significantly more efficient than mammalian lungs at extracting all the oxygen they can.
For this reason, the water in the gills flows in the opposite direction to the blood, thus always maintaining a different concentration gradient.
Merfolk's gills are located on the sides of the neck and may seem a bit small compared to the overall mass of the specimen, especially very large ones! But this is where their dual respiratory system comes into play: they possess large and highly efficient lungs, comparable to those of some marine mammals, and can rise to the surface to breathe in atmospheric oxygen and refuel before diving again.
Thanks to the continuous oxygen supplementation provided by the gills, merfolk can remain completely submerged for very long periods, especially in well-oxygenated waters, where they very rarely need to surface!
Like humans, merfolk have close-set eyes and binocular vision, with a high-definition field of vision in front of their head, typical of predators. Due to their adaptation to aquatic life, however, their lenses are more similar to those of fish than those of humans, making them "nearsighted" outside of water, with the ability to see objects up to a maximum of thirty to forty meters away; when underwater, they cannot see beyond the surface of the water, partly due to light refraction.
Merfolk eyes have two eyelids and a nictitating membrane, but no tear glands. A merfolk's eye is similar to that of other vertebrates, but adapted to a darker marine environment: it has a membrane called the tapetum lucidum, which lies behind the retina and reflects light back to it, improving light perception and visibility in darker waters. The effectiveness of the tapetum lucidum varies by species and subspecies, and is optimized in those that are distinctly nocturnal or live at greater depths.
The color of the irises varies greatly depending on the individual, location, species, and subspecies, and can be any shade, from the deepest blue to the brightest red, and even white or completely transparent.
Muscularly, the pectoral area of merfolk is similar to that of humans, divided into the large pectoral muscle and the small pectoral muscle. Because they are not mammals and do not breastfeed their young, both males and females lack nipples, although some specimens may have nonfunctional vestigial ones, a very rare characteristic linked to their human ancestry. Also due to their "kinship" with primate ancestors, some females exhibit a peculiar adipose tissue arrangement, with accumulations of tissue in the pectoral area that appear to mimic human breasts, but which serve no purpose other than to store fat.
In any case, the fatty deposits on the chest of female merfolk are not particularly voluminous and simply lend a more sinuous shape to their overall silhouette, without protruding too much.
Sometimes, the pectoral area is "decorated" with variously colored scales, cycloid or ctenoid in type, in a pattern that varies greatly in shape and size, but generally covers the center of the chest and the clavicles.
Nixen, which possess placoid scales (also known as dermal denticles), almost never have chest markings.
The fusiform, streamlined lower body features a lateral line (a special sensory system that detects low-frequency vibrations and pressure waves generated by the motion of solid bodies in water) and ends in a large, rayed tail. These rays (lepidotrichous) are articulated with several parallel bony or cartilaginous elements, called radials. Another characteristic of this genus is the presence of a swim bladder, a large, modified lung sac containing a gas mixture, which allows for sophisticated adjustment of their hydrodynamic trim, allowing them to surface or submerge with ease, without having to rely on muscle strength or the use of external weights, as humans would. All merfolk lack hind limbs, leaving only small vestigial bones within the body that are not connected to the vertebral column.
During embryonic development, however, they exhibit the beginnings of these limbs, which spontaneously regress as they grow. The lower body of these specimens also displays a light, flexible covering of scales, consisting of thin, differently pigmented bony plates. In addition to the caudal fin, which is necessary for propulsion and therefore movement, merfolk possess four other essential fins: a dorsal fin, two ventral fins, and an anal fin.
Almost all merfolk have a dorsal fin on their backs, whose function is to provide swimming stability, preventing the specimen from capsizing during rapid lateral movements. This fin is sometimes absent in specimens living in polar regions, as it would hinder swimming under ice. The dorsal fin varies in shape and size among the various merfolk species and subspecies, a useful feature for identification.
Unlike that of fish, this fin in merfolk is arranged horizontally and moves from bottom to top. This characteristic allows the merfolk's tail to be distinguished at first glance from that of a fish, and its function is to propel the fish through its vertical movement. Even in this case, shape and size vary among species, and therefore these characteristics can be used for identification, especially for large species.
This fin, located not far from the cloacal opening, serves to stabilize swimming. However, in males of some subspecies, it is highly developed and colorful and is displayed during courtship to demonstrate the fish's health.
These are paired, or double, fins located higher than the anal fin, just below the abdominal region. They serve a stabilizing function and are used to quickly slow the pace by flexing them downward.
Because they are not designed to support body weight, merfolk bones are light and spongy compared to those of a human. They contain a high concentration of fat, which aids buoyancy.
The rib cage is composed of a variable number of ribs and is very flexible, allowing the lungs to collapse during deep dives and preventing nitrogen buildup in the blood. The pelvic girdle (pelvis) is absent. To ensure adequate oxygen supply during dives, merfolk muscles contain myoglobin concentrations 3 to 10 times higher than those of land mammals.
Beyond these common characteristics, merfolk exhibit a wide variety of shapes and colors, clearly distinguishable depending on the subspecies.
All merfolk species are gregarious and can form very small groups of two to three individuals, called shoals, or medium-sized groups of four to thirty, called platoons, or schools, ranging in number from thirty-five to a thousand.
Schools, which are the most common aggregations of merfolk, can be sedentary and form villages, or they can be nomadic.
Nixen (Maregens pistrix) tend to remain solitary or form small nomadic groups, but there have been documented cases of one or more individuals staying with mixed shoals of different species. Merfolk villages, built on the seabed, are always well-hidden and carefully maintained to blend in with the surrounding environment: the houses, which often extend into caves beneath rocks, are covered with thick layers of algae, flotsam, stones, and coral, making them difficult to spot by humans who might explore the area.
Some populations in restricted ranges have developed forms of government, generally monarchies.
Merfolk are omnivores with a tendency toward carnivory, adapted to be formidable hunters. Contrary to what most modern works portray, they are unable to speak a common language with fish and crustaceans and do not consider them their "brothers," but (like humans do with animals) livestock, prey, or more rarely, pets or threats.
They have no qualms about eating human flesh, which they consider delicious. However, to preserve their relationships with them and prevent war from spreading to their villages, many communities do not actively hunt humans, only eating them if they find drowned bodies.
Merfolk breed during a specific period of the year, known as "rutting." Rutting males undergo a change in their coloration and court females with dances, songs, and displays of their colorful bodies with outstretched fins. Ceasgs or mersalmons (Maregens salmo) undergo a reproductive migration to mate and lay their eggs in freshwater, traveling up rivers until they reach suitable lakes.
For the more elongated and more flexible merfolk, mating involves the male wrapping his inner body around the female's, while in the larger and less flexible species, the 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 for reproduction through the erectile tissue. A peculiarity of the merfolk is that 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. It is therefore impossible for a merfolk to mate outside of the water: not only would an erection be impossible, but also the expulsion of sperm, due to the erection of specific structures that pump it out, occurs thanks to the use of water.
There are numerous documented cases of female merfolk conceiving offspring without mating with a male, through a process known as parthenogenesis. However, this is always thelithotic parthenogenesis, meaning it produces only other females. Some small, stable populations of oceanic merfolk are composed exclusively of females who reproduce by parthenogenesis.
Depending on the species, merfolk can be viviparous, ovoviviparous, or oviparous. In the latter case, the rarest, a small number of large eggs with abundant yolk are produced, up to a maximum of eight.
The birth of healthy octuplets from eight different eggs is considered a very good omen, and the mother who produced these offspring is generally rewarded by the dominant male of her school.
Merfolk meat is considered delicious and prized, but these creatures are rarely actively fished for human consumption. However, there are accounts of merfolk being hunted and killed in the past by specialized crews, called "mermaid hunters," who sold their prized loot for astronomical sums in various fish and meat markets, or directly to wealthy nobles who could afford it.
According to the stories spread by the mermaid hunters, merfolk were evil creatures whose singing seduced sailors and caused their ships to crash against rocks, causing them to fall into the water and drown, only to be devoured. Therefore, it was only right to treat them with the same consideration and hunt them for food. While it's true that merfolk enjoy consuming human flesh, their song isn't enough to enchant humans enough to drive them mad and commit suicide against the rocks. It was therefore merely an excuse on the part of mermaid hunters to quell the pangs of conscience of those who purchased merfolk from them. These rumors persist to this day.
The meat considered the most prized is that of the ceasg, often compared in flavor to that of the grayling (Thymallus thymallus). Although they were fished more than other merfolk in the past, ceasg remain the easiest of their kind to spot, due to their unique reproductive ritual and their strong, fearless personalities, which lead them to easily come into contact with other species.
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