The Sirens of the Sea

[Roma]

Some years ago I was on vacation in Sorrento, Italy.  One day we took a sailboat down the coast to the point where the Sorrentine and Amalfi coasts meet.  This is also where Ulysses encountered the Sirens of the Sea.

I can tell you that the place really exists and the scenery is absolutely gorgeous.  I didn't see any Sirens...so who knows.

[Byrd]

Huh that makes me wonder if the wooden sides of a ship could act as a resonance chamber and amplify underwater sounds from whales, geothermal activity, aliens, etc.

Hmm.

Not really.  It would be a small point that the sound waves partly bounce off.

Now (from a sailor friend) if you're in a small (one man) fiberglass sailing boat, at night you CAN hear some of the noises (taps, mostly) that some kinds of oceanic fish make.

[SteamyAmerican]

Mythical.

The "breathing" bit would be problematic, along with singing.

Mammals that live in the sea are champion breath-holders; anything that's warm-blooded would have lungs, and you need lungs to sing.  You can make noises if you don't have lungs, but you're not going to sing like a canary.

Lungs and gills take up the same space in the body... if you look at any mammal anatomy, you will see that there's not a lot of room for anything else.  If you elongate the body (double the torso) you get a weirdly out of balance creature.

Lungs would imply that they would live on land for some period of time (like go there to have babies or some such)

As to the singing, there's no reason to develop that.  Unlike sharks, we don't hunt by sound and the wail of a dying edible creature isn't an irresistible sound to us.

Not entirely correct.

plenty of mammals hunt with echolocation.

Also. Don’t whales sing? Just a thought.

[BeyondKnowledge]

Not entirely correct.

plenty of mammals hunt with echolocation.

Ok, I will tell you about real mermaids. It is a story of the organized religions wanting to control everything.

Long ago the church more or less ran everything. Id did not matter where a village was, they made the rules.

At that time in fishing villages, people would tire of fish every day. While they would trade with other villages inland, there was not enough for more than occasional variety in food. 

Now for some biological facts. The aquatic apes, known as humans, are the only apes that have subcutaneous fat. This is common in whales and dolphins. It insulates from cold water. The females have slightly more than the males so with practice, they can stand cold water slightly better than the males.

This allowed a few women to actually make a living hunting and gathering in the waters edge and shallows. This was not allowed by the church because a woman could not own land, businesses, etc..  

When a traveling member of the clergy was in the area, they asked about this alternative source of food for the villages. They would ask about the stories of women working along the seashore to make a living on their own. 

The locals, not wanting to lose part of their food would makeup a story that they were these fish women that were sometimes seen at the shore or in the shallow waters. 

So the legend of mermaids was started. This was long before sailors went months out to sea in ships. But they carried on with the legends in their own way. Some just were barely seen dugons or manitees. Some were island women. Exotic and desirable to many a sailor after months at sea.

In modern times, meraids are a good story and a way to make money for some. Some become professional mermaids for parties. Some make tails for the performers. Many are on YouTube. Here is an example. 




How do I know these things? I swam as a merman, made tails for myself and friends before it became a commercial business in mass production. 

So yes, in a way the church and in modern time costume makers have made mermaids real.

[charlyv]

I was an aircrew sonar seat (P-3, SS1) for  8 years in the Cold war. We chased Soviet nuclear subs  all over the East coast.  The sounds we picked up ranged from shrimp to whales and everything in between. There is so much marine life that produces just about everything you have ever heard, including screaming, growling and whistling. 

I would bet that your "Sirens" are really minke or humpback whales or perhaps seals.

[Roma]

Sorry, I couldn't resist.  Here's the acoustic version since it's early here.  The vocalist is Justine Suissa and she's got one of the most beautiful voices I've ever heard.

[Creaky]

[Video: https://youtu.be/F6aI4MvxjHc]

That fish, kicking it’s tail, not even pulling, not something I would buy into

[Byrd]

Not entirely correct.

plenty of mammals hunt with echolocation.

Also. Don’t whales sing? Just a thought.

Yes, some mammals hunt with echolocation (as do some birds and other vertebrates) but that means having a brain set up to process a lot of auditory signals.  Humans can apparently be trained to do it as well (thinking of several blind people who use this), but reports of sirens say that they use a lure embedded in their song and bring the prey to them rather than running around and hunting.

Whales are mammals and have lungs.  The ones that sing also have a larynx like humans do.

Humans have quite a large vocal range compared to most animals, and our mouths are shaped so that our ears hear those ranges naturally.

There's also something about the way that our brains process signals -- there's a difference between "song" and "noise."

...a long-winded way of saying "if the song is irresistible to humans, then the predator singing the song has to have some sort of vocal arrangement that lets it make human noises."

[SteamyAmerican]

For reference. And in no way an authority here. I wrote my Senior Capstone project on this very subject at CSUMB almost 20 years ago. Yeah it was a strange major I ended up in. Something like synchronicity. Read as Liberal Arts lol.

It covered myth, biology, and even other esoteric treaties that speculate they might not as illogical as purported.

besides echolocation and singing of whales. Think of how wolves evolved from whales. Or something along that line.

From Japanese women that still dive for food and have excess body fat. To the way he have noses that hold air underwater unlike other mammals, just like hair on our head for offspring to latch onto while foraging underwater. Our blood the pH of sea water, etc.

to the Dogon people and the Fish-Gods of yore. Looking at you Lovecraft and Sumeria.

to the legends that span the world in many water-faring ancient civilizations.

there are even horrific reports of the elite eating these beings. But that’s a different thread.

in another light it’s like Bigfoot. In the sense we’ve been told we were made in God’s image. 1 moon. 1 sun. 1 and only 1 intelligent ape. If either BF or mermaids or even Giants were to be found to be actual real species, at least at one time if not concurrently, it kind of blows the lid off that whole Abrahamic thinking of the last 2000 years. And certainly invites a lot more questions and critiques of what we’ve been told to believe for millennia.