November 7, 2024 • 61 mins
In this monster-themed episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss a creature most dreadful to the mariners of old: the mythical siren.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And once again October content
has spilled over the edge of the month.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
That's right. In today's episode, we're continuing our Halloween twenty
twenty four express with an episode that was originally scheduled
for late October, but our episode on the Hogs of
Hell went a little long, ended up going to two episodes,
so we bumped this one back a bit. It's a
topic we've touched on briefly before, but it's a great one,
(00:42):
taking us back to the world of oceanic monsters of
myth and legend. We're going to be talking about the siren.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
The siren, so I realized, Rob correct me if I'm wrong,
But I realized, I think we both had we had
different theeomorphic hybrids in my and when we were separately
thinking about the siren. Because when I thought of the siren,
I first thought of sort of half woman, half bird
creatures that sing to the sailors. But I get the
(01:11):
impression that your mind first went to half human, half fish.
So I guess those are both within the siren tradition,
aren't they?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
They are. This is one of the things about the siren,
as we'll discuss, is that there are takes on them
in which they are essentially mermaids. It's essentially some version
of the European North European mermaid tradition. There are versions
of it in which they are just sort of beautiful
ladies who sing sailors to their death, that sort of thing.
(01:44):
And then other times they are essentially what we might
think of as a harpie, you know, they are a
winged creature, perhaps like an all out vulture type being,
with even just the head of a maiden or the
face of a maiden.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
But in either case, I think we're to assume that
their voices may be lovely, but they sing sailors to
their doom.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yes, And that's one thing we can be sure on
when we look to really the most famous literary account
of the sirens, but also the one that continues to
raise a lot of questions because it does skim over
some of the details. As we'll discuss, we are, of
course talking about Homer's the Odyssey. I'm just going to
(02:25):
read a quote here. This is from the Samuel Butler translation.
I believe this is Circe warning Odysseus and his men
about the challenges ahead. First, you will come to the sirens,
who enchant all who come near them. If anyone unwarily
draws in too close and hears the singing of the sirens,
(02:47):
his wife and children will never welcome him home again,
for they sit in a green field and warble him
to death with the sweetness of their song. There is
a great heap of dead men's bones lying all around,
and the flesh still rotting off them.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Number one, that's intense. Number two does not describe them physically,
and number three warbled to death.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Warbled to death. You know which, if you got to go,
why not choose warbling? Why not? So this is you know, considered,
You know this is This is probably the most famous
literary description and non description of the sirens. But we
have a lot of other materials that have depicted the sirens,
(03:33):
described them or depicted them visually that also sort of
compete with our imaginations here and end up in This
is often the case with these things ends up coloring
our absorption of Homer's original writings. We've had some great
cinematic sirens over time, we've have, for example, to get
into the adaptations of the Odyssey itself. There, of course
(03:56):
the Three Sirens and No Brother, Where art thou? The
three strange women that appear as beautiful washer women singing
go to sleep, Little Baby. They of course lure in
del Mar and turn him into a horny toad sort of.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Wait does he get turned back? I haven't seen this
movie in a while.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Well, he doesn't. Actually, we end up finding out later
that he was never turned into a horny toad. He
was captured by authorities because he was wanted.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Oh yeah, and they find him again in the movie
theater Do Not Seek the Treasure.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, but you know, it's a great sequence in the film,
a lot of laughs, and it works nicely in comparison
to the theme of baptism that's also employed in the work.
Elsewhere in cinema, we tend to see the idea of
sirens employed more in terms of the evil mermaid. You
want to have a mermaid, but you want an evil one. Well,
you lean into this idea of the siren. Just a
(04:51):
few quick mentions, and I'm missing a lot of them.
I'm sure there's two thousand and one's Daygone. This is
the Stuart Gordon film you have neat Split Tail that
kidnaped Mermaids. In that, There's a two and another two
thousand and one film titled She Creature that I have
not seen since two thousand and one, but I remember
having a nice little cast to it, and also having
(05:11):
a monstrous mermaid. More recently, I don't know much about
the plot details here, so I don't know where this
falls in terms of sirens, but there's a Polish musical
horror film titled The Lure that seems to have resonated
with a number of viewers. I've seen some nice reviews
of that. And then I think we've had at least
a couple of different Mermaids slash Siren TV shows in
(05:33):
recent decades, but I have not seen them, So we'll
have to lean on our listeners to write in and
tell us what those are like. Now again, to get
back to what we were just talking about earlier, Though
sirens are not definitively sea creatures or definitively mermaids, however,
it's impossible to separate the two completely, so you know,
(05:58):
we do have to acknowledge that to whatever extent. Sirens
are based in this idea of undersea creature as well,
you know, the idea of people and creatures from beneath
the waves. Naturally, it goes back very long ways. As
long as humans have gazed out across the waves or
peered down through clear waters from the side of their boats,
they've dreamed of a mirror world to our own, a
(06:21):
place where every animal has its watery reflection, where intelligent
human like beings, no doubt dwell as well, along with
various monsters and gods and so forth. There is a
paper by Nancy Easterlin. This is a two thousand and
one paper again back to two thousand and one that
we've we cited in a munch Older episode of the
(06:43):
podcast titled Hans Christian Andersen's Fish out of Water, and
she points out that the Babylonians recognize gods with fish
features or hybridity. You have like what Adappa, the fishermen
of Oneius, the teacher of wisdom, even Mighty Inky, the
ancient Sumerian water god, is sometimes depicted as having a
(07:03):
cloak of fish or scaled skin, and the chief place
of worship was a ziggurat known as the House of
the subterranean waters, and additionally fishtailed gods, water dragons and
so forth found throughout the cultures of India, China and
Japan and so forth. There's a quote from that Easter
(07:25):
paper she writes some other mythological sea beings and deities,
such as Poseidon and the Sirens were not originally associated
with water and piicine anatomy. The sirens were originally birds.
We'll get back to that in a minute, indicating that
divine power and womanly allure became combined with the power
and promise of the sea when ancient cultures overtook maritime
(07:47):
war and trade. So in that paper she gets into
a familiar theme on this show when we're talking about
deities and supernatural beings, is that, of course they are
passed down and they do not stay in one form
or another. They are reused, recreated, you know, different different,
various relaunches and reboots of the brand over time, and.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
In past episodes we've even talked about reasons for questioning
the very idea of such a thing as a canonical
form of a deity or a monster or something that
you know, that makes sense when you have something like
intellectual property like if a monster is the creation of
a specific author and they describe it a certain way,
and then other people could take the idea and vary it,
(08:33):
but you would want to refer back to what is
the original one, you know, with like gods and monsters
and things that come out of folklore. You know, maybe
sometimes it makes sense to say there's basically an authoritative
version of a story, but most of the time there's not.
Sometimes the characteristics aren't even given in the earliest works
that are still extant today. So like searching after the
canonical form of the monster or deity or whatever is fruitless.
(08:57):
There just is no original that we can access.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Yeah, I think we've talked about this before. You get
kind of close to this idea when you look at
a multi author of franchise, like say Marvel Comics, where
you can set you know, you try to explain, like, well,
who's Venom. Oh he's a villain of Spider Man. Oh well, no,
he's also kind of a hero, he's kind of an
anti hero. Oh yeah, And sometimes he's just straight up
what we would think I was the protagonist of a story,
(09:21):
So it just it changes. And there are probably better
examples than Venom to turn to there.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Yeah, well, I think that's a good one, except it's
it's like that. But imagine if most Marvel comics were
lost and we don't know what they said or what
was in them, and we don't know where the first
appearance of Venom was.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Yeah, all right, But coming back to the siren and
getting into the Greek traditions here, we as the quote
we read earlier attests to we certainly experienced the sirens
and Homer's eighths century BCE work The Odyssey, and they
are described as malicious, doomy women when we put in
(09:59):
asterisk by that woman description, malicious do me entities anyway,
who hang out on rocks and sing to passing sailors.
But Homer neglects to physically describe them at all. So again,
even by just briefly mentioning them as women, I'm airing
because he does not ascribe gender to these creatures. But
(10:20):
the thing is, it's really hard not to be infected
by the various visual treatments of this encounter of these
creatures from throughout Western art, you know, which has often
served as a great opportunity to create dramatic and evocative
scenes that make use of, you know, the the unclothed
or partially unclothed male and female bodies. I was talking
(10:40):
about this with my son yesterday when I was researching this,
and I mentioned to him, and he already knows his
way aroun myths and monsters pretty well. I mentioned, you
know that that Homer never actually describes them. So they
could look like a woman, they could look like a
fish monster, they could look like a bird person. We
don't know. And he asked, well, could they just be
like a banana peal? And I I dare say they could.
(11:01):
And he does not say that they do not look
like banana peels, and provides no other physical description at all.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
They could literally be Ronald MacDonald.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
They could be. There's nothing in the Odyssey that says
they're not. So I was reading a bit more about
this in this is an older book. This is older publication.
This is from nineteen seventy The Homeric Sirens by Gerald K. Gressith.
This was publishing the Transactions and Proceedings of the American
Philological Association, and in it the author spends a lot
(11:36):
of time talking about what at the time were like
two dueling interpretations of the sirens in Homer's the Odyssey,
and I think it's interesting to look at them here.
So the first one that he references is the idea
that the sirens are soul birds, again playing on the
idea that in other texts we have the sirens described
(11:58):
an Avian term. And the connection here is that they
would be representations of the souls of the dead in
bird form, an idea that extends back through ancient Egyptian religion.
This was an idea champion by the German classical archaeologist
Georg Viker. In short, this view sees the sirens as
things that emerge from hades and or the grave and
(12:21):
as Grethis explains, Homer likely wouldn't have thought that the
soul became a bird upon death in this scenario, but
he might have been influenced by older ideas still present
in art and culture of his time. Okay, then there's
this other idea, and that is that the sirens are
other world enchantresses. So an idea in this case champion
(12:43):
by German archaeologist and translator Ernst Bouscher in response to
Vicker arguing that homer sirens are anthropomorphic. This view sees
the sirens not as creatures of the afterlife, but as
something else that doesn't reside in Hades, though perhaps does
resis guide in a different other world and might not
(13:05):
even be directly malicious. That's the interesting thing about this
kind of view. They might be more in line with
muses offering song and information that were just not equipped
to resist. We just can't handle a song this beautiful
and or information that's tantalizing, and therefore we are just
drawn into it. And this actually gets into the vagueness
(13:26):
of how they actually bring about these men's dooms, because,
as Aggressive points out, we don't have an answer for
this in Homer either, and elsewhere, interpretations range from an
overt and then the sirens ad him sort of situation
to this idea that enraptured individuals just slowly die of
exposure on the shores of the sirens, like they're drawn
(13:47):
by the song, and then they just, you know, forget
to eat, forget to stay out of the sun, and
just waste away. And so in that scenario, it's like, well,
the muses, like they may not even be entities that
are aware of what they are doing. They're just sharing
song and information, but we just can't handle it as mortals.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
That's fascinating, and it's funny because the interpretation I always
just had in the back of my mind isn't even
listed there, which is the idea that they sit on
the rocks and they sing to the sailors and they
draw the sailors in close, and the ship's wreck on
the rocks and the sailors drone. I don't know where
that idea came from, but that is what I thought
was being described in the Odyssey.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
You know, Like I said, there are a lot of
paintings of the sirens and or Odysseus, and I think
they also almost at times subliminally charge one's understanding of
this scenario. And there are several of these that I
think I've just seen most of my life. There are
a couple in particular that pop up in the time
(14:47):
Life Enchanted World book series, of course makes use of
a lot of excellent original art, but also a lot
of classic art as well too. In particular, John William
Waterhouse is the Siren from nineteen hundred. This is a
like a vertical piece in which there is a nude
woman with a harp some kind of or is this
a lute?
Speaker 3 (15:08):
I believe it's a liar's Yeah, yeah, there you go,
U shaped stringed instrument.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah. So she's playing it on the rocks, and there
down in the water below her is an enraptured male,
like a youthful male, who looks like he is probably
going to drown. And so like, I think this really
matches up with your read on it, and you know,
I often I think thought about it in similar terms
looking at these images, like the sirens just draw you
(15:34):
in and then you know, stuff happens, but it's not
like they're biting into you or anything that's right.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
But she in this in the waterhouse painting, the siren
does not look malicious. She does not look like she's
even really attempting to lure him. She's just kind of
there existing, And he is up to his neck in
the water, clearly about to die, looking like he has
this combination of just joy and tear or yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
And then the other piece that was definitely in the
Enchanted World series is Herbert James Draper's nineteen oh nine
painting Ulysses and the Sirens. This is a very captivating
piece in which you see the familiar scenario that I
may again describe her in a second where, of course,
how does Odysseus how does he get past the sirens? Well,
of course he clogs the ear holes of all of
(16:24):
his men with wax, and then he himself is strapped
to the mast of the ship, and then they just
keep moving that way. The siren song doesn't infect the oarsman.
It infects him, but he can't do anything about it
because he's strapped to the mast.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
And this is usually presented as a result of curiosity,
like Odysseus wants to hear what the siren song is like,
but doesn't want to allow himself under its spell to
command his men to do otherwise, so he has himself
tied up on purpose.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah, and so in this particular piece by Draper, which
you know is widely available you can find it on
wiki commons, and so forth, we see, you know, this
crazed look on Odysseus's eye. He's completely enraptured, straining against
the ropes that bind him. Meanwhile, the naked sirens in
this case seemingly seeming to transform out of mermaid form
(17:16):
into humanoid form, just like the movie Splash as they
crawl on the ship. And of course this is a.
This image, of course, like a lot of the later
treatments of Sirens, is of course very there's a certain
sexual politics to all this and gender politics to it,
because it's clearly showing like the feminine form is the
(17:37):
aggressively alluring temptation that is coming at the men on
the ship.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Yeah, and it looked There are very different implied situations
in these two paintings, Like in the Waterhouse painting, I
don't know, you could interpret it multiple ways, but it
doesn't look obvious to me. Like I said that the
siren is even trying to attract the man, She's just
sitting there. She might just be minding her own business. Yeah,
and he's raptured. In the second painting, the Draper painting
from nine These these are beings that are obviously trying
(18:06):
to seduce the men, and they are posed with seductive
ill intent.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yes, So these are the two that I was most
familiar with. But there's a third I want to mention,
and this is the Sirens and Ulysses from eighteen thirty
seven by William Edie or Eddie I'm not sure which,
but this one is also tremendous. I was not familiar
with this but in this one, we see the sirens
on their rocky island in the foreground, and in the
(18:34):
background we see Ulysses send a ship and there's a
lot of struggling going on there. But in the foreground
the sirens are just kind of like, hey, sirens, party,
come on over, guys. And then next to them we
see rotting bodies and bones. It's quite quite a quite
a scene.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
It is wonderful. But to your point, yeah, I interpret
this one more along the lines of the waterhouse painting.
There's no indication that that their attention even has anything
to do with the men on the ship.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Yeah, all right, So I already rolled through the basic
scenario with Odysseus and the Odyssey and how they get
past the sirens. But we have another encounter, and this
(19:27):
one is detailed in the Argonautica from the third century BCE,
and this one involves Jason in the Argonauts, how did
they defeat the sirens? Well, they brought Orpheus along with them,
the most famous bard of Greek mythology, at least as
far as mortals go, and his song is even sweeter
(19:47):
than the sirens. So you know, they explode or something.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
It's the Devil went down to Georgia.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, actually, as Apollodorus described it, I believe the sweet
song of Orpheus causes them to throw them selves into
the sea and become rocks. And it would turn out
that these were like the terms of their power, that
if their song ever failed to enthrall someone, then they
have to die. They were done for. And there are
(20:13):
similar accounts with the Sphinx as well, you know, like
if it's riddle as guest, it has to throw itself
off a mountain, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Wait, now that I said it, I'm trying to remember
what happens to the devil at the end of Devil
went Down to Georgia. BET's a fiddle of gold against
your soul. But what happens if Johnny wins.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
He gets to keep the golden golden.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Devil's just out of gold fiddle. That's it.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah, there was some I forget who, some stand up
comedian I think, was talking about how you know, it's
clear that the Devil's music is more impressive in that
particular song, we still give the wind to the mortals.
But yes, I agree, it is like very much like
the Devil goes down.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
To Geordia which text came first. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Now the exact number of sirens fairies. They're like between
two and five, depending on what telling you're looking at.
They have various names, different there are different takes on
their parentage as well. Again, it's just how many there
are to begin with, but their exact nature in large
part due to Homer being vague about it. This has
(21:16):
always been an area of discussion, and apparently it's not
the only area that Homer's vague, and for instance, according
to Gressith, he never explains that the cyclops as one eye.
So I think there are moments like that where we
just kind of like assume, like we like we know
as the as the reader what it's supposed to be
(21:38):
or what it becomes canonized as later. But you can
apparently get into discussions with any of this of like, well,
what did the original author intend? What was the shape
of it? Then?
Speaker 3 (21:48):
Yeah, of course, then again, they because most of these
stories would be drawing on pre existing concepts and stuff,
you never know, like what did people just naturally assume
when you name a character or type of being, Like
what did the reader bring to the reader or listener
bring to the table.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah, And that's one thing that Gressi gets into as well,
is that you have to end up looking for these
answers in the contemporary religion, but also in contemporary folklore,
to whatever extent you can pick at it through other sources. Now,
I picked up a couple of my favorite monster books
for a little more on these sirens, and I was
(22:26):
looking at Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, and
he points out three different traditions. He points out that
Avid describes them as golden birds with the faces of virgins.
He points out that Paulinius of Rhodes described them as
women with the lower half of sea birds. And then
much later medieval heraldry and bestiaries tend to present them
(22:48):
just as straight up mermaids, again fusing these older classical
tellings with Northern European traditions of mermaids. And I think
it's this is a reality you just can't get away from. Then,
when you keep tugging at siren myths, because the terms
are often used interchangeably, like some some tales of the siren,
(23:10):
you could sort of maybe make a better case that
these are actually mermaid stories. But some of them are
very are very juicy, and I just couldn't resist getting
into a particular one. This is one that Borges also
talks about. This This would have been the sixth century
in northern Wales. It is said that a siren was
(23:32):
caught and baptized, eventually becoming a saint in some traditions,
by the name of Murgan or Murrgan, which I believe
means Seaborn. She was reportedly carried to her baptism in
a vat, and I believe and this is also tied
to an Irish legend of lie Bon, and in fact
I often I have elsewhere seen this character referenced as
(23:55):
li Bon Murrgan, for example. I've also seen Morgan described
as an early discredited saint, so I don't know if
I don't believe that she is officially a saint in
the Catholic Church. This would have been around what five
eighty eight CE, I think, But she had a feast
(24:15):
day at one point, and it was January twenty seventh,
which I think is also devoted to various other saints
and so forth.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
This is an interesting story, but I'm thinking about the
symbolic implications of the baptism of an animal that lives
under the water.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Yeah, yeah, And it comes back to what we were
talking earlier about baptism and sirens and no brother where
art thou. There's apparently a more complete telling of this story,
and I found it in Carol Rose's Spirits Farries, Leprachauns
and Goblins, where this luban murrgan. She starts out as
(24:50):
a human, a human daughter of the High King of
Ireland and a goddess Iatawan I believe is her name,
and she's just a normal human child. But then she
is caught in the flood of a sacred spring with
her dog and carried to an underwater cavern and she's
trapped there for a year. But then she prays that
she might be free like the fishes, and so her
(25:12):
lower half becomes like a fish, and her dog transforms
into an otter.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Well that is appropriate because otters are good boys.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Three hundred years later, enter a cleric by the name
of BioC and he hears her singing and then you
know he's drawn to her singing. So they meet and
she asked him to bring her to Saint Comgall, an
actual historic saint, and this is where the vat comes
into the picture. They throw her in a vat and
she is willingly, you brought to the saint so that
(25:46):
she may be baptized. But at her baptism she is
or upon her baptism she is faced with a choice
another three hundred years of life or immediate entry into heaven.
So you know, do not pass go directly to heaven.
She chooses heaven. So anyway, it's a lovely little little
(26:07):
bit of folklore there. I like it quite a bit.
And they're apparently depictions of the saint here, Saint leban
or Saint Morgan, and yeah, sometimes she's depicted with a crown,
yeah quite oh and then and some depictions you also
see her order there beside her.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
Oh that's adorable.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
So essentially, you know, we have these Northern European mermaid traditions,
not to be confused with similar tales from around the world,
merging to some extent with classical tales of sirens, but
plenty of winged descriptions remain that ultimately line up more
with what you might think of today as a heartbeat.
You know, ancient wind spirits eventually transformed into fiends through
(26:52):
tellings of Greek myth depending on how you slice it.
Harpies and sirens may have been both female bird human hybrids,
but of different demeanors. So harpies you can think of
more as vengeful cannibal to spoilers, while sirens are alluring,
musical beings of temptation and is. If faced with both,
you'd need to fight the harpies off with physical weapons,
(27:14):
while the siren demands a more cerebral approach. So you know,
in some ways, they're kind of if you're looking at
them both as avian beings, they're kind of reflections of
each other, one targeting the body and the other targeting
the mind.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, And we mentioned earlier the idea of the siren
as a feminine monster, and Carol Rose in Giants, Monsters
and Dragons discusses this. Briefly points out that in medieval
European traditions, the siren takes on various symbolic powers. Quote
for her attributed where the comb and the mirror of vanity,
(27:50):
the fish or eel symbols of the entrapped Christian soul
ensnared by luxury and vice, the small dragon the symbol
of her liaison with the devil, and her nakedness taken
as a sign of wanton sexuality. So then and to
this day, in some depictions we see the siren presented
as this monstrous female temptress, a corruptor of menfolk, but
(28:12):
also like this, indeed, like something that has been summoned
up to test ones resolve. Still, as Rose points out,
there were still descriptions of the siren as a bird
woman you know, well, you know, out of of the
ancient world, pops up in the seventh and eighth century,
leaving Monstroum also a twelfth century Latin Bestiaria, which describes
(28:35):
them in much more harpy terms as winged, rock dwelling
beasts well that will not only lure sailors to their death,
but pounce on them with flesh rending talons. And then
during the nineteenth century we even see again kind of
like bumping up against all of these depictions of sirens
as mermaids and naked women in the water, we see
(28:57):
John William Waterhouse's eighteen ninety one pain Ulysses and the Sirens.
And what do we see here? We see big birds
with the heads of women, and they are the ones
as sailing ulysses strapped to the mast and his various oarsmen.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
Yeah, there's no ambiguity about their intentions. Here they are
swarming the boat.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yes these are Yeah, these are definitely aggressive human headed
birds here. Waterhouse it would seem drew more on those
classical Greek descriptions and depictions on vases and urns rather
than what his contemporaries were doing.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
It's interesting because I think it's the same painter, John
William Waterhouse that did the siren from nineteen hundred we
talked about earlier, the much more haunting an ambiguous image.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, I can't help, but one I don't know much
about about the man in his work, and you know
who's painting for. But I wonder if with the nineteen
hundred someone was like, I'd like you to draw me
a siren and no birds this time, John, I wanted
to be a lady.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
The one from nine years later does seem a little
little more mysterious and maybe mature.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
And to be clear, these are just a few, like
very famous examples of sirens and paintings from this period.
There are others, So if you have favorites, feel free
to send them into us, and you know, I'd love
to take a look at them.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Oh yeah, absolutely, Contact at Stuff to Blow your mind
dot com. Get in touch as always. Now, the idea
of the siren song luring sailors to their destruction by
(30:37):
one means or another got me thinking about nature. I
was wondering, are there any predators in nature that have
the genuine biological equivalent of a siren song? A sound
or a song or a vocalization that lures pray to
their doom. And after I did a little digging, I
(30:58):
discovered the answer is yes. Apparently it is not very
common in nature, at least as far as we know.
But there is one excellent example I want to talk about,
and this predatory song involves an animal that we just
did a series on earlier this year, the cicada. In
this case, the cicada not as the predator, but as
the prey. So I'm going to be referring to one
(31:21):
major source here, a zoology paper from two thousand and
nine published in Plus one by David C. Marshall and
Kathy B. R. Hill called versatile aggressive mimicry of cicadas
by an Australian predatory Katie did So. This paper begins
by talking about the concept of mimicry in nature. Mimicry
(31:43):
in the animal kingdom is when an animal has an
adaptation that makes it seem like something other than what
it is, and this can take a lot of different
forms and serve a lot of different purposes. A lot
of animal mimicry is defensive in purpose and visual in format.
So a vulnerable prey animal might try to fool predators
(32:05):
into leaving it alone, perhaps by looking like something totally
uninteresting to the predator, like a leaf, or like another
animal that tastes bad and is non nutritious. In some cases,
visual defensive mimicry makes the prey animal look threatening. It
makes it look like a different animal that is dangerous
(32:26):
and could put up a fight, or one that is poisonous.
But there are non visual forms of defensive mimicry as well.
For example, a prey animal can smell like something uninteresting
or something dangerous, so that's defensive mimicry. But there's also
what's called aggressive mimicry. This is when an animal disguises
(32:47):
itself for aggressive purposes, usually to attract or gain advantage
over prey if the mimic is a predator, or over
a host if the mimic is a parasite, and apparently
one of the most common strategies for aggressive mimics in
nature is to exploit mating drive. So it's like, hello,
fellow conspecifics, I am a member of your species and
(33:10):
I'm very sexy. So the authors give some examples of this.
One is the bolus spiders collectively known as a Mastophora,
which have been documented to attract male moths of at
least two different species by copying the sex pheromones of
female moths of those same species, so this would be
(33:31):
aggressive mimicry by smell. There's another interesting example, which is
predatory fireflies known as Fouturis versicolor, which these animals use
flashes of light to initiate mating within their own kind,
but they can also copy the courtship flashes of females
(33:52):
of other firefly species to trick the males of those
species into getting close for a mating opportunity, and then
the predatory fireflies just eat them, so this is aggressive
mimicry by visual signal, and the authors note that this
case is particularly interesting because the predatory fouturist fireflies can
(34:13):
copy the flashing patterns of eleven different prey species of fireflies.
So that's incredible versatility in the predatory mimic behavior, and
it's an interesting evolutionary question in cases like this how
that much versatility in the predatory behavior comes about. The
authors speculate that it might be possible in part because
(34:34):
in this case the predator and the prey are closely related.
But whatever the explanation there, both of these previous examples
work by the predator falsely appearing to be a female
conspecific that is ready to mate, either by smelling like
one or looking like one. This paper presents an example
of aggressive mimicry that is interesting for several reasons. Like
(34:57):
the fireflies, the predator in this case shows versatility in
altering the mimic behavior to match multiple different prey species.
But unlike the fireflies, the predator is not closely related
to the prey in a phylogenetic sense. And then, also,
though I didn't notice this priority claim in the paper itself,
(35:18):
a couple of news and blog sources I was reading
about the paper say that this was the first scientifically
documented case of an aggressive or predatory mimic relying on
sound rather than on visual or smell based cues, though
this mimic the mimic in question also does use visual
mimicry as a secondary appeal. I can't confirm there were
(35:40):
no earlier documented examples in nature, and I'm a little
curious why I found that claim in the popular sources
and not in the research itself. But I did not
find any earlier examples. So if that is true, this
is the first documented case. Or sound is the medium
being used for the aggressive mimic to mimic something that
(36:00):
gets it access to its prey. Wow, So what is
this dangerous mimic? Well, it is the spotted predatory katie
did or Chlorobalius leucoviritus. So this is a large green,
green and white patterned katie did or bush cricket. It's
a species native to Australia, mostly found in the dry
(36:23):
interior regions of the continent, and it preys on multiple
different species of cicadas belonging to the tribe Cicadatini, among
other things. It's got multiple prey, but it likes to
eat these cicadas of Cicadatini. Now it's important to note
that these prey cicadas rely on a two part acoustic
(36:43):
signaling behavior to initiate sexual pair formation. And when we
did our series on cicadas, we talked a lot about
the songs of cicadas, how they use sound in their
their mating behaviors. But in this case, these specific cicadas
rely on what the authors call signal responds duets. So
when it's time to mate, the male cicada initiates with
(37:06):
a song particular to its species, and then if a
female is nearby and she's receptive to mating, she will
reply with a series of wing flicks, which can be
recognized visually if you're very close. But more importantly, the
wingflicks produce an audible sound that matches with that specie
specific mating call put out by the male. So the
(37:27):
wingflicks can usually be heard for a range of several
meters and they will help the male locate the female
the author's right quote. Because a wingflick reply is structurally nondescript,
it must closely follow the queue in the male cicada's
song in order to be recognized. But this leads to
(37:48):
a kind of interesting situation where a clicking sound that
has roughly the right sound quality and the right latency
meaning I interpret this. I hope I'm right about this.
I think they're talking about the the time delay between
the end of the male cicada song and when the
clicks start and stop in response to that. If it
(38:10):
has these sonic qualities correct, it can be interpreted as
a female sexual signal by the male cicada. And as
an example, the authors mentioned that with some of these
cicadas in the tribe Cicadatini, you can attract males by
like snapping your fingers if you time it right with
respect to their songs. But different species listen for different things,
(38:31):
and some are more wary than others. I guess some
just kind of rush right in there. Now, coming back
to the katie DIDs, Chloribelius adults are most active in
the summertime, and you will tend to find them perched
in the upper branches of small trees and large shrubs,
where they can take advantage of their green and white
camouflage coloration pattern to hide in the foliage and rob
(38:53):
I've attached a couple of pictures for you to look at,
where one is against a white background where this animal
is very easy to say see. Another one is of
its standing in the tree branches, where it's much easier
to see how it would just kind of blend in,
especially if you weren't looking very close.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
Yeah, yeah, it is often the case. Right when you
look at the specimen more in its natural habitat, it
does blend in.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
So what do these kadieids do to mimic and hunt
the cicadas they eat? Well? The authors write that they
can quote attract male cicadas Hymiptera cicatada by imitating the
species specific wing flick replies of sexually receptive female cicadas.
This aggressive mimicry is accomplished both acoustically with tegmental clicks
(39:42):
and visually with synchronized body jerks, so it's a two
part mimic They imitate both the sounds and the visually
recognizable body movements produced by female cicadas that are ready
to mate, attracting male cicadas from the surrounding area, and
when the male cicada gets close enough, the katie did
(40:03):
will promptly snatch it, bite into it, and eat it.
And observations of these predatory encounters find that the kdi
did typically just eats the whole thing. The entire cicada
except for the wings, and they leave the wings behind.
And I thought that was interesting because I recall from
our series on cicadas this was also true of some
bird predators, which would eat the whole cicada except the
(40:24):
wings and then just leave pairs of wings everywhere.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Oh interesting.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
Now, one really interesting thing that the authors point out
is that these predators are able to not only reproduce
the different specific sounds of a bunch of different cicada species,
experiments showed they can reproduce the songs of cicadas they
have never come across before. So this acoustic mimicry is
not just a singular, evolved, pre programmed behavior, but it's versatile.
(40:53):
It is a versatile adaptable capacity to mimic and respond
to cicada calls. Interestingly, and perhaps relatedly, Chlorobelius also uses
acoustic signals for its own reproductive purposes. So when it's
time for this KTI did to mate, the male KTI
DIDs will produce a trilling sound with a file and
scraper system on the edges of their fore wings, which
(41:16):
is thought to attract females which are interested in mating. Now,
coming to the discussion section of this paper. It's worth
noting that this is not the only way that the
mating call of a cicada could be used to help
a predator eat a cicada. The predator could, for example,
just follow the song to its source and eat the male,
and many predators do exactly this. They do follow the
(41:39):
mating calls of prey animals to hunt. But this is
a different strategy like the siren, or at least one
version of the siren. The kti did lures victims to itself,
and I think that's kind of interesting to consider. It's
like a different evolutionary investment. I don't believe the authors
say this, so this could be on the wrong track,
but I was personally wondering if it could have something
(42:02):
to do with the fact that the katie did already
has a cryptic coloration pattern. It has camouflage, and so
the fact that it may be using camouflage for one thing,
it may be using camouflage defensively to hide from its
own predators, from birds and so forth. You know, whatever
preis on it, it may be able to get double
use out of that by specializing in a type of
(42:23):
predation that allows it to hold still and hide among
the leaves and have its prey come to it right right.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
And also I guess maybe it's helpful if it's this way,
it doesn't have to worry about the predators that could
potentially be seeking out the mating call of their very prey.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
Oh that's a very good point because as we talked
about it in our cicada series. I don't know with
this specific Australian family with the Cicadatinian Australia, but in
most places everything eats cicadas when the cicadas come out
their dinner for everything out there, and most of the
things that are eating them, or at least a lot
of the things would be big enough to eaticated it
as well. Right now. The authors in this paper argue
(43:02):
that the katie DIDs versatility and mimicry probably follows from
the application of a few simple rules. For one thing,
Since they're game to eat pretty much any cicada and
not just one particular species, they can probably ignore everything
about the male cicada's song except whatever part of it
cues the female cicada to respond, so there's less information
(43:26):
to process. Just tune most of that out focus on
whatever part you need to pay attention to to time
your response, your clicks and response, which is typically probably
something about the onset of a pause at the end
of a song segment. And this was funny because it
made me think about like text message scammers who are
going to possibly ignore basically everything you type to them
(43:48):
and just be looking for a couple of keywords to
advance the scamscript to the next waypoint.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Hmmm, yeah, I mean often predatory. There you go, efficiency, yeah,
predatory efficiency.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
But in general, the authors point out that a complex
adaptation like the kd did has here, it requires multiple parts. Right,
You've got to have sound producing organs, which they do
in the four wings. You've got to have sound perceiving organs.
You've got to be able to listen so you know
what to respond to. And you've got to have the
neural processing required to make that match right, to produce
(44:23):
the appropriate sound to match the call you just heard.
And fortunately for the kd DIDs, they already have all
three capabilities for use in their own mating. Remember that
from earlier they also use sound in their own mating. However,
there's an interesting complication here, which is that if this
predatory mimicry of cicada mating duets were based on the
(44:47):
mating behavior of the predator species, you would expect the
kd DIDs to also engage in duets, and as far
as the authors could tell, this was not the case.
The kd DIDs do not seem to do male female duets. Instead,
it seems as of the time of this paper that
males generally produce a song which attracts a silent female
(45:08):
to its source. So the male makes a song, the
female comes and finds the male. But the authors acknowledge
that not a lot is known about this katie did species,
so maybe some information is missing here. And also just
a reminder that I said there was both an acoustic
and a visual signal that the katie did also does
this body jerking behavior which accompanies the mimicry clicks, and
(45:30):
it does not seem to be physically necessary to make
the click sound, so it's probably also a mimic behavior
in this case to kind of look like a female
cicada flicking its wings between the leaves, so the male's like,
oh yeah, I see it right up there, and the
male's crawling up and then it gets.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Eaten fascinating it, I mean as lines up with the
basic siren script right absolutely.
Speaker 3 (45:52):
But in fact, to come back to the Odyssey, one
thing we see in the Odyssey is that the prey
of the sirens, at least one one member of the
sirens prey has a clever workaround a way of avoiding
the sirens song by plugging the ears of the men
rowing the ship and by lashing himself to the mast
(46:15):
so that the sirens wouldn't get him. This is what
Odysseus does, and you could see that as the beginning
of a possible arms race in adaptations between sailors and sirens.
And in fact there may be a fairly complex predator
prey arms race in evolution between these cicadas and the
katie DIDs. So here to read from the paper the
author's write quote. Even though Cobonga ox lay, the species
(46:39):
we observed being attracted by Chlorobelius luco viridus, has a
structurally obvious song cue and an easily timed repetitive rhythm,
we have found this species to be extremely resistant to
our artificial signals. Poorly timed finger snaps cause males of
many species to become wary with k i ox lay
(47:00):
an especially strong example. Perhaps persistent aggressive mimicry by Chlorobelius
lucoviritis has selected kox lay males for greater sensitivity to
the occasional, poorly timed click. This possibility also suggests an
additional evolutionary route for the cicada prey, the addition of
(47:22):
false cues that elicit premature katie did replies without queuing
female cicadas, whose response depends on a particular combination of
song elements. Long continued selection of this sort might account
for the extraordinarily complex songs of many Australian cicatatine species
(47:42):
found in the arid Acacia dominated habitats where see Lucoviritus
is most common. So that's very interesting. We may have
some cicada odysseuses on hand who have evolved a defensive
reaction to this type of predatory mimicry by, for one thing,
throwing out some decoy sound signals that are not going
(48:05):
to get females of its own species responding. But if
you do hear clicks in response to them, that's something
to be afraid of. Lets you know there's a monster
nearby and then also perhaps by being more sensitive to
incorrect timing on the response clicks in the duet.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Interesting. Interesting, So yeah, so their use of the song
become becomes more nuanced in a way, in a way
to outwit these pretenders. Yeah, I mean one is tempted
to make various comparisons, to say, conversations between humans, perhaps
(48:44):
in a dating scenario, you know, like a first date
where one might throw out, hey, you know, did you
see such and such movie? And I thought it was
pretty good and they're like, yeah, it's great. Well, then
you know that's a red flag fill in your own example. Well, sorry,
I'm a little slow today. I can't come up with
a good example that we can all stand behind as
(49:04):
being the red flag for a first day.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
But I absolutely understand what you're talking about, sort of
tossing out a sonic conversational bait to draw out the
attention of anything that you should be avoiding.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
Yeah. Well this is fascinating and again more evidence to
a point that we're always making on the show, and
that is that anything you find in myth and in
legend and fictional monsters, there is almost always something equally
weird in the natural world.
Speaker 3 (49:38):
Yeah, there's you know, through doing a lot of these
October Monster episodes, I find it varies how close of
a match we can find in the natural world. Sometimes
there's just not something in nature that is a real
tight fit on whatever fictional example we're talking about, But
there's always something more amazing. Yeah, but this was a
(49:59):
case where I was shocked how close the fit is,
especially with the Odysseus cicadas. To be clear, that's not
their biological name, that's just what I'm calling him.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Now, all right, I have one more little curiosity to
consider here. Take it from the cabinet of curiosity, if
you will, because it concerns a very learned individual who
(50:33):
seems to have thought very long and hard on the
reality of sirens, as well as the reality of some
other things that I don't think one typically thinks of
as having an objective reality. So I ran across this
in Literature and Lore of the Sea, edited by Patricia
Ann Karlson, specifically, in an article titled the Extraordinary being
(50:57):
Death in the Mermaid and Baroque literature Eileen S. Goodman,
She points out the seventeenth century German polymath and Jessuit
scholar Athanasius Kircher, who is sixteen o two through sixteen eighty,
in one of his natural history volumes, seems to give
serious consideration to not only the objective reality of Noah's Ark,
(51:19):
which isn't completely out of the ordinary. He still see
that kind of thing going on today, but also spends
a lot of time trying to figure out where Noah
put all of the sirens.
Speaker 3 (51:30):
Right next to the unicorns.
Speaker 2 (51:31):
Obviously, well, we'll get to unicorns. He also believed in them.
I guess brief refresher for those of you who don't
remember the story of Noah's Ark is this Old Testament
Book of Genesis tale concerning the Great flood and one
anti Theiluvian patriarch's mission to save all of the world's
animals from the flood in a great big boat. It's
(51:54):
one of various great flood myths found throughout the ancient world. Obviously,
this is not a story that easily endures. Is very close,
you know, literal scrutiny. When you dig down into the
two by two details of the endeavor. I think you
know a lot of us who grew up, you know,
going to Sunday school class. You reach that point where
you're like, wait, how does this work? Now? Wait to
(52:14):
two of each animal, you know, and then various questions arise.
But Kircher was very into figuring out exactly how all
of this would work, and he, to be clear, seems
to have believed in the reality of mermaids or sirens
as well as unicorns, based on some like the tail
(52:36):
and the bones of a mermaid that were in his museum.
Speaker 3 (52:41):
Oh okay, so he had empirical evidence.
Speaker 2 (52:44):
He's like, we have evidence, this is what these were.
And he describes them as amphibians and stresses that there
is some controversy as to whether these particular amphibians were
or were not received into the arc. And I imagine
some of you might have wondered about this, how did
what happened to the mermaids? So he explains in his writing,
well that others have said, well, perhaps they lived on
(53:07):
the outside of the arc, outside of this great boat,
perhaps in some sort of a nest, something like a
fixed to the hole.
Speaker 3 (53:17):
I'm finding it a little confusing here because I would
not normally think that aquatic animals needed to be taken
onto the arc at all, which I guess is part
of why he's classifying them as amphibians that like, they
can't live their entire lives in the water. They must
come to dry surface at some point.
Speaker 2 (53:33):
Yeah, so there was some disagreement with people asking the
same questions here. Where did the mermaids or sirens go?
Some said they stayed in nests on the outside of
the arc, but Kircher dismisses the idea, stating that this
is a This is a quote translated quote from his work,
as referenced in that article by Goodman Holy writ is
(53:56):
in agreement on the matter of the little stalls into
which the animals were district and it does not teach
that any existed outside. And I believe he argues against
the idea that any creature lived outside the ship during
the cataclysm, like even fish. I mean it, it's I
have no answer there. It's like, even if you're even
(54:19):
if I'm going to assume that fish surely get away
with living outside of the arc. I think he's making
the case that amphibian creatures could not. They would have
to be aboard the arc. H Okay, So I'm assuming here,
based on what I'm reading, that Kircher is arguing that
the sirens would have ridden inside the arc, and I
(54:41):
have to acknowledge that, yes, that sounds ludicrous to even
be wondering about that. But I also I don't want
to give everyone the wrong idea about this man, because
by all accounts he was. He was a brilliant mind,
you know, a brilliant man of his time, sometimes described
as being the last man to know everything. So this
(55:02):
is a guy who studied religion, linguistics, geology, medicine. He
tried to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and claimed that he
had translated them, but apparently not. He wrote an encyclopedia
on China. He kept a vundokama, or a cabinet of curiosities,
(55:23):
and he spent the majority of his career at Roman College.
He was fascinated by fossils. He made proposals about the
cause of plague that apparently line up with some of
the actual the actual reality of it. He was intrigued
by various devices, made little inventions. He was a science
superstar of his day, even if he's often eclipsed in
(55:46):
our recollection by such contemporaries as Galileo. And there is
the fact that he seemed to believe in the existence
of both mermaids and unicorns based on the evidence in
his museum.
Speaker 3 (55:57):
Oh yeah, well, I mean this would be, by no
means the only example of a truly brilliant mind in
history who spent a lot of time obsessing over minutia
based on false premises. Yeah, you know, the all the
devotion to to alchemy and trying to trying to work
things out based on the literal interpretation of the Bible
(56:17):
and things like that.
Speaker 2 (56:19):
So a lot of books have been written about him,
and I ran across there's actually a review of a
particular book about him. This was in this case, the
review was written by the Vatican Observatory's brother, Guy Konsumajno,
who I had the pleasure to hear speak here in
Atlanta many years ago. Was not speaking about this. Who
(56:40):
was speaking, I believe about religion and extraterrestrials, the sort
of like speculative material. But yeah, he wrote this article
in twenty twenty one titled a mishmash of brilliance and absurdity,
and he stressed that, yeah, there's here's this guy Kirchner,
who was brilliant, you know, was obsessed with optics, acoustics,
(57:00):
you name it just like everything that could be learned
or known about the world. He was all in on it.
But on the other hand, he wrote three volumes on
how Noah managed to fit all of the animals and
their food into the arc, and then also speculates about
the sirens as well.
Speaker 3 (57:19):
Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant minds of all time,
was spent a huge amount of intellectual energy obsessed with
interpreting his with like his interpretations of Biblical prophecies.
Speaker 2 (57:31):
Kanzemaijno writes quote, Kirchner makes a fascinating contrast in style
with Galileo. While both were shameless self promoters, Galileo was
far more rigorous, focused, and polemical in his science. Kirchner's
theme was simply wonder and delight, reporting marvelous machines and novelties,
like a seventeenth century version of Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Speaker 3 (57:53):
Well, Far be it from me to find fault there
in wonder and delight.
Speaker 2 (57:59):
I mean, you know it kind of you know, drives
home that you know. Wonder and delight are great, but
they too can be kind of a siren song, steering
you off into I mean in the worst cases, you know,
misinformation and delusion, but even into maybe just ideas that
are not ultimately that productive but maybe entertaining. I don't know.
(58:20):
Did Kirchner's three volumes on Noah's art like hurt anything,
Did his belief in the physical reality of unicorns and
mermaids hurt anything? Well? Maybe not, Maybe it's fine.
Speaker 3 (58:31):
I guess it's hard to say about that kind of thing, though,
I would say in general, it's absolutely the case. I
think that the estheticization of ideas can in some cases
have very negative consequences. Appreciating ideas primarily for whether they
are fun or exciting or how they make you feel,
with not enough appreciation for testing whether they are true,
(58:51):
can be in fact quite dangerous.
Speaker 2 (58:54):
Yeah. Absolutely, We've We've discussed multiple times in the show
various hypotheses that you know, sometimes are quite enthralling and
and even inspiring, but are they the best hypotheses with
which to understand the universe? And that's not always the case.
And if you just follow what's exciting, then you're, you know,
(59:16):
you're in search of with Leonard Nimoy or something, you know,
you're you're in the realm of let's just talk about
these ideas because they are entertaining and not because they
actually explain the world around us.
Speaker 3 (59:27):
Yeah, though, if we can make a persuasive case, I
hope we could convince you that you can put truth
testing as the first priority and ideas can still be fun.
Speaker 2 (59:38):
Absolutely, So you know, don't put wax in your ears.
Put put put a little Stuff to Blow your Mind
in your ears and hopefully that'll help you out. All right,
We're gonna go ahead and close up this episode, but
we'll remind everyone out there. The Stuff to Blow Your
Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do a short form
episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set aside most
(59:58):
serious concerns to just talk about a we film on
Weird House Cinema. If you listen to us on Apple
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Speaker 3 (01:00:22):
Huge Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
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Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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is the West or
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And once again October content
has spilled over the edge of the month.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
That's right. In today's episode, we're continuing our Halloween twenty
twenty four express with an episode that was originally scheduled
for late October, but our episode on the Hogs of
Hell went a little long, ended up going to two episodes,
so we bumped this one back a bit. It's a
topic we've touched on briefly before, but it's a great one,
(00:42):
taking us back to the world of oceanic monsters of
myth and legend. We're going to be talking about the siren.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
The siren, so I realized, Rob correct me if I'm wrong,
But I realized, I think we both had we had
different theeomorphic hybrids in my and when we were separately
thinking about the siren. Because when I thought of the siren,
I first thought of sort of half woman, half bird
creatures that sing to the sailors. But I get the
(01:11):
impression that your mind first went to half human, half fish.
So I guess those are both within the siren tradition,
aren't they?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
They are. This is one of the things about the siren,
as we'll discuss, is that there are takes on them
in which they are essentially mermaids. It's essentially some version
of the European North European mermaid tradition. There are versions
of it in which they are just sort of beautiful
ladies who sing sailors to their death, that sort of thing.
(01:44):
And then other times they are essentially what we might
think of as a harpie, you know, they are a
winged creature, perhaps like an all out vulture type being,
with even just the head of a maiden or the
face of a maiden.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
But in either case, I think we're to assume that
their voices may be lovely, but they sing sailors to
their doom.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yes, And that's one thing we can be sure on
when we look to really the most famous literary account
of the sirens, but also the one that continues to
raise a lot of questions because it does skim over
some of the details. As we'll discuss, we are, of
course talking about Homer's the Odyssey. I'm just going to
(02:25):
read a quote here. This is from the Samuel Butler translation.
I believe this is Circe warning Odysseus and his men
about the challenges ahead. First, you will come to the sirens,
who enchant all who come near them. If anyone unwarily
draws in too close and hears the singing of the sirens,
(02:47):
his wife and children will never welcome him home again,
for they sit in a green field and warble him
to death with the sweetness of their song. There is
a great heap of dead men's bones lying all around,
and the flesh still rotting off them.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Number one, that's intense. Number two does not describe them physically,
and number three warbled to death.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Warbled to death. You know which, if you got to go,
why not choose warbling? Why not? So this is you know, considered,
You know this is This is probably the most famous
literary description and non description of the sirens. But we
have a lot of other materials that have depicted the sirens,
(03:33):
described them or depicted them visually that also sort of
compete with our imaginations here and end up in This
is often the case with these things ends up coloring
our absorption of Homer's original writings. We've had some great
cinematic sirens over time, we've have, for example, to get
into the adaptations of the Odyssey itself. There, of course
(03:56):
the Three Sirens and No Brother, Where art thou? The
three strange women that appear as beautiful washer women singing
go to sleep, Little Baby. They of course lure in
del Mar and turn him into a horny toad sort of.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Wait does he get turned back? I haven't seen this
movie in a while.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Well, he doesn't. Actually, we end up finding out later
that he was never turned into a horny toad. He
was captured by authorities because he was wanted.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Oh yeah, and they find him again in the movie
theater Do Not Seek the Treasure.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, but you know, it's a great sequence in the film,
a lot of laughs, and it works nicely in comparison
to the theme of baptism that's also employed in the work.
Elsewhere in cinema, we tend to see the idea of
sirens employed more in terms of the evil mermaid. You
want to have a mermaid, but you want an evil one. Well,
you lean into this idea of the siren. Just a
(04:51):
few quick mentions, and I'm missing a lot of them.
I'm sure there's two thousand and one's Daygone. This is
the Stuart Gordon film you have neat Split Tail that
kidnaped Mermaids. In that, There's a two and another two
thousand and one film titled She Creature that I have
not seen since two thousand and one, but I remember
having a nice little cast to it, and also having
(05:11):
a monstrous mermaid. More recently, I don't know much about
the plot details here, so I don't know where this
falls in terms of sirens, but there's a Polish musical
horror film titled The Lure that seems to have resonated
with a number of viewers. I've seen some nice reviews
of that. And then I think we've had at least
a couple of different Mermaids slash Siren TV shows in
(05:33):
recent decades, but I have not seen them, So we'll
have to lean on our listeners to write in and
tell us what those are like. Now again, to get
back to what we were just talking about earlier, Though
sirens are not definitively sea creatures or definitively mermaids, however,
it's impossible to separate the two completely, so you know,
(05:58):
we do have to acknowledge that to whatever extent. Sirens
are based in this idea of undersea creature as well,
you know, the idea of people and creatures from beneath
the waves. Naturally, it goes back very long ways. As
long as humans have gazed out across the waves or
peered down through clear waters from the side of their boats,
they've dreamed of a mirror world to our own, a
(06:21):
place where every animal has its watery reflection, where intelligent
human like beings, no doubt dwell as well, along with
various monsters and gods and so forth. There is a
paper by Nancy Easterlin. This is a two thousand and
one paper again back to two thousand and one that
we've we cited in a munch Older episode of the
(06:43):
podcast titled Hans Christian Andersen's Fish out of Water, and
she points out that the Babylonians recognize gods with fish
features or hybridity. You have like what Adappa, the fishermen
of Oneius, the teacher of wisdom, even Mighty Inky, the
ancient Sumerian water god, is sometimes depicted as having a
(07:03):
cloak of fish or scaled skin, and the chief place
of worship was a ziggurat known as the House of
the subterranean waters, and additionally fishtailed gods, water dragons and
so forth found throughout the cultures of India, China and
Japan and so forth. There's a quote from that Easter
(07:25):
paper she writes some other mythological sea beings and deities,
such as Poseidon and the Sirens were not originally associated
with water and piicine anatomy. The sirens were originally birds.
We'll get back to that in a minute, indicating that
divine power and womanly allure became combined with the power
and promise of the sea when ancient cultures overtook maritime
(07:47):
war and trade. So in that paper she gets into
a familiar theme on this show when we're talking about
deities and supernatural beings, is that, of course they are
passed down and they do not stay in one form
or another. They are reused, recreated, you know, different different,
various relaunches and reboots of the brand over time, and.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
In past episodes we've even talked about reasons for questioning
the very idea of such a thing as a canonical
form of a deity or a monster or something that
you know, that makes sense when you have something like
intellectual property like if a monster is the creation of
a specific author and they describe it a certain way,
and then other people could take the idea and vary it,
(08:33):
but you would want to refer back to what is
the original one, you know, with like gods and monsters
and things that come out of folklore. You know, maybe
sometimes it makes sense to say there's basically an authoritative
version of a story, but most of the time there's not.
Sometimes the characteristics aren't even given in the earliest works
that are still extant today. So like searching after the
canonical form of the monster or deity or whatever is fruitless.
(08:57):
There just is no original that we can access.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Yeah, I think we've talked about this before. You get
kind of close to this idea when you look at
a multi author of franchise, like say Marvel Comics, where
you can set you know, you try to explain, like, well,
who's Venom. Oh he's a villain of Spider Man. Oh well, no,
he's also kind of a hero, he's kind of an
anti hero. Oh yeah, And sometimes he's just straight up
what we would think I was the protagonist of a story,
(09:21):
So it just it changes. And there are probably better
examples than Venom to turn to there.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Yeah, well, I think that's a good one, except it's
it's like that. But imagine if most Marvel comics were
lost and we don't know what they said or what
was in them, and we don't know where the first
appearance of Venom was.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Yeah, all right, But coming back to the siren and
getting into the Greek traditions here, we as the quote
we read earlier attests to we certainly experienced the sirens
and Homer's eighths century BCE work The Odyssey, and they
are described as malicious, doomy women when we put in
(09:59):
asterisk by that woman description, malicious do me entities anyway,
who hang out on rocks and sing to passing sailors.
But Homer neglects to physically describe them at all. So again,
even by just briefly mentioning them as women, I'm airing
because he does not ascribe gender to these creatures. But
(10:20):
the thing is, it's really hard not to be infected
by the various visual treatments of this encounter of these
creatures from throughout Western art, you know, which has often
served as a great opportunity to create dramatic and evocative
scenes that make use of, you know, the the unclothed
or partially unclothed male and female bodies. I was talking
(10:40):
about this with my son yesterday when I was researching this,
and I mentioned to him, and he already knows his
way aroun myths and monsters pretty well. I mentioned, you
know that that Homer never actually describes them. So they
could look like a woman, they could look like a
fish monster, they could look like a bird person. We
don't know. And he asked, well, could they just be
like a banana peal? And I I dare say they could.
(11:01):
And he does not say that they do not look
like banana peels, and provides no other physical description at all.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
They could literally be Ronald MacDonald.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
They could be. There's nothing in the Odyssey that says
they're not. So I was reading a bit more about
this in this is an older book. This is older publication.
This is from nineteen seventy The Homeric Sirens by Gerald K. Gressith.
This was publishing the Transactions and Proceedings of the American
Philological Association, and in it the author spends a lot
(11:36):
of time talking about what at the time were like
two dueling interpretations of the sirens in Homer's the Odyssey,
and I think it's interesting to look at them here.
So the first one that he references is the idea
that the sirens are soul birds, again playing on the
idea that in other texts we have the sirens described
(11:58):
an Avian term. And the connection here is that they
would be representations of the souls of the dead in
bird form, an idea that extends back through ancient Egyptian religion.
This was an idea champion by the German classical archaeologist
Georg Viker. In short, this view sees the sirens as
things that emerge from hades and or the grave and
(12:21):
as Grethis explains, Homer likely wouldn't have thought that the
soul became a bird upon death in this scenario, but
he might have been influenced by older ideas still present
in art and culture of his time. Okay, then there's
this other idea, and that is that the sirens are
other world enchantresses. So an idea in this case champion
(12:43):
by German archaeologist and translator Ernst Bouscher in response to
Vicker arguing that homer sirens are anthropomorphic. This view sees
the sirens not as creatures of the afterlife, but as
something else that doesn't reside in Hades, though perhaps does
resis guide in a different other world and might not
(13:05):
even be directly malicious. That's the interesting thing about this
kind of view. They might be more in line with
muses offering song and information that were just not equipped
to resist. We just can't handle a song this beautiful
and or information that's tantalizing, and therefore we are just
drawn into it. And this actually gets into the vagueness
(13:26):
of how they actually bring about these men's dooms, because,
as Aggressive points out, we don't have an answer for
this in Homer either, and elsewhere, interpretations range from an
overt and then the sirens ad him sort of situation
to this idea that enraptured individuals just slowly die of
exposure on the shores of the sirens, like they're drawn
(13:47):
by the song, and then they just, you know, forget
to eat, forget to stay out of the sun, and
just waste away. And so in that scenario, it's like, well,
the muses, like they may not even be entities that
are aware of what they are doing. They're just sharing
song and information, but we just can't handle it as mortals.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
That's fascinating, and it's funny because the interpretation I always
just had in the back of my mind isn't even
listed there, which is the idea that they sit on
the rocks and they sing to the sailors and they
draw the sailors in close, and the ship's wreck on
the rocks and the sailors drone. I don't know where
that idea came from, but that is what I thought
was being described in the Odyssey.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
You know, Like I said, there are a lot of
paintings of the sirens and or Odysseus, and I think
they also almost at times subliminally charge one's understanding of
this scenario. And there are several of these that I
think I've just seen most of my life. There are
a couple in particular that pop up in the time
(14:47):
Life Enchanted World book series, of course makes use of
a lot of excellent original art, but also a lot
of classic art as well too. In particular, John William
Waterhouse is the Siren from nineteen hundred. This is a
like a vertical piece in which there is a nude
woman with a harp some kind of or is this
a lute?
Speaker 3 (15:08):
I believe it's a liar's Yeah, yeah, there you go,
U shaped stringed instrument.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah. So she's playing it on the rocks, and there
down in the water below her is an enraptured male,
like a youthful male, who looks like he is probably
going to drown. And so like, I think this really
matches up with your read on it, and you know,
I often I think thought about it in similar terms
looking at these images, like the sirens just draw you
(15:34):
in and then you know, stuff happens, but it's not
like they're biting into you or anything that's right.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
But she in this in the waterhouse painting, the siren
does not look malicious. She does not look like she's
even really attempting to lure him. She's just kind of
there existing, And he is up to his neck in
the water, clearly about to die, looking like he has
this combination of just joy and tear or yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
And then the other piece that was definitely in the
Enchanted World series is Herbert James Draper's nineteen oh nine
painting Ulysses and the Sirens. This is a very captivating
piece in which you see the familiar scenario that I
may again describe her in a second where, of course,
how does Odysseus how does he get past the sirens? Well,
of course he clogs the ear holes of all of
(16:24):
his men with wax, and then he himself is strapped
to the mast of the ship, and then they just
keep moving that way. The siren song doesn't infect the oarsman.
It infects him, but he can't do anything about it
because he's strapped to the mast.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
And this is usually presented as a result of curiosity,
like Odysseus wants to hear what the siren song is like,
but doesn't want to allow himself under its spell to
command his men to do otherwise, so he has himself
tied up on purpose.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah, and so in this particular piece by Draper, which
you know is widely available you can find it on
wiki commons, and so forth, we see, you know, this
crazed look on Odysseus's eye. He's completely enraptured, straining against
the ropes that bind him. Meanwhile, the naked sirens in
this case seemingly seeming to transform out of mermaid form
(17:16):
into humanoid form, just like the movie Splash as they
crawl on the ship. And of course this is a.
This image, of course, like a lot of the later
treatments of Sirens, is of course very there's a certain
sexual politics to all this and gender politics to it,
because it's clearly showing like the feminine form is the
(17:37):
aggressively alluring temptation that is coming at the men on
the ship.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Yeah, and it looked There are very different implied situations
in these two paintings, Like in the Waterhouse painting, I
don't know, you could interpret it multiple ways, but it
doesn't look obvious to me. Like I said that the
siren is even trying to attract the man, She's just
sitting there. She might just be minding her own business. Yeah,
and he's raptured. In the second painting, the Draper painting
from nine These these are beings that are obviously trying
(18:06):
to seduce the men, and they are posed with seductive
ill intent.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yes, So these are the two that I was most
familiar with. But there's a third I want to mention,
and this is the Sirens and Ulysses from eighteen thirty
seven by William Edie or Eddie I'm not sure which,
but this one is also tremendous. I was not familiar
with this but in this one, we see the sirens
on their rocky island in the foreground, and in the
(18:34):
background we see Ulysses send a ship and there's a
lot of struggling going on there. But in the foreground
the sirens are just kind of like, hey, sirens, party,
come on over, guys. And then next to them we
see rotting bodies and bones. It's quite quite a quite
a scene.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
It is wonderful. But to your point, yeah, I interpret
this one more along the lines of the waterhouse painting.
There's no indication that that their attention even has anything
to do with the men on the ship.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Yeah, all right, So I already rolled through the basic
scenario with Odysseus and the Odyssey and how they get
past the sirens. But we have another encounter, and this
(19:27):
one is detailed in the Argonautica from the third century BCE,
and this one involves Jason in the Argonauts, how did
they defeat the sirens? Well, they brought Orpheus along with them,
the most famous bard of Greek mythology, at least as
far as mortals go, and his song is even sweeter
(19:47):
than the sirens. So you know, they explode or something.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
It's the Devil went down to Georgia.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, actually, as Apollodorus described it, I believe the sweet
song of Orpheus causes them to throw them selves into
the sea and become rocks. And it would turn out
that these were like the terms of their power, that
if their song ever failed to enthrall someone, then they
have to die. They were done for. And there are
(20:13):
similar accounts with the Sphinx as well, you know, like
if it's riddle as guest, it has to throw itself
off a mountain, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Wait, now that I said it, I'm trying to remember
what happens to the devil at the end of Devil
went Down to Georgia. BET's a fiddle of gold against
your soul. But what happens if Johnny wins.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
He gets to keep the golden golden.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Devil's just out of gold fiddle. That's it.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah, there was some I forget who, some stand up
comedian I think, was talking about how you know, it's
clear that the Devil's music is more impressive in that
particular song, we still give the wind to the mortals.
But yes, I agree, it is like very much like
the Devil goes down.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
To Geordia which text came first. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Now the exact number of sirens fairies. They're like between
two and five, depending on what telling you're looking at.
They have various names, different there are different takes on
their parentage as well. Again, it's just how many there
are to begin with, but their exact nature in large
part due to Homer being vague about it. This has
(21:16):
always been an area of discussion, and apparently it's not
the only area that Homer's vague, and for instance, according
to Gressith, he never explains that the cyclops as one eye.
So I think there are moments like that where we
just kind of like assume, like we like we know
as the as the reader what it's supposed to be
(21:38):
or what it becomes canonized as later. But you can
apparently get into discussions with any of this of like, well,
what did the original author intend? What was the shape
of it? Then?
Speaker 3 (21:48):
Yeah, of course, then again, they because most of these
stories would be drawing on pre existing concepts and stuff,
you never know, like what did people just naturally assume
when you name a character or type of being, Like
what did the reader bring to the reader or listener
bring to the table.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah, And that's one thing that Gressi gets into as well,
is that you have to end up looking for these
answers in the contemporary religion, but also in contemporary folklore,
to whatever extent you can pick at it through other sources. Now,
I picked up a couple of my favorite monster books
for a little more on these sirens, and I was
(22:26):
looking at Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, and
he points out three different traditions. He points out that
Avid describes them as golden birds with the faces of virgins.
He points out that Paulinius of Rhodes described them as
women with the lower half of sea birds. And then
much later medieval heraldry and bestiaries tend to present them
(22:48):
just as straight up mermaids, again fusing these older classical
tellings with Northern European traditions of mermaids. And I think
it's this is a reality you just can't get away from. Then,
when you keep tugging at siren myths, because the terms
are often used interchangeably, like some some tales of the siren,
(23:10):
you could sort of maybe make a better case that
these are actually mermaid stories. But some of them are
very are very juicy, and I just couldn't resist getting
into a particular one. This is one that Borges also
talks about. This This would have been the sixth century
in northern Wales. It is said that a siren was
(23:32):
caught and baptized, eventually becoming a saint in some traditions,
by the name of Murgan or Murrgan, which I believe
means Seaborn. She was reportedly carried to her baptism in
a vat, and I believe and this is also tied
to an Irish legend of lie Bon, and in fact
I often I have elsewhere seen this character referenced as
(23:55):
li Bon Murrgan, for example. I've also seen Morgan described
as an early discredited saint, so I don't know if
I don't believe that she is officially a saint in
the Catholic Church. This would have been around what five
eighty eight CE, I think, But she had a feast
(24:15):
day at one point, and it was January twenty seventh,
which I think is also devoted to various other saints
and so forth.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
This is an interesting story, but I'm thinking about the
symbolic implications of the baptism of an animal that lives
under the water.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Yeah, yeah, And it comes back to what we were
talking earlier about baptism and sirens and no brother where
art thou. There's apparently a more complete telling of this story,
and I found it in Carol Rose's Spirits Farries, Leprachauns
and Goblins, where this luban murrgan. She starts out as
(24:50):
a human, a human daughter of the High King of
Ireland and a goddess Iatawan I believe is her name,
and she's just a normal human child. But then she
is caught in the flood of a sacred spring with
her dog and carried to an underwater cavern and she's
trapped there for a year. But then she prays that
she might be free like the fishes, and so her
(25:12):
lower half becomes like a fish, and her dog transforms
into an otter.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Well that is appropriate because otters are good boys.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Three hundred years later, enter a cleric by the name
of BioC and he hears her singing and then you
know he's drawn to her singing. So they meet and
she asked him to bring her to Saint Comgall, an
actual historic saint, and this is where the vat comes
into the picture. They throw her in a vat and
she is willingly, you brought to the saint so that
(25:46):
she may be baptized. But at her baptism she is
or upon her baptism she is faced with a choice
another three hundred years of life or immediate entry into heaven.
So you know, do not pass go directly to heaven.
She chooses heaven. So anyway, it's a lovely little little
(26:07):
bit of folklore there. I like it quite a bit.
And they're apparently depictions of the saint here, Saint leban
or Saint Morgan, and yeah, sometimes she's depicted with a crown,
yeah quite oh and then and some depictions you also
see her order there beside her.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
Oh that's adorable.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
So essentially, you know, we have these Northern European mermaid traditions,
not to be confused with similar tales from around the world,
merging to some extent with classical tales of sirens, but
plenty of winged descriptions remain that ultimately line up more
with what you might think of today as a heartbeat.
You know, ancient wind spirits eventually transformed into fiends through
(26:52):
tellings of Greek myth depending on how you slice it.
Harpies and sirens may have been both female bird human hybrids,
but of different demeanors. So harpies you can think of
more as vengeful cannibal to spoilers, while sirens are alluring,
musical beings of temptation and is. If faced with both,
you'd need to fight the harpies off with physical weapons,
(27:14):
while the siren demands a more cerebral approach. So you know,
in some ways, they're kind of if you're looking at
them both as avian beings, they're kind of reflections of
each other, one targeting the body and the other targeting
the mind.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, And we mentioned earlier the idea of the siren
as a feminine monster, and Carol Rose in Giants, Monsters
and Dragons discusses this. Briefly points out that in medieval
European traditions, the siren takes on various symbolic powers. Quote
for her attributed where the comb and the mirror of vanity,
(27:50):
the fish or eel symbols of the entrapped Christian soul
ensnared by luxury and vice, the small dragon the symbol
of her liaison with the devil, and her nakedness taken
as a sign of wanton sexuality. So then and to
this day, in some depictions we see the siren presented
as this monstrous female temptress, a corruptor of menfolk, but
(28:12):
also like this, indeed, like something that has been summoned
up to test ones resolve. Still, as Rose points out,
there were still descriptions of the siren as a bird
woman you know, well, you know, out of of the
ancient world, pops up in the seventh and eighth century,
leaving Monstroum also a twelfth century Latin Bestiaria, which describes
(28:35):
them in much more harpy terms as winged, rock dwelling
beasts well that will not only lure sailors to their death,
but pounce on them with flesh rending talons. And then
during the nineteenth century we even see again kind of
like bumping up against all of these depictions of sirens
as mermaids and naked women in the water, we see
(28:57):
John William Waterhouse's eighteen ninety one pain Ulysses and the Sirens.
And what do we see here? We see big birds
with the heads of women, and they are the ones
as sailing ulysses strapped to the mast and his various oarsmen.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
Yeah, there's no ambiguity about their intentions. Here they are
swarming the boat.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yes these are Yeah, these are definitely aggressive human headed
birds here. Waterhouse it would seem drew more on those
classical Greek descriptions and depictions on vases and urns rather
than what his contemporaries were doing.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
It's interesting because I think it's the same painter, John
William Waterhouse that did the siren from nineteen hundred we
talked about earlier, the much more haunting an ambiguous image.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, I can't help, but one I don't know much
about about the man in his work, and you know
who's painting for. But I wonder if with the nineteen
hundred someone was like, I'd like you to draw me
a siren and no birds this time, John, I wanted
to be a lady.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
The one from nine years later does seem a little
little more mysterious and maybe mature.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
And to be clear, these are just a few, like
very famous examples of sirens and paintings from this period.
There are others, So if you have favorites, feel free
to send them into us, and you know, I'd love
to take a look at them.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Oh yeah, absolutely, Contact at Stuff to Blow your mind
dot com. Get in touch as always. Now, the idea
of the siren song luring sailors to their destruction by
(30:37):
one means or another got me thinking about nature. I
was wondering, are there any predators in nature that have
the genuine biological equivalent of a siren song? A sound
or a song or a vocalization that lures pray to
their doom. And after I did a little digging, I
(30:58):
discovered the answer is yes. Apparently it is not very
common in nature, at least as far as we know.
But there is one excellent example I want to talk about,
and this predatory song involves an animal that we just
did a series on earlier this year, the cicada. In
this case, the cicada not as the predator, but as
the prey. So I'm going to be referring to one
(31:21):
major source here, a zoology paper from two thousand and
nine published in Plus one by David C. Marshall and
Kathy B. R. Hill called versatile aggressive mimicry of cicadas
by an Australian predatory Katie did So. This paper begins
by talking about the concept of mimicry in nature. Mimicry
(31:43):
in the animal kingdom is when an animal has an
adaptation that makes it seem like something other than what
it is, and this can take a lot of different
forms and serve a lot of different purposes. A lot
of animal mimicry is defensive in purpose and visual in format.
So a vulnerable prey animal might try to fool predators
(32:05):
into leaving it alone, perhaps by looking like something totally
uninteresting to the predator, like a leaf, or like another
animal that tastes bad and is non nutritious. In some cases,
visual defensive mimicry makes the prey animal look threatening. It
makes it look like a different animal that is dangerous
(32:26):
and could put up a fight, or one that is poisonous.
But there are non visual forms of defensive mimicry as well.
For example, a prey animal can smell like something uninteresting
or something dangerous, so that's defensive mimicry. But there's also
what's called aggressive mimicry. This is when an animal disguises
(32:47):
itself for aggressive purposes, usually to attract or gain advantage
over prey if the mimic is a predator, or over
a host if the mimic is a parasite, and apparently
one of the most common strategies for aggressive mimics in
nature is to exploit mating drive. So it's like, hello,
fellow conspecifics, I am a member of your species and
(33:10):
I'm very sexy. So the authors give some examples of this.
One is the bolus spiders collectively known as a Mastophora,
which have been documented to attract male moths of at
least two different species by copying the sex pheromones of
female moths of those same species, so this would be
(33:31):
aggressive mimicry by smell. There's another interesting example, which is
predatory fireflies known as Fouturis versicolor, which these animals use
flashes of light to initiate mating within their own kind,
but they can also copy the courtship flashes of females
(33:52):
of other firefly species to trick the males of those
species into getting close for a mating opportunity, and then
the predatory fireflies just eat them, so this is aggressive
mimicry by visual signal, and the authors note that this
case is particularly interesting because the predatory fouturist fireflies can
(34:13):
copy the flashing patterns of eleven different prey species of fireflies.
So that's incredible versatility in the predatory mimic behavior, and
it's an interesting evolutionary question in cases like this how
that much versatility in the predatory behavior comes about. The
authors speculate that it might be possible in part because
(34:34):
in this case the predator and the prey are closely related.
But whatever the explanation there, both of these previous examples
work by the predator falsely appearing to be a female
conspecific that is ready to mate, either by smelling like
one or looking like one. This paper presents an example
of aggressive mimicry that is interesting for several reasons. Like
(34:57):
the fireflies, the predator in this case shows versatility in
altering the mimic behavior to match multiple different prey species.
But unlike the fireflies, the predator is not closely related
to the prey in a phylogenetic sense. And then, also,
though I didn't notice this priority claim in the paper itself,
(35:18):
a couple of news and blog sources I was reading
about the paper say that this was the first scientifically
documented case of an aggressive or predatory mimic relying on
sound rather than on visual or smell based cues, though
this mimic the mimic in question also does use visual
mimicry as a secondary appeal. I can't confirm there were
(35:40):
no earlier documented examples in nature, and I'm a little
curious why I found that claim in the popular sources
and not in the research itself. But I did not
find any earlier examples. So if that is true, this
is the first documented case. Or sound is the medium
being used for the aggressive mimic to mimic something that
(36:00):
gets it access to its prey. Wow, So what is
this dangerous mimic? Well, it is the spotted predatory katie
did or Chlorobalius leucoviritus. So this is a large green,
green and white patterned katie did or bush cricket. It's
a species native to Australia, mostly found in the dry
(36:23):
interior regions of the continent, and it preys on multiple
different species of cicadas belonging to the tribe Cicadatini, among
other things. It's got multiple prey, but it likes to
eat these cicadas of Cicadatini. Now it's important to note
that these prey cicadas rely on a two part acoustic
(36:43):
signaling behavior to initiate sexual pair formation. And when we
did our series on cicadas, we talked a lot about
the songs of cicadas, how they use sound in their
their mating behaviors. But in this case, these specific cicadas
rely on what the authors call signal responds duets. So
when it's time to mate, the male cicada initiates with
(37:06):
a song particular to its species, and then if a
female is nearby and she's receptive to mating, she will
reply with a series of wing flicks, which can be
recognized visually if you're very close. But more importantly, the
wingflicks produce an audible sound that matches with that specie
specific mating call put out by the male. So the
(37:27):
wingflicks can usually be heard for a range of several
meters and they will help the male locate the female
the author's right quote. Because a wingflick reply is structurally nondescript,
it must closely follow the queue in the male cicada's
song in order to be recognized. But this leads to
(37:48):
a kind of interesting situation where a clicking sound that
has roughly the right sound quality and the right latency
meaning I interpret this. I hope I'm right about this.
I think they're talking about the the time delay between
the end of the male cicada song and when the
clicks start and stop in response to that. If it
(38:10):
has these sonic qualities correct, it can be interpreted as
a female sexual signal by the male cicada. And as
an example, the authors mentioned that with some of these
cicadas in the tribe Cicadatini, you can attract males by
like snapping your fingers if you time it right with
respect to their songs. But different species listen for different things,
(38:31):
and some are more wary than others. I guess some
just kind of rush right in there. Now, coming back
to the katie DIDs, Chloribelius adults are most active in
the summertime, and you will tend to find them perched
in the upper branches of small trees and large shrubs,
where they can take advantage of their green and white
camouflage coloration pattern to hide in the foliage and rob
(38:53):
I've attached a couple of pictures for you to look at,
where one is against a white background where this animal
is very easy to say see. Another one is of
its standing in the tree branches, where it's much easier
to see how it would just kind of blend in,
especially if you weren't looking very close.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
Yeah, yeah, it is often the case. Right when you
look at the specimen more in its natural habitat, it
does blend in.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
So what do these kadieids do to mimic and hunt
the cicadas they eat? Well? The authors write that they
can quote attract male cicadas Hymiptera cicatada by imitating the
species specific wing flick replies of sexually receptive female cicadas.
This aggressive mimicry is accomplished both acoustically with tegmental clicks
(39:42):
and visually with synchronized body jerks, so it's a two
part mimic They imitate both the sounds and the visually
recognizable body movements produced by female cicadas that are ready
to mate, attracting male cicadas from the surrounding area, and
when the male cicada gets close enough, the katie did
(40:03):
will promptly snatch it, bite into it, and eat it.
And observations of these predatory encounters find that the kdi
did typically just eats the whole thing. The entire cicada
except for the wings, and they leave the wings behind.
And I thought that was interesting because I recall from
our series on cicadas this was also true of some
bird predators, which would eat the whole cicada except the
(40:24):
wings and then just leave pairs of wings everywhere.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Oh interesting.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
Now, one really interesting thing that the authors point out
is that these predators are able to not only reproduce
the different specific sounds of a bunch of different cicada species,
experiments showed they can reproduce the songs of cicadas they
have never come across before. So this acoustic mimicry is
not just a singular, evolved, pre programmed behavior, but it's versatile.
(40:53):
It is a versatile adaptable capacity to mimic and respond
to cicada calls. Interestingly, and perhaps relatedly, Chlorobelius also uses
acoustic signals for its own reproductive purposes. So when it's
time for this KTI did to mate, the male KTI
DIDs will produce a trilling sound with a file and
scraper system on the edges of their fore wings, which
(41:16):
is thought to attract females which are interested in mating. Now,
coming to the discussion section of this paper. It's worth
noting that this is not the only way that the
mating call of a cicada could be used to help
a predator eat a cicada. The predator could, for example,
just follow the song to its source and eat the male,
and many predators do exactly this. They do follow the
(41:39):
mating calls of prey animals to hunt. But this is
a different strategy like the siren, or at least one
version of the siren. The kti did lures victims to itself,
and I think that's kind of interesting to consider. It's
like a different evolutionary investment. I don't believe the authors
say this, so this could be on the wrong track,
but I was personally wondering if it could have something
(42:02):
to do with the fact that the katie did already
has a cryptic coloration pattern. It has camouflage, and so
the fact that it may be using camouflage for one thing,
it may be using camouflage defensively to hide from its
own predators, from birds and so forth. You know, whatever
preis on it, it may be able to get double
use out of that by specializing in a type of
(42:23):
predation that allows it to hold still and hide among
the leaves and have its prey come to it right right.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
And also I guess maybe it's helpful if it's this way,
it doesn't have to worry about the predators that could
potentially be seeking out the mating call of their very prey.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
Oh that's a very good point because as we talked
about it in our cicada series. I don't know with
this specific Australian family with the Cicadatinian Australia, but in
most places everything eats cicadas when the cicadas come out
their dinner for everything out there, and most of the
things that are eating them, or at least a lot
of the things would be big enough to eaticated it
as well. Right now. The authors in this paper argue
(43:02):
that the katie DIDs versatility and mimicry probably follows from
the application of a few simple rules. For one thing,
Since they're game to eat pretty much any cicada and
not just one particular species, they can probably ignore everything
about the male cicada's song except whatever part of it
cues the female cicada to respond, so there's less information
(43:26):
to process. Just tune most of that out focus on
whatever part you need to pay attention to to time
your response, your clicks and response, which is typically probably
something about the onset of a pause at the end
of a song segment. And this was funny because it
made me think about like text message scammers who are
going to possibly ignore basically everything you type to them
(43:48):
and just be looking for a couple of keywords to
advance the scamscript to the next waypoint.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Hmmm, yeah, I mean often predatory. There you go, efficiency, yeah,
predatory efficiency.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
But in general, the authors point out that a complex
adaptation like the kd did has here, it requires multiple parts. Right,
You've got to have sound producing organs, which they do
in the four wings. You've got to have sound perceiving organs.
You've got to be able to listen so you know
what to respond to. And you've got to have the
neural processing required to make that match right, to produce
(44:23):
the appropriate sound to match the call you just heard.
And fortunately for the kd DIDs, they already have all
three capabilities for use in their own mating. Remember that
from earlier they also use sound in their own mating. However,
there's an interesting complication here, which is that if this
predatory mimicry of cicada mating duets were based on the
(44:47):
mating behavior of the predator species, you would expect the
kd DIDs to also engage in duets, and as far
as the authors could tell, this was not the case.
The kd DIDs do not seem to do male female duets. Instead,
it seems as of the time of this paper that
males generally produce a song which attracts a silent female
(45:08):
to its source. So the male makes a song, the
female comes and finds the male. But the authors acknowledge
that not a lot is known about this katie did species,
so maybe some information is missing here. And also just
a reminder that I said there was both an acoustic
and a visual signal that the katie did also does
this body jerking behavior which accompanies the mimicry clicks, and
(45:30):
it does not seem to be physically necessary to make
the click sound, so it's probably also a mimic behavior
in this case to kind of look like a female
cicada flicking its wings between the leaves, so the male's like,
oh yeah, I see it right up there, and the
male's crawling up and then it gets.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Eaten fascinating it, I mean as lines up with the
basic siren script right absolutely.
Speaker 3 (45:52):
But in fact, to come back to the Odyssey, one
thing we see in the Odyssey is that the prey
of the sirens, at least one one member of the
sirens prey has a clever workaround a way of avoiding
the sirens song by plugging the ears of the men
rowing the ship and by lashing himself to the mast
(46:15):
so that the sirens wouldn't get him. This is what
Odysseus does, and you could see that as the beginning
of a possible arms race in adaptations between sailors and sirens.
And in fact there may be a fairly complex predator
prey arms race in evolution between these cicadas and the
katie DIDs. So here to read from the paper the
author's write quote. Even though Cobonga ox lay, the species
(46:39):
we observed being attracted by Chlorobelius luco viridus, has a
structurally obvious song cue and an easily timed repetitive rhythm,
we have found this species to be extremely resistant to
our artificial signals. Poorly timed finger snaps cause males of
many species to become wary with k i ox lay
(47:00):
an especially strong example. Perhaps persistent aggressive mimicry by Chlorobelius
lucoviritis has selected kox lay males for greater sensitivity to
the occasional, poorly timed click. This possibility also suggests an
additional evolutionary route for the cicada prey, the addition of
(47:22):
false cues that elicit premature katie did replies without queuing
female cicadas, whose response depends on a particular combination of
song elements. Long continued selection of this sort might account
for the extraordinarily complex songs of many Australian cicatatine species
(47:42):
found in the arid Acacia dominated habitats where see Lucoviritus
is most common. So that's very interesting. We may have
some cicada odysseuses on hand who have evolved a defensive
reaction to this type of predatory mimicry by, for one thing,
throwing out some decoy sound signals that are not going
(48:05):
to get females of its own species responding. But if
you do hear clicks in response to them, that's something
to be afraid of. Lets you know there's a monster
nearby and then also perhaps by being more sensitive to
incorrect timing on the response clicks in the duet.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Interesting. Interesting, So yeah, so their use of the song
become becomes more nuanced in a way, in a way
to outwit these pretenders. Yeah, I mean one is tempted
to make various comparisons, to say, conversations between humans, perhaps
(48:44):
in a dating scenario, you know, like a first date
where one might throw out, hey, you know, did you
see such and such movie? And I thought it was
pretty good and they're like, yeah, it's great. Well, then
you know that's a red flag fill in your own example. Well, sorry,
I'm a little slow today. I can't come up with
a good example that we can all stand behind as
(49:04):
being the red flag for a first day.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
But I absolutely understand what you're talking about, sort of
tossing out a sonic conversational bait to draw out the
attention of anything that you should be avoiding.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
Yeah. Well this is fascinating and again more evidence to
a point that we're always making on the show, and
that is that anything you find in myth and in
legend and fictional monsters, there is almost always something equally
weird in the natural world.
Speaker 3 (49:38):
Yeah, there's you know, through doing a lot of these
October Monster episodes, I find it varies how close of
a match we can find in the natural world. Sometimes
there's just not something in nature that is a real
tight fit on whatever fictional example we're talking about, But
there's always something more amazing. Yeah, but this was a
(49:59):
case where I was shocked how close the fit is,
especially with the Odysseus cicadas. To be clear, that's not
their biological name, that's just what I'm calling him.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Now, all right, I have one more little curiosity to
consider here. Take it from the cabinet of curiosity, if
you will, because it concerns a very learned individual who
(50:33):
seems to have thought very long and hard on the
reality of sirens, as well as the reality of some
other things that I don't think one typically thinks of
as having an objective reality. So I ran across this
in Literature and Lore of the Sea, edited by Patricia
Ann Karlson, specifically, in an article titled the Extraordinary being
(50:57):
Death in the Mermaid and Baroque literature Eileen S. Goodman,
She points out the seventeenth century German polymath and Jessuit
scholar Athanasius Kircher, who is sixteen o two through sixteen eighty,
in one of his natural history volumes, seems to give
serious consideration to not only the objective reality of Noah's Ark,
(51:19):
which isn't completely out of the ordinary. He still see
that kind of thing going on today, but also spends
a lot of time trying to figure out where Noah
put all of the sirens.
Speaker 3 (51:30):
Right next to the unicorns.
Speaker 2 (51:31):
Obviously, well, we'll get to unicorns. He also believed in them.
I guess brief refresher for those of you who don't
remember the story of Noah's Ark is this Old Testament
Book of Genesis tale concerning the Great flood and one
anti Theiluvian patriarch's mission to save all of the world's
animals from the flood in a great big boat. It's
(51:54):
one of various great flood myths found throughout the ancient world. Obviously,
this is not a story that easily endures. Is very close,
you know, literal scrutiny. When you dig down into the
two by two details of the endeavor. I think you
know a lot of us who grew up, you know,
going to Sunday school class. You reach that point where
you're like, wait, how does this work? Now? Wait to
(52:14):
two of each animal, you know, and then various questions arise.
But Kircher was very into figuring out exactly how all
of this would work, and he, to be clear, seems
to have believed in the reality of mermaids or sirens
as well as unicorns, based on some like the tail
(52:36):
and the bones of a mermaid that were in his museum.
Speaker 3 (52:41):
Oh okay, so he had empirical evidence.
Speaker 2 (52:44):
He's like, we have evidence, this is what these were.
And he describes them as amphibians and stresses that there
is some controversy as to whether these particular amphibians were
or were not received into the arc. And I imagine
some of you might have wondered about this, how did
what happened to the mermaids? So he explains in his writing,
well that others have said, well, perhaps they lived on
(53:07):
the outside of the arc, outside of this great boat,
perhaps in some sort of a nest, something like a
fixed to the hole.
Speaker 3 (53:17):
I'm finding it a little confusing here because I would
not normally think that aquatic animals needed to be taken
onto the arc at all, which I guess is part
of why he's classifying them as amphibians that like, they
can't live their entire lives in the water. They must
come to dry surface at some point.
Speaker 2 (53:33):
Yeah, so there was some disagreement with people asking the
same questions here. Where did the mermaids or sirens go?
Some said they stayed in nests on the outside of
the arc, but Kircher dismisses the idea, stating that this
is a This is a quote translated quote from his work,
as referenced in that article by Goodman Holy writ is
(53:56):
in agreement on the matter of the little stalls into
which the animals were district and it does not teach
that any existed outside. And I believe he argues against
the idea that any creature lived outside the ship during
the cataclysm, like even fish. I mean it, it's I
have no answer there. It's like, even if you're even
(54:19):
if I'm going to assume that fish surely get away
with living outside of the arc. I think he's making
the case that amphibian creatures could not. They would have
to be aboard the arc. H Okay, So I'm assuming here,
based on what I'm reading, that Kircher is arguing that
the sirens would have ridden inside the arc, and I
(54:41):
have to acknowledge that, yes, that sounds ludicrous to even
be wondering about that. But I also I don't want
to give everyone the wrong idea about this man, because
by all accounts he was. He was a brilliant mind,
you know, a brilliant man of his time, sometimes described
as being the last man to know everything. So this
(55:02):
is a guy who studied religion, linguistics, geology, medicine. He
tried to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and claimed that he
had translated them, but apparently not. He wrote an encyclopedia
on China. He kept a vundokama, or a cabinet of curiosities,
(55:23):
and he spent the majority of his career at Roman College.
He was fascinated by fossils. He made proposals about the
cause of plague that apparently line up with some of
the actual the actual reality of it. He was intrigued
by various devices, made little inventions. He was a science
superstar of his day, even if he's often eclipsed in
(55:46):
our recollection by such contemporaries as Galileo. And there is
the fact that he seemed to believe in the existence
of both mermaids and unicorns based on the evidence in
his museum.
Speaker 3 (55:57):
Oh yeah, well, I mean this would be, by no
means the only example of a truly brilliant mind in
history who spent a lot of time obsessing over minutia
based on false premises. Yeah, you know, the all the
devotion to to alchemy and trying to trying to work
things out based on the literal interpretation of the Bible
(56:17):
and things like that.
Speaker 2 (56:19):
So a lot of books have been written about him,
and I ran across there's actually a review of a
particular book about him. This was in this case, the
review was written by the Vatican Observatory's brother, Guy Konsumajno,
who I had the pleasure to hear speak here in
Atlanta many years ago. Was not speaking about this. Who
(56:40):
was speaking, I believe about religion and extraterrestrials, the sort
of like speculative material. But yeah, he wrote this article
in twenty twenty one titled a mishmash of brilliance and absurdity,
and he stressed that, yeah, there's here's this guy Kirchner,
who was brilliant, you know, was obsessed with optics, acoustics,
(57:00):
you name it just like everything that could be learned
or known about the world. He was all in on it.
But on the other hand, he wrote three volumes on
how Noah managed to fit all of the animals and
their food into the arc, and then also speculates about
the sirens as well.
Speaker 3 (57:19):
Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant minds of all time,
was spent a huge amount of intellectual energy obsessed with
interpreting his with like his interpretations of Biblical prophecies.
Speaker 2 (57:31):
Kanzemaijno writes quote, Kirchner makes a fascinating contrast in style
with Galileo. While both were shameless self promoters, Galileo was
far more rigorous, focused, and polemical in his science. Kirchner's
theme was simply wonder and delight, reporting marvelous machines and novelties,
like a seventeenth century version of Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Speaker 3 (57:53):
Well, Far be it from me to find fault there
in wonder and delight.
Speaker 2 (57:59):
I mean, you know it kind of you know, drives
home that you know. Wonder and delight are great, but
they too can be kind of a siren song, steering
you off into I mean in the worst cases, you know,
misinformation and delusion, but even into maybe just ideas that
are not ultimately that productive but maybe entertaining. I don't know.
(58:20):
Did Kirchner's three volumes on Noah's art like hurt anything,
Did his belief in the physical reality of unicorns and
mermaids hurt anything? Well? Maybe not, Maybe it's fine.
Speaker 3 (58:31):
I guess it's hard to say about that kind of thing, though,
I would say in general, it's absolutely the case. I
think that the estheticization of ideas can in some cases
have very negative consequences. Appreciating ideas primarily for whether they
are fun or exciting or how they make you feel,
with not enough appreciation for testing whether they are true,
(58:51):
can be in fact quite dangerous.
Speaker 2 (58:54):
Yeah. Absolutely, We've We've discussed multiple times in the show
various hypotheses that you know, sometimes are quite enthralling and
and even inspiring, but are they the best hypotheses with
which to understand the universe? And that's not always the case.
And if you just follow what's exciting, then you're, you know,
(59:16):
you're in search of with Leonard Nimoy or something, you know,
you're you're in the realm of let's just talk about
these ideas because they are entertaining and not because they
actually explain the world around us.
Speaker 3 (59:27):
Yeah, though, if we can make a persuasive case, I
hope we could convince you that you can put truth
testing as the first priority and ideas can still be fun.
Speaker 2 (59:38):
Absolutely, So you know, don't put wax in your ears.
Put put put a little Stuff to Blow your Mind
in your ears and hopefully that'll help you out. All right,
We're gonna go ahead and close up this episode, but
we'll remind everyone out there. The Stuff to Blow Your
Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do a short form
episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set aside most
(59:58):
serious concerns to just talk about a we film on
Weird House Cinema. If you listen to us on Apple
Podcasts or what have you, make sure you're subscribed to
the show. If you haven't reviewed us, give us a
nice review. Maybe touch up that old review. I don't know,
but you know, the stars help, the nice words help,
and likewise, it's the If you're on Instagram, you can
follow us. We are stb ym podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:00:22):
Huge Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
is the West or
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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