damselfish | The Siren's Song

Thanks to all the futzing I've been doing looking for a mermaid book, I figured I'd just write something.

In the midst of this I realized I wanted to give the mermaids a unique sound/language. I've been messing with this a lot for other projects (Arctic Fantasy, it's whales all the way down) so I've heard a lot of underwater noises* and I knew exactly what I wanted: a weddell seal. It's weird, alien, but varied enough to do what I needed it to do in terms of language.

Only problem? I'm trying to figure out how they produce their calls. The whole "how do you produce sound without pushing air out of your lungs" thing became important to know.

Well I can't find any information on that no matter how I search for bioacoustics. But! Apparently James Weddell, the sealer who first described the weddell seal, wrote that the calls he heard as the musical notes of a mermaid.

So if you ever wanted to know what a mermaid sounds like, it sounds like this:

"Eerie Vocals of Weddell Seal Pup & Adult" (Watch on YouTube)

*But never the ones I want or need. My main character is a ribbon seal shapeshifter and I have no idea what they sound like aside from one recording of a pup's call, and everyone says they run (as in, it alternates its flippers rather than inching along, and it can apparently run as fast as a person across the ice). I can pick out most other arctic seals from a line-up, but I can't find a recording of the one I actually need. I also found myself in need of a saber-tooth whale** call and can't find it either.

**Technically Stejneger's Beaked Whale, a group of cetaceans after my own heart, but a common name is "saber-toothed whale" which not only means I don't have to use a person's name in a fantasy setting but how awesome a name is that.