Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the
Speaker 2: Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
Speaker 2: As you probably know, I love a good monster manual,
Speaker 2: I love a good bestieri, and I recently picked up
Speaker 2: an especially imaginative book by German fantasy and horror illustrator
Speaker 2: Yanna Heidersdorff, titled Doctor c Lilyfisk's Explorations in Sirenology, A
Speaker 2: Guide to Mermaids and other under the Sea phenomena, purported
Speaker 2: to have been written by syenologist doctor Cecilia Lilyfisk, who
Speaker 2: is described as quote most definitely a real person. The
Speaker 2: book guides readers through a fanciful and horrifying imagined world
Speaker 2: of mermaids, sirens, o people, and related creatures. One of
Speaker 2: the things I love about this book is the way
Speaker 2: it fully embraces the weirder and from our vantage point,
Speaker 2: horrific details of marine life and folds them into its
Speaker 2: treatment of mermaids, mythic and folkloric beings that are based
Speaker 2: in a very anthropocentric view that populated the ancient seas
Speaker 2: with mere reflections of terrestrial and human life. So the
Speaker 2: fantastic beings of the sea in this book are never
Speaker 2: mere women of the deep, but bizarre creatures whose human
Speaker 2: likenesses are infused with all manner of underwater mimicry, predation,
Speaker 2: and camouflage. For just one example, I'd like to discuss
Speaker 2: the hortoise, a creature from the latter portions of the
Speaker 2: book that deal with denizens of the lightless midnight zone.
Speaker 2: The main illustration for this entry depicts a mermaid resting
Speaker 2: on the seafloor, her chin on crossed arms, as if
Speaker 2: in slumber of some sort. Her back, however, is a
Speaker 2: garden of corals and sea and enemies growing out of
Speaker 2: her body, thriving with various other deep water organisms. An
Speaker 2: accompanying image depicts the hortoise's eye sockets full of sessile
Speaker 2: organisms and skin that is seemingly ravaged as well by
Speaker 2: the growth of such life forms. As the entry describes,
Speaker 2: the hortois is herself a sessile habitat for the various
Speaker 2: organisms that inhabit her body, and is whale fall incarnate.
Speaker 2: Whale fall, you might remember, occurs when the remnants of
Speaker 2: a whale cadaver sync to the ocean floor in deep water,
Speaker 2: creating an oasis ecosystem of life in an otherwise desolate
Speaker 2: ocean floor environment, becoming not only a destination for scavengers,
Speaker 2: but a localized, specialized ecosystem until the resources are completely
Speaker 2: consumed later on. Knowledge of whale fall is relatively new
Speaker 2: to science, having first been observed in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 2: but has been featured prominently on such nature documentaries as
Speaker 2: Blue Planet. There are sulfide rich habitat islands that may
Speaker 2: also have served as evolutionary stepping stones for deep sea
Speaker 2: vent organisms, and they feature multiple phases of activity before
Speaker 2: they pass once more into the night. A mobile scavenger stage,
Speaker 2: followed by an enrichment opportunist stage, followed by a sulfophilic stage,
Speaker 2: and finally a reef stage is detailed by Smith at
Speaker 2: All in twenty fifteen's Whalefall Ecosystems, published in the Annual
Speaker 2: Review of Marine Science. There's a morbid beauty in imagining
Speaker 2: a mermaid form of whalefall, but Hydrosdorff takes it all
Speaker 2: to the next philosophical level by having the horta seemingly
Speaker 2: engage in this condition, willingly dreaming away on the seafloor,
Speaker 2: undying and continually regenerating like a nightmare aquatic take on
Speaker 2: Doctor Seuss's Thidwick, the big Hearted Moose, perhaps composed by
Speaker 2: the android David. The inevitable comparison, of course, is that
Speaker 2: while whales in death become a home for an entire
Speaker 2: ecosystem of organisms, we live in humans, like all animals,
Speaker 2: are hosts to a fertile microbiome of microorganisms. In a sense,
Speaker 2: we are all the horta and its nightmare visage is
Speaker 2: also our reflection. The book is currently in print, part
Speaker 2: of the Wool of Bat folklore series, and I highly
Speaker 2: recommend it. You can also read about such creatures in
Speaker 2: the book as the terrifying jellyfish like Medusa Clara, the
Speaker 2: deadly spinosa with its spiked tail, oh and the horrifying Vellum,
Speaker 2: a midnight zone siren that quote devours any flesh its
Speaker 2: prey offers, then rips out the bones, licks them clean,
Speaker 2: and pierces itself with them. Tune in for additional episodes
Speaker 2: of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can
Speaker 2: email us at Contact It's Stuff to will your mind dot.
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