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The biggest part of the ocean is undiscovered, and nobody really knows what kind of creatures are living in is deepest parts.
Sailors were always telling tales of beautiful femme fatales which wait in the ocean, leading men to their deaths. According to one legend, a lot of lonely, desperate men were attracted by the beauty of a woman with the bottom half of the body of a fish, dragged down to the depths below where they actually faced unpredictable horrors.
The ancient Greeks called these creature sirens, and the Japanese called them ningyo, but we often call them mermaids. You may go crazy if you see a real mermaid out in the sea, but it would for sure also be a crazily wonderful experience too.
What are mermaids?
A mermaid is actually a legendary aquatic creature which has the upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish. Mermaids appear in the folklore of a lot of cultures around the world, which include the Near East, Europe, Africa, as well as Asia. The first stories about mermaids appeared in ancient Assyria, in which the goddess Atargatis transformed herself into a mermaid out of shame as she accidentally killed her human lover.
Sometimes, mermaids are connected with perilous events like floods, storms, as well as shipwrecks and drowning. In some other folk traditions, or sometimes within the same tradition, mermaids can be benevolent or beneficent, bestowing boons or also falling in love with humans.
Mermaids are usually liked with the mythological Greek sirens and with Sirenia, which are a biological order comprising dugongs and manatees. Some of the historical sightings by sailors which were probably misunderstood encounters with these aquatic mammals.
The famous Christopher Columbus reported seeing mermaids while he was exploring the Caribbean and sightings were reported in the 20th and 21st centuries too, in Canada, Israel, as well as Zimbabwe. Also, the U.S. National Ocean Service stated in 2012 that there was no evidence of mermaids found.
Mermaids were also a popular subject of art and literature in recent centuries, like in the well-known fairy tale of Hans Christian Andersen, titled “The Little Mermaid” from 1836. They were subsequently depicted in operas, paintings, as well as books, films, and comics.
The word mermaid is actually a compound of the Old English mere, which means sea, and maid, which means a girl or young woman. The equivalent term for these creatures in Old English is merewif. Mermaids are usually depicted as beautiful with long flowing hair. As we already mentioned, they are sometimes equated with the sirens of Greek mythology, particularly Odyssey, half-bird femme fatales who had enchanting voices that would lure soon-to-be-shipwrecked sailors to nearby rocks, as well as sandbars, or shoals.
Sirenia is an order of fully aquatic, as well as herbivorous mammals which often inhabit rivers, estuaries, as well as coastal marine waters, swamps and marine wetlands. Sirenians, which include manatees and dugongs, possess major aquatic adaptations, such as arms, which they used for steering, a paddle, which they used for propulsion, and remnants of hind limbs or legs which were in the form of two small bones that were floating deep in the muscle. They look ponderous and clumsy, but they are also fusiform, hydrodynamic, as well as highly muscular, and mariners that were before the mid-nineteenth century called them as mermaids.
What is sirenomelia?
Sirenomelia, or also called “mermaid syndrome,” is actually a rare congenital disorder in which a child is born with its legs fused and small genitalia. This is a condition which is about as rare as conjoined twins, affecting one out of every 100,000 live births and usually it is fatal within a day or two of birth as of kidney and bladder complications. As of July 2003, there are only four survivors known.
In these three videos, you can see a diver who enjoys the stunning scenery at the Great Barrier Reef managed to capture a video of a mermaid, five mermaids caught on camera, as well as spotted in real life and other.
