Elderly women divers[28] peeled sea urchins with thick starched gloves. An old woman tucked her dyed-brown frizz into the black hood of her wetsuit. She picked up her green-netted Styrofoam buoy and waddled on stubby flippers toward the ocean.
We asked the divers where they’d spotted a pod of merrows. We nudged our Korean American intern to translate for us. After some back-and-forth, the divers burst out laughing. Our intern said the divers didn’t see the pod but one or two merrows, headed for the estuary. He said one of the divers had recognized Astra. They called her “psycho,” which caused some of us to bristle.
“Why did they laugh?” Rodney said.
Our intern had tried to explain that her name was Astra and her importance. One of the divers had replied, Why hang her in the sky when she belongs to the sea?
We drove toward Soesokkak Estuary, the mouth of a stream where salt meets fresh, some of us skeptical. The estuary wasn’t deep enough for merrows who were open-water swimmers.[29] But as the divers had claimed, we spotted a dorsal fin speeding across the estuary, the water so shallow the fin stood at least half a meter. We counted two more shapes, three in total. One of the merrows was chasing something, but water visibility remained at zero from the stirred sediment. We couldn’t see who the merrows were or what they were hunting.
One of the merrows leaped from the waters. The torso disappeared underwater before we could see the face, but a pair of dark purple flukes slapped the surface.
Marla wobbled over to the bow. “Astra!”
Astra chased after a silhouetted shape that slipped under our boat. We spotted the third merrow, Triton, recognized by his blue dorsal fin, as he tried to wedge himself between Astra and the fleeing merrow. Astra swerved and rammed into the other merrow from the side.
Alto lashed back at her with his tail. It’d taken us much longer to ID him. His silver scales had darkened into a deep hue. Alto released a sonic boom, a cry only alphas could make. His scream shuddered across the waves. Astra shrieked back. Blood flowed from the corners of her enraged smile. She raked his face with her claws, then headbutted him in the stomach. Alto dove under her and flipped her over.
“Astra,” Marla screamed.
Astra’s head rose once more. For a moment her gaze swiveled in our direction. We couldn’t recognize her. Her eyes had sunk deep into her sockets, from either grief or fury. But she recognized us. Her merrow smile seemed to falter. In her hesitation we saw confusion, and in her confusion we saw her head droop, like a heartbroken child, before she dove under the water.
The waves rippled over, but the air remained sticky with salt and blood. Then the boat lurched. Marla crashed against the railing. A merrow had headbutted us. We scanned the waters for a blue dorsal fin, signs of Triton. But it was Alto, with his deep-diver eyes and mopey smile. A gruesome flap of skin dangled from his nose. Astra had almost raked his face clean off.
Alto bared his teeth at us. “What is he doing? Why is he attacking?” Marla shouted, but none of us could answer. He smashed into our boat again and screamed. His gills splayed pink. He shrieked nonsensical words. Shaken, we turned the boat. We had to chase after Astra, following her wispy trail of blood before it faded. Some of us remembered Kara, who’d once challenged a thirteen-year-old Astra for leadership of the pod, who’d died from her injuries, entangled in a cage net. Alto’s screams echoed, chasing after us.
We searched for Astra, but she’d left the range of her VHF tag. We recruited volunteers from the Korean Oceanic Rescue Service, divers from the local school, and even a crew from an aquaculture site. Volunteers scanned the islets, from Beom Isle to Moon Isle, for hours.
We returned to the estuary, where we found Triton swimming under the strong sun, back and forth along the surface, standing on his tail, a strong indicator of distress. We hauled him in with little effort. Alto, no longer bleeding but sluggish from the fight, had also lingered within sighting distance. He dove deeper whenever we tried to approach. But he never strayed too far. He wouldn’t leave Triton, and we had finally begun to understand why.
Rodney, who had the license and the aim, shot Alto in the back with a tranquilizer. Back at our facility, we measured Alto’s length. The growth was astounding. He stretched 11.5 feet long. His colors had settled into a turquoise flecked with bright yellow. He’d transitioned into a splendid alpha male.
Triton watched Alto from an adjacent sea pen. He hissed whenever we drew close. His own transformation was palpable. The sea pen was shallow enough to expose his scales, fading from crimson to orange-yellow. As we would later discover, the collagen in his scales had already softened from the ridged ctenoid scales of males into the smooth cycloid scales of females.
An external event had triggered Triton’s hermaphroditic transition and we feared the cause.[30] Perhaps Triton sensed this. He rammed against the walls of the sea pen, not purposefully but as if he were disoriented with loss.
A few days later the A pod was spotted near Beom Isle, but Astra was still nowhere to be found. “She’s strong,” Marla said, jaw tense.[31] At her suggestion, we played a merrow song on speakerphone every night. We listened to Astra sing as a merling when she used to cry for her mother, who was killed in the 2001 September drive hunt. We waited on the dock until dawn. We wanted to believe in her smile, no matter how illusory it was.
Fabio eventually returned to the sea. The $20 million Free Fabio Project rehabilitated him in a makeshift pen by Klettsvik Bay. He was taught how to swim, how to hunt. A month after his release into Icelandic waters, Fabio was found near a Norwegian village, flirting with the fishermen, playing with the children. Tourists often spotted him preening his long golden hair, singing Christmas jingles like “Jingle Bell Rock.”
Sometimes he sang in a lost language, echoing clicks and guttural groans, as if he wanted to stretch his vocal cords, his ability to reach out to his own kind, no matter how far away they were.
He died a year after his release. They found his body in Taknes Bay, a calm pocket of coastal water, deep enough that it wouldn’t freeze in the winter.
There is only one recorded instance of Fabio’s attempt to establish contact with a wild merrow pod. He was once seen bobbing in the periphery of the pod, at least five hundred feet away, facing the closest merrow, as they passed by.
After thirty-five days of incubation, the fetus in Astra’s egg resembled a human baby, curled up in a spiral, with a misshapen large head, five webbed little fingers on each hand, and small hind protrusions, which would shrink and meld into a merrow tail, just as the tail would shrink and meld into a human spine.
The tests proved Triton wasn’t the father. On top of his low sperm count, we suspected he was infertile. The surviving merrows of the T pod who had reintegrated into other clans never yielded any fertilized eggs. We’d hoped it wouldn’t be the case for Triton, who was a merling at the time. The virus had not only decimated his family but killed his fragile reproductive capabilities. Even as an alpha female, the chance that Triton would bear children was frighteningly low.
28
The
29
“Benthic foraging on stingrays by merrows (
30
Ibid., p. 6. If the alpha mermaid of a triad falls ill or is injured, the alpha male changes sex to assume the female role while the beta male completes the breeding pair by turning into a mature male. Casas, Lisa, and Ryu, Taewoo. (2008). “Sex Change in Merrows: Molecular Insight from Transcriptome Analysis.”
31
In 2012, Marla Rowland gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Marina, at the age of thirty-eight. At Marina Rowland’s first birthday, Marla is reported to have told some of her past coworkers she wished she could apologize to Astra.