Pop open your favorite fairy tale book from when you were a kid, and you're sure to find a story about mermaids, mythical half-human, half-fish beings that dwell in the depths of the ocean. Some stories portray mermaids as friendly, while others are not so much.
However, the idea of mermaids stems from more than just children's stories. Many cultures across the globe have some form of mermaid lore that stretches back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Does this mean they actually existed at one point? Or were our ancestors mistaking merfolk for something else?
Mermaid Folklore Around the World
It’s no exaggeration to say that mermaid folklore is found across the globe. Many different cultures have some sort of mermaid legend.
Celtic mythologies often discuss such legends as the ceasg — a creature that has the upper body of a woman and the tail of a salmon — and the selkie, a seal-like creature who can shed their skin and come ashore. Other European countries have legends such as Melusine, a figure with the torso and head of a woman and the tail of a serpent — sometimes two tails, like the Starbucks logo.
In Japan, there is a legend of the ningyo, a figure with the head of a human and the body of a fish that could allegedly cry tears of pearls. In Hindu culture, Matsya is the fish avatar of the god Vishnu, protector of the Universe. Merfolk even appear in ancient Greek mythology, including The Odyssey.
However, a lot of these myths and legends could be chalked up to a classic case of misidentification.
What Inspired Mermaids?
Mermaids may seem like a tale sailors and fishermen made up while at sea, but it’s possible that they saw something they couldn’t explain and attributed it to mermaids and other creatures of folklore. Take the dugong, and their close cousin, the manatee. Some experts suggest that when sailors first encountered these animals, they believed they were seeing mermaids.
There is even an account from Christopher Columbus saying that members of his crew had spotted “mermaids,” though they were ugly and seemed more masculine than the mermaids in legends. It’s hard to say how valid his account is; the man mistook North America for India.
However, a 2023 study in the journal Marine Mammal Science suggests that a whale’s unique feeding strategy may be responsible for mermaid and other legendary sea monster witness accounts.
A Whale of a Tale
Over the last two decades, researchers have observed a phenomenon they term "trap feeding" among humpback whales in the Northeast Pacific. Researchers also observed a similar feeding method (although it may be distinct, according to the Marine Mammal Science study) in a Bryde’s whale in the Gulf of Thailand called tread-water feeding.
The feeding strategy involves the whale treading water at the surface with its jaws wide open. The whale sits, waiting patiently for the prey to enter its mouth before quickly closing its jaw and trapping its prey. According to the study, this behavior may have inspired legends of mermaids and krakens as early explorers and anglers sailed the seas.
Recordings of these types of feedings were relatively rare until recently; the study authors believe that with the rise of whale monitoring, biologists are now witnessing it more often. However, for this study, the authors analyzed a 2,000-year-old Norse text that describes this feeding pattern and note that the Norse authors attributed this behavior to a creature called the ‘hafgufa.’
“It struck me that the Norse description of the hafgufa was very similar to the behaviour shown in videos of trap feeding whales, but I thought it was just an interesting coincidence at first,” said John McCarthy, a maritime archaeologist in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, in a press release.
“Once I started looking into it in detail and discussing it with colleagues who specialise in medieval literature, we realised that the oldest versions of these myths do not describe sea monsters at all, but are explicit in describing a type of whale,” McCarthy concluded in the press release.
This article is a republished version of this previously published article.
Read More: The Dugong is a Manatee Cousin That No Longer Exists in China
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- World History Encyclopedia. Melusine
- Philadelphia Museum of Art. Matsya (Fish), an Avatar of Vishnu
- BBC. Who is Vishnu?
- NOAA. Are mermaids real?
- One Earth. Dugongs: the marine mammal that inspired the myth of mermaids
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. From Mermaids to Manatees: the Myth and the Reality
- Marine Mammal Science. Parallels for cetacean trap feeding and tread-water feeding in the historical record across two millennia
- NOAA. Bryde’s Whale
