The Case for Mermaids

Are mermaids real?

As a Very Serious marine biologist, if you had asked me this a dozen or so years ago, even in jest, I would have rolled my eyes. To me, the question wasn’t quite as bad as Shark Week hyping that Megalodon was still extant, but it was up there. There has been no scientific proof, zero evidence of the existence of mermaids, and therefore they cannot exist. Case closed.

Now that I’m a wee bit older, a smidge wiser, and definitely not as rigid in my beliefs… I’m not so sure that mermaids don’t exist. If you ask either of my children, along with any number of marine scientists and ocean lovers, they will emphatically inform you that they are mermaids. Myself included.

Maybe we can’t sing as eloquently underwater as Ariel, breathe without the help of special equipment, or even have a tail (though there are companies that make some pretty realistic looking ones!), but there is one thing that thing that makes us feel like we could, potentially be mermaids: the ocean feels like home. Being in, on, or near the water feels right, no gills required.

Mermaids appear in lore all over the world. Perhaps the most famous are the Sirens that Odysseus faced: dangerously beautiful maidens that tried to lure him in with their song (though scholars say that it was likely a bird-woman, not a bird-fish that tempted the famous sailor). Sirens appear in Germanic lore, mermaids are found in African, Maori, and Caribbean tales.

Typically, mermaids are depicted as half-human, half-fish. Here’s the interesting part: even though their tails are scaled, it doesn’t go side to side like a fish, but up and down like dolphins and whales do. So perhaps mermaids are pelagic marine mammals, living in the open ocean far from the eyes of man. Or maybe they’re a crazy hybrid species like the duck-billed platypus who lays eggs like a bird, and feeds its young milk like a mammal. Could mermaids have the tail of a dolphin, body of a human, scales and gills like a fish? Perhaps.

The most compelling evidence that mermaids could exist is the simple fact that over 90% of the ocean is unexplored. We cannot definitively say for sure that mermaids aren’t real because we don’t know. We’re discovering new species every day, and have studied space more than the ocean floor.

It’s understandable why we haven’t explored more of the sea; for as beautiful as it is, she is one hostile environment:  It’s comprised of salt, which is highly corrosive to most materials, more than half of it exists in complete darkness, and it’s average depth the world over is a little over two miles. At this depth (and she goes a whole lot deeper than two miles!) The pressure is nearly five thousands pounds per square inch— the equivalent of an elephant standing on your toe.

Because the deep sea is so hard to really get up close and personal with, we really have barely scratched the surface on what’s out there. Just because it’s hidden, doesn’t mean it’s not there, that it’s not important. Lack of evidence is not evidence.

We can’t prove mermaids don’t exist, just like we can’t prove we’re not destroying irreplaceable ecosystems we’ve never seen. It’s one of the reasons why deep sea mining is so problematic. The ecosystems that we are aware of on the ocean floor are incredibly sensitive: deep sea corals, entire communities in hydrothermal vents. Because they live in such hostile environments, growth rates are often slow, and some reefs have proven to be hundreds of years old. This is the small percentage of what we do know. Mining and bottom trawling have already proven to be incredibly destructive— injudiciously bulldozing everything in their path. We don’t know enough to say it’s okay, to know where the tipping point lies.

So are mermaids real? 

Maybe. 

Maybe the better question is: what if they are, and we destroy their home before we ever meet them? Whether it’s mythical mermaids or the very real wonders we know are down there, the ocean deserves better. Before we mine it, trawl it, or write it off, shouldn’t we at least take the time to truly see what we’d be losing?

Maybe through deep sea exploration we’ll find the empirical evidence that backs the lore. 

Or maybe the mermaid doesn’t exist so much in the physical realm as it does in our hearts and minds— and in what it means to be connected to the sea.