The Chesapeake Mermaid

WRAL New, Chesapeake Mermaid Celebrates 15 Years of Storytelling, Stewardship, and Everyday Magic

In 2025, Chesapeake Mermaid proudly celebrates 15 years as the first mermaid in the Mid-Atlantic created specifically to serve as an environmental educator for the Chesapeake Bay. To mark this milestone, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit is launching an exciting year-long celebration of public events, book releases, and immersive educational experiences throughout the watershed.

Over the past decade and a half, the Chesapeake Mermaid has grown to connect with up to 30,000 individuals annually through unforgettable storytelling programs and community outreach—many of whom now return with the next generation of children in tow.

 

“It’s heartwarming to see the kids we once taught now bringing their own children,” said the Chesapeake Mermaid. “Our passion has become a tradition rooted in love for the Bay.”

This anniversary year debuts a fully reimagined stage experience that reflects the community’s collective hope and imagination. At the heart of the new set is a glowing, 12-foot-long oyster reef, activated by the audience with the chant: “Wake up, oysters!” This new element was the result of over 200 hours of dedicated work by the nonprofit’s team of artists and engineers, who are constantly innovating and developing fresh ideas. The reef celebrates the ecological importance of oysters while inviting young audiences into a world of learning through light, sound, and play.

“The Chesapeake Mermaid is more than a character—she’s a voice for nature,” said Julia O’Grodnick, a local parent. “She helps kids fall in love with their watershed in a way that sticks with them.”

As a deaf performer and educator, the Chesapeake Mermaid also brings an inclusive and powerful approach to environmental storytelling. American Sign Language (ASL) is woven into every program, creating a space where children of all abilities can experience connection, wonder, and a deeper love for nature.

The tour features dozens of interactive, hour-long performances incorporating storytelling, music, movement, ASL, and actionable steps for environmental stewardship. The programs reach children and families in schools, museums, libraries, festivals, and nature centers, delivering a lasting message: everyone can protect the Chesapeake Bay.

Probably mostly harmless. I suspect Gabby would get a big kick out of her. 

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Lewis Grizzard Memorial Post ready on time and under budget at The Other McCain.

Wednesday Wetness

The Wombat has posted Rule 5 Sunday: Anya Forger on time and under budget at The Other McCain.

I Thought Museums were for Real Things

Chesapeake Bay Magazine:  East Coast’s 1st Mermaid Museum Open in Berlin, MD

Berlin, Maryland was once named America’s Coolest Small Town in a national contest, and now there’s a new cool thing to see: the East Coast’s first Mermaid Museum just opened on the town’s main street.

In a soft opening held over the weekend, visitors went in not knowing quite what to expect, but later described the place as “really magical.”

Among the curiosities inside, you’ll find an authentic Fiji Mermaid, that mythical half monkey-half fish said to have been caught off the coast of Fiji and shown off by PT Barnum sideshows. There’s art and cultural artifacts, and even an uncanny mermaid-shaped Cheeto.

 

“I was just called to do a space where people could be in an enchanting environment and learn a bit about why the Mermaid is such an enduring myth throughout all of earths cultures,” owner Alyssa Maloof tells Bay Bulletin.

The Mermaid Museum is located in a historic Odd Fellows building in Berlin, relatively close to the sea at just 20 minutes west of Ocean City. Owner Alyssa Maloof is an artist, and saw inspiration in the town’s early 20th-century architecture.

 

“I tried to have the content of the museum match the historical time period of the building and the town’s structures,” explains Maloof.

“It was the missing puzzle piece to what Berlin was missing,” said visitor Michelle Burke.

The Mermaid Museum doesn’t take itself too seriously: there is a sign at the entrance that warns of “Nudity and fish nudity. Early mermaids didn’t wear suits.”

Maloof says in addition to the main attractions, there are other hidden gems tucked into the museum that you might not find on the first visit. “But if you look closely you will find peeks into other worlds,” she tells us.

Sounds like good fun! 

Linked at The Daley Gator in Mermaids huh? The Wombat has Rule Five Sunday: Happy Easter! ready for your amusement at The Other McCain.

Can the Mermaid Save the Bay?

I didn't met her, but Steve did

Chesapeake Mermaid Saves the Bay in New Kids' Book

If you’ve seen her at a Bayside festival or event, you won’t soon forget her: the Chesapeake Mermaid, a brunette beauty with the shimmering tail of an Atlantic sturgeon.

The Mermaid, a self-proclaimed mascot for Bay conservation, takes her environmental message to kids of all ages across the Chesapeake region. This month she’ll release her second storybook geared towards educating children on Bay issues from a young age. With vivid illustrations by Angela R. Mitchell, The Giants of the Bay personifies some of the biggest challenges to Bay restoration— development, industry, and politics— as big, scary giants.

The story’s message is that even small voices can make a difference, and that children will be the future protectors of the Bay.

Says Mitchell, “I wanted children of all ages to understand how big problems happen but also how little changes by a lot of people can add up. It’s not hopeless.”

John Bonanno, President of the Coastal Conservation Association Maryland, calls the 32-page picture book “a fantasy within the realm of reality.”

“Both adults and children should be aware what we do today has impact in years to come. The Chesapeake Bay belongs to everyone and we are all responsible for its future,” says Bonanno.

The Chesapeake Mermaid will bring the magical “seeds of knowledge” she teaches about in her book on tour this year to continue to drive home The Giants of the Bay’s lessons. To see a list of her upcoming appearances or to order her storybook, click here. The book comes in hardback or paperback, and is intended for children six and up.

I don't know if she can save the Bay, but I don't think she can hurt.

I wonder what kind of lure to use...

Rule 5 Saturday - The Song of Siren with Eline Powell

Anyone who knows me knows I'm a sucker for cheap SciFi and Fantasy, and thus, after Britannia ran it's course, I checked out Siren, a show on the FreeForm network (the minors for CW, I believe), starring, chiefly, Eline Powell as a siren, or mermaid, come ashore into a small town in Washington to search from a missing sister.

With her small size, and her vaguely elfin appearance, it must be easy enough to make her up to seem vaguely inhuman. But good enough for a Rule 5 post!

Powell is the daughter of Belgian pharmacologist Rudi Pauwels and clinical researcher Carine Claeys, who in 1994 were two of the co-founders of the biotech company Tibotec. She was born in Leuven and lived in Mechelen until she was fourteen years old. After a short stay in Switzerland, she moved to England,  but she has Belgian citizenship and considers Belgium her home.

She attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, graduating in 2011 with a BA degree in acting. 

In 2014, she played the title role in the Italian drama film Anita B. directed by Roberto Faenza. The 2014 Capri, Hollywood International Film Festival named Powell as that year's "Breakout" actress for her role in Anita B.. Hollywood Reporter, on the other hand, criticized that performance as "ineffective..failing to convey any traces of the suffering her character has obviously endured."

In 2016, she appeared in two episodes of Game of Thrones as Bianca, a young actress plotting to murder her rival.

Which, being GOT, had her do some NSFW work.

She had small roles in Novitiate and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, both released in 2017.

In August 2016, Powell was cast to star in the Freeform series Siren playing Ryn, a feral mermaid who comes to a small coastal village in search of her sister.  Preparing for the role, Powell studied legends of mermaids and sea creatures.  To develop ideas for the mermaid's body language, Powell worked from videos of marine and other predators. For the mermaid's newly learned speech, Powell was inspired by the accent of Icelandic singer Björk.

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup and links. The Wombat has Rule 5 Monday: Komi-san Has A Communication Problem and FMJRA 2.0: Four Wheel Drive ready and waiting. Linked at The Right Way in Rule 5 Saturday LinkOrama. Linked by EBL in Iva Lamarão, Ruthie Collins: Country Roads, Run Beto Run and Making Marianne Williamson Happen, Pocahontas, RIP, Emma Eliza Regan, Christopher Moltisanti Gets A Message From Hell and Irish Dating Show.

Another Version of Insanity

Caitlin Nielsen

Brought to you via Wombat-socho's "In The Mailbox: 01.31.2017" Comes word of a new form of insanity: You’re Not A Mermaid, You’re Just Crazy

A little girl wanting to be a mermaid princess when she grows up is adorable. An adult woman who quits her job because she believe she is half fish and half human is just plain crazy in the head.

Morgan Caldwell (left) and Tessie LaMourea (right)

But it's a cute kind of crazy, sort of.

“When Caitlin Nielsen told her kindergarten teacher she wanted to be a mermaid when she grew up, the kids laughed at her.
“But now aged 32, Caitlin is living her dream: She is part of a ‘secret’ community of people who identify as part-human, part-fish and call themselves merfolk.
“Caitlin had long dreamed of being a mermaid and watching the Disney movie The Little Mermaid did nothing to ease her aspirations.
“So in 2015 the biology graduate quit her job so she could focus full-time on her real ambition: being a full-time mermaid.”

Funny, how the growth of body disphoria related madness has grown with the rise of people who don’t want to grow up and accept reality? How is believing you are the opposite sex, or some made up gender, more crazy than thinking you are a different species or some made-up mythical creature?

Caitlin  with her friend Tessie, right

She probably has at least a good job prospects as a mermaid as with her biology major.

“‘I do feel like my tail is a part of me, and I do actually feel like it is a prosthetic limb.
“‘I sometimes joke that I wear a prosthetic because I was born with a terrible birth defect – which is legs.
“‘When my tail is off I feel a little bit awkward. Suddenly I have legs and I don’t know what to do with them. I feel extremely clumsy.'”
Yet again, South Park has been eerily prescient.

Unsurprisingly, these people suffer psychological issues. Rather than address those issues, these people are indulged in their delusional fantasies:

Yes, there are boys, too

“Her friends Ed Brown and Tessie LaMourea also identify as part-fish-part-human and like Caitlin, they are immersed in the lifestyle.
“Environmental policy student Tessie was inspired to become a mermaid ever since she attended a magical mermaid school in the exotic Philippines three years ago.
“Once she slides her tail on and becomes Mermaid Essie, she says her worries disappear and the magical feeling of invincibility and power arises.
“The 24-year-old said: ‘I have a lot of body insecurities, I think a lot of people do. When I am in my tail I don’t feel insecure anymore. Because it suddenly doesn’t matter what size I am because I am a mermaid and that is what people really focus on.
“‘When I take my tail off it almost feels like a piece of me has come off, that I am in a weird limbo. It’s very vulnerable feeling. It is an odd feeling for sure.
“‘It suddenly doesn’t matter what size I am because I am a mermaid and that is what people really focus on.’”

How long before the military is required to pay for transterrestrials operations to fuse their legs and segment their leg bones to become flexible tails? Oh, that's right, we elected Trump.



Wombat-socho has the grand "Rule 5 Sunday: The Humiliation Of Roger Goodell" and "FMJRA 2.0: Waiting For The Superb Owl" ready at The Other McCain.

Killer Mermaids

A trailer for a new, possibly delightfully bad movie:



Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday" and links. Wombat-socho celebrates his week of absence with a double dose "Rule 5 Monday: Easter Weekend Double-Dip Edition."

Can a Mermaid Save the Bay?

Probably not, but can it she hurt it? Third-year College student creatively advocates for conservation

Like many other young girls, third-year College student Hales Parcells dreamed of becoming the Little Mermaid when she grew up. At the University, Parcells found a way to turn this dream into reality while teaching others about the conservation of the Chesapeake Bay.

“Being away from the ocean, I realized how much I cared about that part of my life,” Parcells said. “I always liked mermaids — maybe it’s a Virginia Beach thing. I always thought it was a normal thing.”

She purchased her first mermaid tail through an online retailer.

And yes, in answer to the question you did not ask, you can find Mermaid tails at Amazon.

“I wanted to devote my life to studying [conservation] and being a mermaid is a creative way to do that,” Parcells said. “Even though in Charlottesville we are three hours from water, the litter we have here still matters.”

Parcells was confronted with the opportunity to combine her love of mermaids and acting with her interest in the environment when children’s author Daniel Ford, stumbled across a Facebook photo of her wearing the mermaid tail.

Parcells and Ford teamed up to read to children in Charlottesville and Virginia Beach schools and teach them about conservation. The performance showcases Parcells in mermaid costume presenting a 45-minute reading of Ford’s book.

Ugh, 45 minutes of propaganda, no thanks.  But sure, I would pose for a picture in her arms.  Oh that's right, I already did (see right).

An Environmental Science major, Parcells practices conservation in her daily life and enjoys acting as a mermaid to spread the message to others. Parcells hopes to expand her influence in the Charlottesville community by working at birthday parties and public events.

“[I] hope to do more to promote conservation,” Parcells said. “I would love this to be a career, but I think it [will have to] be a side job. [I] don’t plan on giving it up anytime soon.”

You can find her Facebook page "The Marlin and the Mermaid Save the Bay", and her Ideastations site Mermaid Hales Teaches Children How to "Help Save the Bay" at the links.

Wombat-socho is back on track this week at The Other McCain with "Rule 5 Sunday: Take It Like A Man."

Mermaids Stop Work in Zimbabwe

John William Waterhouse - "The Siren" -1900

Reason for Zimbabwe reservoir delays... mermaids have been hounding workers away! 

Here's hoping that mermaids become as big a meme as zombies; they're much more appealing.

Essential work on planned reservoirs in Zimbabwe has stopped because mermaids have been hounding workers away, according to the country's Water Resources Minister.

Samuel Sipepa Nkomo told a Zimbabwean parliamentary committee that terrified workers are refusing to return to the sites, near the towns of Gokwe and Mutare.

Minister Nkomo said the only way to solve the problem was to brew traditional beer and carry out any rites to appease the spirits.

Mermaids and beer! This gets even better.

John William Waterhouse - "The Mermaid" -1901

All the officers I have sent have vowed not to go back there', Minister Nkomo was reported as saying in Zimbabwe's state-approved Herald newspaper. The senior politician said that mermaids were also present in other reservoirs. 'We even hired whites thinking that our boys did not want to work but they also returned saying they would not return to work there again,' he added.

The two, long overdue reservoirs are considered essential if Zimbabwe is provide adequate water to its population and to boost its agricultural production. Having once been the 'bread basket' of Southern Africa, the country's farms have been laid low by lack of faith in government policy.

Rupert Bunny - "Mermaids Dancing" - 1896

From 2000, President Robert Mugabe expropriated some 4,000 white owned farms and gave them to politically connected blacks.

Ah, crony capitalism in action; prefiguring Solyndra.

Partly as a result, agricultural production is this year forecast to be at its second lowest level since Zimbabwe achieved independence from Britain in 1980.

Collier Smithers - "A Race with Mermaids and Tritons"

And working as well as usual.

The belief in mermaids and other mythical creatures is widespread in the country, where many people combine a Christian faith with traditional beliefs.

Local Government, Rural and Urban Development Minister Ignatius Chombo said the government wants to give the population the water it needs, but cannot do so until the rituals are performed and necessary repairs can be carried out.

Three quarters of Zimbabwe's population live on less than one US dollar a day.

So, are we angling for mermaid based tourism?  As much as I'd like to see an actual mermaid (and not a Florida fake), I don't think I'd visit Zimbabwe to see her.

Thanks to Wombat-Soccho for the links at The Other McCains  plain brown wrapper "Rule 5 Monday" linkfest. Also to The Classical Liberal, who clearly pored over the blog looking for Rule 5 material for his links "Rule 5 Fuel."

NOAA Nixes Nereids

NOAA Denies Existence of Mermaids

This official release from NOAA denies the existence of those luscious, and sometime not so luscious denudzens of the deep:

Mermaids — those half-human, half-fish sirens of the sea — are legendary sea creatures chronicled in maritime cultures since time immemorial. The ancient Greek epic poet Homer wrote of them in The Odyssey. In the ancient Far East, mermaids were the wives of powerful sea-dragons, and served as trusted messengers between their spouses and the emperors on land. The aboriginal people of Australia call mermaids yawkyawks – a name that may refer to their mesmerizing songs.

Not to mention the early colonial sailors of the America's who were thought to have confused manatees and dugongs  with mermaids.  A glimpse of a tail and a desperate and/or optimistic imagination, perhaps?

The belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn of our species. Magical female figures first appear in cave paintings in the late Paleolithic (Stone Age) period some 30,000 years ago, when modern humans gained dominion over the land and, presumably, began to sail the seas. Half-human creatures, called chimeras, also abound in mythology — in addition to mermaids, there were wise centaurs, wild satyrs, and frightful minotaurs, to name but a few.

But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. Why, then, do they occupy the collective unconscious of nearly all seafaring peoples? That’s a question best left to historians, philosophers, and anthropologists.

I'm glad they got around to telling me.  Now I won't have waste all that time looking fro mermaids when I go fishing.

Why does NOAA feel obliged to deny the existence of mermaids now? 

Credit (or blame) Animal Planet (a branch of Discovery), which last month aired a TV show called "Mermaids: The Body Found." It was a documentary-style show that “paints a wildly convincing picture of the existence of mermaids, what they may look like, and why they’ve stayed hidden...until now,” according to the show’s press Web page. Indeed, it says, “'Mermaids: The Body Found' makes a strong case for the existence of the mermaid...”

I missed that one.  Well, I'm sure it will be replayed many times.

Though the filmmakers acknowledged that the film is science fiction, for many people it was indeed “wildly convincing.” The show was an "X-Files" type fanciful mix of state-of-the-art computer generated animation, historical fact, conspiracy theory and real and faked footage sprinkled with enough bits of scientific speculation and real science to make it seem plausible. In fact, there were even interviews with real NOAA scientists. As with all good science fiction, there’s a grain of science and truth to it: the so-called “aquatic ape¹” idea it touted (suggesting our evolutionary ancestors may have lived in marine environments) is a real hypothesis, but has nothing to do with mermaids.

As New York Times reviewer Neil Genzlinger noted, the story is “a fictional account built on a few strands of fact and made to look like an actual documentary. If you know those ground rules, it’s a rather enjoyable and intriguing piece of work, in the same vein as 'The Blair Witch Project'.” It seems that many people weren’t aware of those ground rules, and were fooled into thinking that there was more fact than fancy in the show.

Yep, it's kind of odd how the "serious" science type channels have started doing more and more  shows that, if they don't out and out promulgate beliefs in mythical animals like Yeti, Sasquatch, and Chubacabra, at least do a dishonestly good job of attempting to be "fair" at trying to present both sides of the story.  It's almost as if money is more important to them than the truth...

¹ The aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH) is a hypothesis about human evolution, which posits that the ancestors of modern humans spent a period of time adapting to life in a wet environment. AAH emerged from the observation that some traits that set humans apart from other primates have parallels in aquatic mammals. It was first proposed by German pathologist Max Westenhöfer in 1942, and then independently by British marine biologist Alister Hardy in 1960. After Hardy, the most prominent proponent has been Welsh screenwriter Elaine Morgan, who has written several books on the topic.

I read the Morgan book many years ago.  I thought it was interesting, but not completely convincing.

The Classical Liberal links to this in "Hot Legs!" Special thanks to Wombat-Socho who featured this in his weekly Rule 5 post "Touch and Go" over at The Other McCain.