Merfolk Read online

  “If you’re careful,” Elsa said with a smile, pleased to see the child’s curiosity outshine her fear. “They’re very sharp.”

  The girl pressed her index finger to the plane of one triangular tooth. When it wobbled freely and unexpectedly, she snatched her hand back. “It moved!”

  Elsa nodded again. “Sharks don’t chew, so their teeth aren’t attached to their jaws. This allows for forward and backward rotation and retraction, which is perfect for tearing off chunks of flesh from their prey that they can swallow whole—”

  “Ow!” The girl had touched the tooth again, only this time she had run her finger over a serrated edge. She glanced up at Elsa accusingly. “It bit me!”

  “It didn’t bite—”

  “Mrs. Jayawardene!” the girl wailed, jabbing her finger in the air. “It bit me! The shark bit me!”

  The three teachers who had been conversing amongst themselves turned to face the shed. The short, scowling one—Mrs. Jayawardene, presumably—said, “What are you doing in there, Julie? Come out right now! In fact, everyone get in the shade of the tent and take a seat!” She clapped her hands loudly. “You heard me!”

  Julie and the other students went obediently to the marquee and plopped down on the sand at the front of the standing-room-only audience. The teachers began straightening them into two lines.

  Julie, Elsa noted, was excitedly showing her classmates the finger the great white had “bit.”

  When the students were settled, and it didn’t appear as though any more spectators would be joining the gathering, Elsa nodded to Mark, who turned on his handheld video camera and pointed the lens at her. The feed was being sent wirelessly to a large flat-screen TV set up on the sand so everyone under the marquee would have a detailed view of the dissection.

  Elsa switched on the lavalier microphone clipped to the collar of her blue SBMC polo shirt, stepped to the threshold of the shed in her rubber Wellingtons, and said, “Thank you all for joining us today. We have quite the show for you.” She spoke with a professional cadence and authority, honed through the many scientific seminars and presentations she had given over the years. “I’ll begin the necropsy of this great white shark in just a moment, but first I always like to ask my audience, what do you already know about sharks?”

  “They eat people!” the blonde girl blurted out.

  “Hand up!” Mrs. Jayawardene instructed.

  Julie’s hand shot up above her head and wiggled fiercely.

  Elsa nodded at her. “Yes, young lady?”

  “They eat people!”

  Her classmates snickered nervously.

  “No, that’s not exactly true,” Elsa corrected her. “The film Jaws convinced millions of people that great whites were cold-blooded monsters. But the truth is, they hardly ever attack human beings. In fact, you have a better chance of being killed by your kitchen toaster than a great white. Yes, they do occasionally attack swimmers or surfers, but marine biologists will tell you they don’t like the taste of us. Most attacks are little more than ‘test bites,’ as they attempt to establish what we are. And because of our ability to get out of the water and get medical attention, most of these attacks aren’t fatal. Those who do die, sadly, die from excessive bleeding. It’s very, very rare for a great white to eat anybody alive.”

  “What do they eat then?” asked an Asian boy who was holding his backpack on his lap.

  “Peter, hand!” Mrs. Jayawardene admonished, and Elsa realized the woman’s scowl might just be a permanent fixture on her face.

  The boy raised his hand.

  “They have a varied diet,” Elsa told him. “But their main prey are pinnipeds such as sea lions and seals, dolphins, porpoises, other sharks, and even turtles and sea birds.”

  “Dolphins?” Julie griped. “But I like dolphins.”

  “Julie, quiet!” Mrs. Jayawardene snapped.

  “You might be surprised to learn,” Elsa said, “that great whites are also eaten themselves. Orcas, otherwise known as killer whales, hunt even the largest great whites. They bite off the great white’s tail from behind and finish it off when it can no longer swim. If the great white gets away unharmed, it won’t return to that hunting ground for up to a year.” She clasped her hands together behind her back. “What I want everybody to take away from today’s dissection is that great whites—and sharks in general—aren’t the fearsome creatures of the deep that they’re often portrayed as. We shouldn’t fear them or stigmatize them. They’re simply a part of the circle of life, part of the food chain, doing what they have done for millions and millions of years, long before humans were around. In fact, many of them now need our help. Because of overfishing, some species are critically endangered and might one day go extinct, and nobody wants that, do they?” She smiled. “But enough talk. Is everyone ready for the dissection?”

  This was greeted with cheers and a splattering of applause.

  Elsa went to the stainless-steel necropsy table and picked up a large, thin filleting knife. Mark followed her with the video camera.

  “You should all have a good view on the TV out there,” she said, the microphone amplifying her voice with only the tiniest trace of feedback. “If anyone is squeamish seeing blood, you can look away or close your eyes. But remember, this is just a fish, a big one, but just like the fish you see on ice in the supermarket. One big piece of sushi. Now, I’m going to begin with the snout.”

  ∆∆∆

  Elsa expertly sliced off the end of the great white’s snout (to some gags from the crowd), revealing a cross-section of the complex system of tiny jelly-filled pores that processed olfactory information. She explained that sharks didn’t use their noses for breathing—they used their gills for that—only for smelling. The pores picked up vibrations in the water and the weak electromagnetic fields produced by the muscle contraction and movement of potential prey. They were so sensitive they could detect a half-billionth of a volt in electric fields, as well as traces of blood from as far as four or five miles away.

  Next Elsa began removing the shark’s jaws. Just as its teeth weren’t fused to the jaws, the jaws weren’t fused to the skull. This allowed it to spit out its gums, bludgeoning its prey and enlarging the size of its bite. While she made incision after incision, she kept up a steady commentary of facts and biology. She also added her usual jokes to keep the dissection light-hearted. “Why do sharks live in salt water? Because pepper makes them sneeze!” was one of her cringe-worthy favorites.

  When she freed the jaws from the shark’s head, Elsa and her colleague, Lasith—a local fisherman and marine biologist with a nicotine-stained moustache—lowered them to the cement floor carefully. A great white’s jaws were worth $10,000 to $20,000. This, along with the substantial monetary value of their fins, and the prestige involved in catching such a notorious predator, was part of the reason they were currently listed as a threatened species on the IUCN Red List.

  Crouching beside the gaping maw to show that she fit neatly inside it, Elsa explained that despite the massive size of the jaws, great whites didn’t have a particularly powerful bite compared to other animals such as saltwater crocodiles, jaguars, or spotted hyenas. This was because, as she’d told Julie earlier, they didn’t chew, and their razor-sharp teeth could slice through anything they came in contact with.

  Standing up, she exchanged the filleting knife for a bone saw and performed the laborious task of decapitating the great white. She extracted the brain from the cartilage cranium and held it before her, allowing Mark to capture a combination of slow pans and tight close-ups that elicited a mixture of delight and repulsion from the audience. She then placed it in a white bucket with a wet thump. Later, she would take measurements and perform a detailed examination to compare its major regions to other, better understood, shark species.

  The great white’s heart was also in its head. Elsa removed the pink organ and again held it before her for Mark to film. Like the brain, it was relatively small in comparison to shark’s bod
y size, though the aorta still dwarfed a human finger.

  “How’s everyone faring so far?” Elsa asked the crowd as she rinsed blood from her gloved hands in the shed’s sink. “Nobody’s fainted yet, I hope?”

  “It’s gross!” shouted Julie, and several of her classmates echoed this sentiment.

  “Remember, the dissection is for science. Have you all learned something so far?”

  There was a general chorus of agreement.

  “Then it’s been worthwhile,” she stated. “And now it’s time to take a look inside the great white’s body.” She returned to the necropsy table and made a long cut along the shark’s abdomen. With Lasith’s help, they lifted back the thick layer of skin and tissue to reveal the shark’s enormous liver beneath. It was the size of a human and filled almost the entire gut cavity. Unlike other fish, sharks lacked gas-filled swim bladders that controlled buoyancy. Instead, they relied on giant, fatty livers packed with oil to keep them afloat, which was why they sank when they died and rarely washed up on shore.

  As Mark filmed the oil oozing out of the organ, Elsa said, “You may be surprised to see there are no bones inside the great white, only cartilage. This is the case with all sharks. It allows them to be light and flexible in the water, while also enabling them to become the largest known extant fish species in the oceans. Whale sharks, for instance, can reach a length of sixty feet and a mass of twenty tons. That’s about the weight of three elephants, thirty cattle, or a whopping two hundred and fifty people. Thankfully, they pose no threat to us as their diet consists mostly of plankton and small squid or fish.”

  Elsa, Lasith, and four other colleagues heaved the great white’s liver from the gut cavity and plopped it down on a blue tarp stretched across the floor.

  After catching her breath, Elsa said, “All right, ladies and gentlemen and boys and girls. I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally made it to the stomach! This is my favorite part of any dissection. Some of you older folks out there might recall that in Jaws Richard Dreyfuss found a crushed tin can and a license plate in the stomach of a tiger shark. Although that’s just a movie, some strange stuff has indeed been found inside the stomachs of sharks over the years, including old boots, car tires, a bag of money, and even a full suit of armor! Any guesses as to what we’ll find today?”

  “A dolphin?” Julie called out.

  “I hope not. But anything’s possible. So let’s get cracking, shall we?”

  Elsa slit open the shark’s stomach and nearly retched at the putrefying smell. Scrunching her nose in disgust, she sifted a gloved hand through the partially digested sludge inside the muscular sack.

  “Much of this appears to be…half-digested whale blubber,” she said, tasting the offending odor in her mouth. “Which means this great white had likely been scavenging on a floating whale carcass not long before it died…” Her fingers brushed something hard and heavy. She removed a piece of bone the shape and size of a small boat propeller. “Ah ha! I was right! This is a whale vertebra. By the size of it, I’d say it was part of a backbone at least twenty feet long. We’ll send it off to a laboratory for proper identification.” She handed it to Lasith, then stuck her hand back into the goop. A few moments later she cried out again when she discovered the rest of the fisherman’s line that had trailed from the great white’s mouth. She pulled it fist over fist until a nasty fishing hook emerged from the rotting whale blubber. She showed it to Lasith. “What do you think?”

  He examined the hook closely. “Good news—the angler was not fishing for sharks,” he said in his Sri Lankan English, colloquially known as Singlish. “This line and hook, it is for gamefish—sailfish or marlin. Bad news—the damage to the hook means the white tip put up a strong fight until the line broke. The escape would leave it exhausted.”

  “Exhausted enough to ride a current to shore and get tangled up in the Matara safety nets?”

  “Yes, I think so. Struggling for oxygen the entire way. You will probably find high levels of stress hormones in the blood sample you took from the liver.”

  Elsa sighed, disappointed but not surprised. “Sharks,” she explained to the audience, setting aside the hook and tugging off her yellow latex gloves, “need water moving over their gills to breathe. If they stop swimming, they drown. This great white, it seems, exhausted itself getting off the fisherman’s line, which left it—”

  “Doctor,” Mark said, holding the video camera in one hand and his nose with the other as he peered into the shark’s stomach. “I think I see a second bone…”

  Elsa joined him at the necropsy table. “You’re right,” she said, snapping a glove back on. “Most likely another of the whale’s vertebrae…” She plucked the bone free from the sludge—and frowned in momentary shock.

  “Oh, no,” Mark mumbled. He quickly recognized what she held in her hand and averted the video camera, but not before the human skull appeared on the outdoor television screen.

  The crowd erupted in bedlam.

  Chapter 2

  MARTY

  Dr. Martin Murdock stood on the aft deck of the RV Oannes, the smoke from his corncob pipe drifting away from him into the briny air. He was staring out at the vast expanse of the Laccadive Sea to where it kissed the vermillion evening sky. Marty had purchased the twenty-two-meter ship from a local businessman who had been in the process of retiring his ragtag fishing fleet. At the time it had reeked of fish and showed its age in every grubby plank and window. Now, after a thorough retrofitting, it was a state-of-the-art research vessel featuring scientific equipment, high-tech electronics, and both a wet and dry laboratory.

  The Oannes was also his permanent home.

  It had never been Marty’s intention to live aboard a boat, but his work often kept him there late into the evenings. When he found himself spending the night in the master stateroom more often than not, it became redundant renting a house in the city. And so he adopted the life of a sea nomad, waking each morning to the squawks of herons and spoonbills and seagulls, showering with spotty hot water, and bobbing around like a rubber duck in a bathtub during Sri Lanka’s frequent tropical storms. It was an unusual lifestyle, but not an uncomfortable one.

  “Wishful thinking never caught anyone a mermaid, mon capitiane.”

  Marty turned as his sprightly, short assistant, Pip Jobert, emerged from the companionway to the lower deck, where she had been working in the dry lab. Her typical outfit on any given day was a grungy tee-shirt, torn jeans, and an Australian slouch hat (one side of the brim pinned up with a rising sun badge) to keep the equatorial sun off her tanned face. Today she wore the slouch hat and torn jeans but with an oversized Metallica singlet that revealed her bra straps. A pair of Ray-Ban Aviators shielded her sea-green eyes. Her coffee-colored hair, which fell nearly to the small of her back, was braided into two individual ponytails. On her feet were a pair of sun-bleached flipflops so well-worn they had holes in the soles beneath each of her big toes.

  Marty had never known what to make of Pip’s Salvation Army fashion. Nevertheless, he didn’t give it much thought anymore. The idiosyncratic clothing had come to embody her in the two and a half years they’d been acquainted—and in his mind she would be somehow diminished without it.

  What mattered most to Marty, of course, was that Pip was a sonar technician bar none. The day she first showed up at the Oannes, unannounced, and told him she was replying to the help wanted ad he’d posted on a number of online job forums, he’d explained the spot was filled (this was not an excuse because she’d looked like she’d spent the night in a trash can; he had actually hired a Colombo University graduate student two weeks prior). Yet Pip persisted, bragging that she was the best sonar technician in the city, and she’d work the first week pro bono to prove it. Although being skeptical, Marty agreed to give her a trial run, as the grad student had taken off the week to study for an upcoming exam.

  That week, Pip worked every day from dawn until dusk, chipping away at the massive amount of acoustic data he�
�d compiled during his research trips along the island-nation’s west coast—and proved that her boast of being the best sonar technician around wasn’t hyperbolic.

  “Wishful thinking?” he said to her, removing the pipe from his mouth.

  “That is right,” she replied in French-accented English. “If you are not glued to a computer screen analyzing your sonar readouts, Marty, you are standing out here daydreaming about catching mermaids.”

  “In fact, I wasn’t thinking about anything.”

  “I cannot believe that. People are always thinking of something, yes? You are not a rock.”

  “Thank you for pointing that out, Pip. Tell me then. What are you thinking about right at this moment?”

  “I just told you. I am thinking that you are thinking about catching mermaids. But what I think you mean is, what was I thinking about before that? I will tell you. I was thinking about clownfish.”

  “Clownfish?” he said, amused.

  “I watched a Disney movie last night, the one with the clownfish. It reminded me of a paper I wrote when I was a university student. My thesis questioned why some marine animals such as clownfish forgo their own reproduction to help others in their society reproduce. Very strange, yes?”

  “Any ideas?”

  “Of course. Do you think I wrote a paper without answering my thesis? I posited that the largest nonbreeder from an anemone inherited the territory when a dominant breeder died and left a breeding vacancy. Thus it assumes its own breeding role and contributes genetically to the next generation of clownfish.”

  “And what about the smaller nonbreeders from the anemone, or even nonbreeders from elsewhere? They simply cede this territory?”

  “That is right.”

  Marty shook his head. “Sorry, Pip. You get a B for effort, but that’s all. Ask any behavior ecologist and they’ll tell you that nothing in the animal kingdom waits to inherit a breeding position. They contest it immediately. The guy gets the girl, the loser skulks off into the bush. It’s why we have a little something called natural selection, not future selection.”