The first thing she noticed was just how blue the water was. How could any natural liquid be so startlingly turquoise, so unrealistically vibrant yet be in at the back of the same grotto she and her friends used to play in when they were children. It wasn't just a trick of the florescent lighting, that was for damn sure, as her colleague showed her a sample he'd taken that still retained the same colour as the rest of the water.
It had been fenced off back when she was a child but now she had been invited back with an official purpose. The unusual fish sighted darting between what appeared to be old mining equipment and some kind of rusted scaffolding had prompted more questions than the local council had been prepared to answer, especially given that theirs had never been a mining community.
The water was found to be dangerously acidic, barely contained within the glass sample tube and far too harsh to consider doing a personal dive. The fish however seemed perfectly content to laze about and even float just beneath the surface, showcasing their full ten foot length in some cases. Otherwise they acted as normally as any cave dwelling fish with no natural predators, until her team tried to feed one.
It was suggested that they lure one close enough that it could be netted and samples taken to further study them without killing what appeared to be a rare and unclassified species. Chum was made from other local fish (non-cave dwelling, of course) and brought in by the bucket so the team could try and sample as many fish as possible.
The first time they tried they were at such an angle that they never got near the head end of the fish, just managing to grab tissue samples and a scale or two along by its tail. The second and third fish went much the same before they redistributed the chum so that they'd be able to get teeth and gum samples for the first time.
None of them expected that these fish had evolved alongside humans for countless centuries and that they had once preyed upon humans on a scale so colossal that stories of them were still well known, albeit skewered ones. They looked nothing like the movies or paintings - they were much worse.
Inside the fourth fishes' mouth was a human head, it was rudimentary and unresponsive to sound but still opened and closed its smaller mouth in time with the fishes' outer mouth to eat. The eyes were possibly light sensitive organs, there wasn't much chance of them being able to haul the hulking creature on shore to further investigate it.
While the outer mouth had no teeth it appeared to use small muscular contractions to pull food in like a fleshy conveyor belt while the inner mouth had incredibly human-looking teeth that bit and chewed the food.The head was even able to twist and turn to properly shred the chum into smaller digestible pieces.
She wasn't quite sure how to tell her bosses that she'd found mermaids.
It had been fenced off back when she was a child but now she had been invited back with an official purpose. The unusual fish sighted darting between what appeared to be old mining equipment and some kind of rusted scaffolding had prompted more questions than the local council had been prepared to answer, especially given that theirs had never been a mining community.
The water was found to be dangerously acidic, barely contained within the glass sample tube and far too harsh to consider doing a personal dive. The fish however seemed perfectly content to laze about and even float just beneath the surface, showcasing their full ten foot length in some cases. Otherwise they acted as normally as any cave dwelling fish with no natural predators, until her team tried to feed one.
It was suggested that they lure one close enough that it could be netted and samples taken to further study them without killing what appeared to be a rare and unclassified species. Chum was made from other local fish (non-cave dwelling, of course) and brought in by the bucket so the team could try and sample as many fish as possible.
The first time they tried they were at such an angle that they never got near the head end of the fish, just managing to grab tissue samples and a scale or two along by its tail. The second and third fish went much the same before they redistributed the chum so that they'd be able to get teeth and gum samples for the first time.
None of them expected that these fish had evolved alongside humans for countless centuries and that they had once preyed upon humans on a scale so colossal that stories of them were still well known, albeit skewered ones. They looked nothing like the movies or paintings - they were much worse.
Inside the fourth fishes' mouth was a human head, it was rudimentary and unresponsive to sound but still opened and closed its smaller mouth in time with the fishes' outer mouth to eat. The eyes were possibly light sensitive organs, there wasn't much chance of them being able to haul the hulking creature on shore to further investigate it.
While the outer mouth had no teeth it appeared to use small muscular contractions to pull food in like a fleshy conveyor belt while the inner mouth had incredibly human-looking teeth that bit and chewed the food.The head was even able to twist and turn to properly shred the chum into smaller digestible pieces.
She wasn't quite sure how to tell her bosses that she'd found mermaids.
No comments:
Post a Comment