Open Ocean Mermaid, Golden Queen of the Sea

Open Ocean Mermaid for my Intermediate Digital Art final project series. For my series I am combining my love for marine biology with my love for art. I'm seeking to create "realistic" mermaids - not just half human-half fish. I've been doing a ton of research, and the marine biology class I've taken is proving to be very helpful. It's of course hard to say what a half mammal-half fish creature would be like, but I tried to make myself as educated as possible in the time allotted (which is only a few weeks)

Genus/species: Aureus reginamar = “Golden Queen of the Sea”

- Compressed head
- Ampullae of Lorenzini (little dots on nose): sense electromagnetic currents in water
- Short hair so it doesn't interfere when she's swimming fast
- Second set of dorsal and anal fins

- She's the largest mermaid to be found thus far, reaching an average of 6.5 feet in length and over 400 pounds.
- She schools with other yellowfin tuna, but usually tries to find a male during the breeding season. She reproduces via spawning, so she simply releases her eggs and wishes them good luck. While normal spawning fish can release up to 1 millions eggs at a time, the mermaid will only release about 10,000. This may sound like a large number, but most will not get fertilized and others will be eaten. At the end of a breeding season, only around 15 mermaids will lives long enough to see maturity. Because of this, Pelagic Mermaids are quite rare.
- They are carnivorous and their only predators are sharks. Unfortunately though, since they are rare and school with fish that are used as food, they often get caught in fishing nets and (though this has happened VERY few times) have been killed and turned into trophies. They are often able to escape the nets thanks to the fact that they have arms/hands, but they are usually covered in scars due to this struggle.

Personality:
A very serious mermaid. Most of what they do is out of pure instinct, though they utilize their relatively large brains to play scenarios in their heads and choose the best course of action. They don’t like to be bothered, and can get aggressive. They attack by ramming the intruder at very high speeds.
When they meet new mermaids, they often will ignore them. There is usually only one mermaid to school of tuna, and they only go looking for others when it is spawning season (and even then, their meeting will be very brief).

Stock: *SenshiStock, ~arghus, ~Luminya, ~millertimemsu

Drawing: 2 hours Coloring: 7 hours

Enjoy!