The Monstrefact: Hortus the Rotting Mermaid
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With one sign-in, you can manage all your subscriptions, all in one place. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash subscriptions. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

As you probably know, I love a good monster manual. I love a good bestiary. And I recently picked up an especially imaginative book by German fantasy and horror illustrator Jana Heidersdorf titled Dr. C. Lillifisk's Explorations in Sirenology, A Guide to Mermaids and Other Under-the-Sea Phenomena.

Purported to have been written by sirenologist Dr. Cecilia Lilifisk, who is described as, quote, most definitely a real person, the book guides readers through a fanciful and horrifying imagined world of mermaids, sirens, gill people, and related creatures.

One of the things I love about this book is the way it fully embraces the weirder and, from our vantage point, horrific details of marine life and folds them into its treatment of mermaids, mythic and folkloric beings that are based in a very anthropocentric view that populated the ancient seas with mere reflections of terrestrial and human life.

So, the fantastic beings of the sea in this book are never mere women of the deep, but bizarre creatures whose human likenesses are infused with all manner of underwater mimicry, predation, and camouflage. For just one example, I'd like to discuss the Hortus, a creature from the latter portions of the book that deal with denizens of the Lightless Midnight Zone.

The main illustration for this entry depicts a mermaid resting on the sea floor, her chin on crossed arms as if in slumber of some sort. Her back, however, is a garden of corals and sea anemones growing out of her body, thriving with various other deep water organisms.

An accompanying image depicts the Hortus's eye sockets full of sessile organisms and skin that is seemingly ravaged as well by the growth of such life forms. As the entry describes, the Hortus is herself a sessile habitat for the various organisms that inhabit her body and is whale-fall incarnate.

Whale fall, you might remember, occurs when the remnants of a whale cadaver sink to the ocean floor in deep water, creating an oasis ecosystem of life in an otherwise desolate ocean floor environment, becoming not only a destination for scavengers, but a localized, specialized ecosystem until the resources are completely consumed later on.

Knowledge of whale fall is relatively new to science, having first been observed in the 1970s, but has been featured prominently on such nature documentaries as Blue Planet.

They're sulfide-rich habitat islands that may also have served as evolutionary stepping stones for deep-sea vent organisms. And they feature multiple phases of activity before they pass once more into the night. A mobile scavenger stage, followed by an enrichment opportunist stage, followed by a sulfophyllic stage, and finally a reef stage as detailed by Smith et al. in 2015's Whale Fall Ecosystems, published in the Annual Review of Marine Science.

There's a morbid beauty in imagining a mermaid form of whale fall, but Heidersdorf takes it all to the next philosophical level by having the Horta seemingly engage in this condition willingly, dreaming away on the seafloor, undying and continually regenerating, like a nightmare aquatic take on Dr. Seuss's Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose, perhaps composed by the android David.

The inevitable comparison, of course, is that while whales in death become a home for an entire ecosystem of organisms, we living humans, like all animals, are hosts to a fertile microbiome of microorganisms. In a sense, we are all the Horta, and its nightmare visage is also our reflection.

The book is currently in print, part of the Wool of Bat folklore series, and I highly recommend it. You can also read about such creatures in the book as the terrifying jellyfish-like Medusa Clara, the deadly Spinosso with its spiked tail, oh, and the horrifying vellum, a midnight zone siren that, quote, devours any flesh its prey offers, then rips out the bones, licks them clean, and pierces itself with them.

Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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