Sri Lanka’s Sea Mammals | The Mermaid That Wasn’t

Which sea mammals can Sri Lanka rightly claim as its own – and did the Portuguese really find a mermaid on the shores of Mannar 500 years ago?

Europeans first encountered mermaids in Sri Lanka 500 years ago. Just a few decades after arriving, the Portuguese, under the command of Constantino of Braganza, a cousin of the King of Portugal, tiring of the relatively successful raids upon his fleet by the Kings of Jaffna, decided war was the best way forward. His expedition, in November 1560, resulted in the capture of Mannar Island.

Inevitably, many in his army were terribly injured, and under the naval doctor, Dimas Bosque, a beach hospital was erected. Bosque, described as "a very cultured man, well known for his veracity, and quite sagacious in the treatment of illnesses,” took up the story in a letter later discovered in the Jesuit library in France.

“One day, a crowd of fishermen came to the Father, requesting him, with loud shouting in their own language, to go to their boats and look at some fish they had caught. They said that while they were fishing, they had, by a stupendous miracle of nature, either by luck or that the marvellous works of God the Almighty might be spoken of, caught in their nets nine female fishes and seven males, which, because they resembled human beings, the natives themselves called "sea men" and "sea women". "Struck by the novelty, as was natural, we went to the boats. The fishermen who had remained there had already taken the fish out of the boats and laid them on the shore. When I saw them and contemplated how greatly they resembled human beings, I could scarcely breathe. In wonderment, I could hardly turn my eyes away from their admirable bodies. What I saw then with my own eyes I would never have believed if someone else had told me. I kept staring at these fish with their marvellous resemblance to human beings. Such a work of nature seemed hardly believable even while I was looking at it with my own eyes. Nevertheless, helped by Christian philosophy, I referred the extraordinary shape of the fish before me to God, the maker of all things, to whom nothing is difficult to make, let alone impossible. I considered it worthwhile to inspect each particular member, so that, after examining the anatomy of each part, I would clearly understand the similitude of the whole body with that of a human being. Externally, the resemblance was very great.”

What Bosque had actually discovered was not mermaids but dugongs. He was by no means the first to confuse the two. Christopher Columbus himself had come across them a few years earlier, noting in his diary - “the day before, when the Admiral was going to the Rio del Oro, he said he saw three mermaids who came quite high out of the water but were not as pretty as they are depicted, for somehow in the face they look like men.”

Hundreds of years of brutal hunting have since driven this most marvellous of all the island’s sea mammals to the brink of extinction. But a gentler creature would be hard to find.

Growing to around eleven feet in length, with poor eyesight but a good sense of smell, they propel themselves forward by flippers and tail, and although they can live up to seventy years, longevity is now but a dugong dream. Widespread legal protection has not stopped them from being hunted, whilst habitat pollution and degradation have also decimated their numbers. In Sri Lanka, their meat was highly sought and considered to have medicinal and aphrodisiac properties; diaries note that, as recently as the 1950s, over 150 slaughtered animals were offered for sale annually in Mannar alone. Their cautious reproductive habits do not much help them either, with males taking sometimes as many as eighteen years to reach sexual maturity. The impressive Dugong and Seagrass Conservation Project reports depressingly that “large herds of dugongs were reported to have occurred in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka in the early 1900s; however, none were sighted during aerial surveys conducted of Palk Bay and the waters off western Sri Lanka in the 1980s, and their current status and distribution are unknown.” Even so, there have been uncorroborated reports of more recent sightings, including one in 2017 in Puttalam Lagoon, where some say they still live, grazing on seagrass meadows in shallow bays and mangroves.

But out beyond these sheltered shores, in deeper waters, Sri Lanka’s other sea mammals are faring better, and the country is one of the best places in Asia to sort them – especially in Mirissa, from November to April; off Trincomalee, from May to September; or Kalpitiya, from December to March.

Three capacious seas splash against Sri Lanka’s beaches – from the east, the Bay of Bengal; from the west, the Laccadive Sea; and from the south, the Indian Ocean. Purists clamour for a fourth – the shallow Palk Straits that link the north of the island to the south of India. Either way, the country is blessed to be so centrally located to a great mix of oceans. Like a roundabout amid myriad roads, its shores are a nursery, school, home, and larder for a plenitude of marine creatures, not least its mammals. Whale watching, with abundant side helpings of dolphin and the odd bit of porpoise watching, is propelling a whole new branch of environmental tourism.

Scientists estimate that across the 90 species of whales found today, there are about 1.5 million individuals, many of which are concentrated in specific oceans. Sri Lanka boasts 12 of these massive saltwater residents, including the most magnificent of whales – the Blue Whale, one of the country’s two most commonly encountered sea beasts.

Measuring up to one hundred feet, there is nothing that still lives on our harried planet quite so large or inspiring as the Blue Whale. From Moby-Dick and the prophet Jonah to Aristotle and Kipling, they have become creatures whose literary heritage is almost as impressive as their mythological one. They sing, live blamelessly on krill, and press on through the ups and downs of life for up to ninety years. The males sport a 3 metre penis, the largest of any species still alive. They are truly one of our planet’s greatest wonders, yet have been hunted to the brink of extinction, their numbers falling from around 140,000 in 1926 to some 25,000 in 2018. Today, they also face grave threats from ship collisions and rising noise pollution. They take about 10 years to reach sexual maturity and produce calves every 2 to 3 years – a low, slow reproductive process that further strains their global numbers. The only area of the world they seem to avoid is the Arctic. Remarkably, the blue whales found off Sri Lanka’s beaches are permanent residents, their otherwise migratory inclinations negated by the sheer magnetic nutrient wealth of the country’s waters, fed by run off and monsoon rain and captured by an ocean shelf that is perfectly constituted to maximise the availability and accessibility of food.

The Sperm whale, Or Cachalot Whale, is the other whale often seen here. Massive, migratory, equipped with the largest brain of any living creature, and able to live up to seventy years, the Sperm Whale is everything that a well-bred species of whale aims to be. It abounds in superlatives: a four-chambered stomach, the longest intestinal system of any creature in the world; capable of emitting a sound louder than any other living beast, and happiest swimming in ice-free waters over 1,000 metres deep. Hunted by commercial whalers for hundreds of years, their numbers were pushed to the point of extreme vulnerability, but have since started to recover – slowly. They are one of the most sighted whales off Sri Lanka’s shores, tempted by warm and plentiful seas to group together and mate, forming super pods of sometimes a hundred beasts in March and April.

Five other whale species offer accolades for their sightings, being occasionally visible in Sri Lanka’s seas. The first of these, the Humpbacked Whale, is one of whale conservation’s rare success stories. Their future stared them in the face by the 1960s; by then, hunting had driven their global numbers down to around 5,000. Today, they are estimated to number 135,000, despite the continual and rising pressures they face from ship collisions and noise pollution. They are migratory beasts, delighted to embark on journeys of 5,000 miles and are found almost everywhere around the world. Their name derives from their idiosyncratic body shape: a snug hump to which are attached giant flippers, one-third the length of their entire body (which usually measures fifty feet in length). The males are much given to long songs– often thirty minutes in length. They can live for up to fifty years and become sexually active at around five to ten years. Although rarely spotted off Sri Lanka’s beaches, they are still sufficiently seen as to give hope to determined whale watchers.

In this, they are similar to Bryde's Whale. So elongated as to resemble a fifty-foot torpedo on testosterone, Bryde's Whale is so little studied that scientists postulate that what is one species could actually be four. Or three. No one knows, yet it is widely considered to be distributed and is regularly, if infrequently, seen off Sri Lanka’s shores. As is the Little Picked Whale, Minke Whale. This solitary beast is happiest roaming solo style like an aquatic David Livingstone, albeit without the porters. They are only “little” in whale terms, measuring in at 30 feet or more. They are widely distributed and enter sexual maturity at 8 years, living for up to 50 years.

Occasionally spotted too is the Pigeon Sperm Whale, the sprat of the whale world, measuring little more than 11 feet. It has a solid, barrel-like body and notably fewer brain neurons than its cousins, making it intellectually more challenged than many other whales. They live for about 20 years and are shy, rarely spotted creatures.

Cuvier's Beaked Whale is also hard to see, preferring the deeper waters well offshore. It is a relatively small beast in whale terms (around 20 feet in length) but holds the record for the deepest and longest dives, plunging to almost 3,000 metres for over 200 minutes. When not displaying such pressure-busting dexterity, it keeps to tropical or temperate seas at depths of 1,000 feet.

The island’s final five whales are so rare as to prompt newspaper headlines when sighted – for sighted they are, from time to time, including the Southern Bottlenose Whale, which lives most typically in the Antarctic, but has been spotted, most possibly lost, in the deeper seas around the island. Measuring just over 20 feet, they can be mistaken for giant dolphins with their tubelike snout and bulbous head.

A little smaller, at sixteen feet in length, is the Ginkgo-Tooth Beaked Whale, one of the most mysterious of whales, little studied, and rarely seen. It inhabits tropical and warm-temperate waters in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and whilst there have been the odd sightings off Sri Lanka, seeing one is wont to draw teeming tribes of cetologists to the island to corroborate the sightings.

Marginally less elusive is the False Killer Whale. This beast gets its unfortunate name from its easy confusion with killer whales, a similarity that vexed Victorian marine biologists, ever eager to pin them down. Found all around the world, they prefer tropical waters – and deep ones at that but remain a rare and prized sight for Sri Lankan whale watchers. They often travel in pods of a dozen or so animals, so their infrequent appearances are all the more anticipated than those of London buses. They grow to around twenty feet in length and frequently socialise with dolphins, especially the common bottlenose dolphin – sometimes rather excessively, their friendship descending into attempts at both sex and, even less happily, murder. There are no reliable estimates of their global population, and although they can live for almost 60 years, their calving is a long and complex process.

The Killer Whale itself is as little spotted here as it is elsewhere. Despite being known as Killer Whales, they are actually a type of dolphin, albeit about 30 feet long. They live typically for thirty years or so, but often do not become sexually active until halfway through this period. They are brilliant, with brains weighing more than those of most other whales, but less than those of the sperm whale. They have been recorded deliberating, imitating one another, and teaching exact skills to their young. Linguistically adroit, within the pods in which they live, they appear to communicate with one another in dialects different to those used by other pods. Their interaction with humans is more one of curiosity than a determined desire to consume what they see. They prey on fish, seals, sharks, dolphins, porpoises and even whales much larger than themselves – but have also been recorded tossing sea lions to their death for the sheer fun of it. Play is, in fact, something that stands out in studies made of the creature: they are playful, strategic, and determined – the sort of whale you might choose to have next to you at a corporate dinner for the sheer pleasure of lively companionship.

Bigger by far, though no less rare, is the Fin Whale. At almost ninety feet in length, it is only pipped to the post of longest living animal on earth by the Blue Whale. The American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews memorably described it as "the greyhound of the sea,” with a “beautiful, slender body built like a racing yacht.” Able to swim at speeds of twenty-five miles per hour, they are creatures that like to take their time about things, reaching full sexual maturity at around twenty-five years, and going on to enjoy a life expectancy that in some cases has been recorded to be as long as one hundred and thirty years. Migratory by nature, they are distributed worldwide, except for the Arctic, but sightings around Sri Lanka remain relatively rare.

Even accepting their preference for tropical and sub-tropical waters, it seems invidious to write of endemic dolphins in Sri Lanka, given the creature’s ability to swim where it pleases. But the island is especially blessed in attracting quite so many species to so many parts of its offshore waters – 7 dolphins and a porpoise. However, the differences between them are only disentangled by the most scholarly of cetologists.

The first of these, the Common Bottlenose Dolphin, is practically a citizen of the world, so widespread is its distribution, which happily includes the oceans off Sri Lanka’s coasts. Gunboat grey, with a single blowhole, a dorsal fin, and a length of up to 13 feet, they have a brain larger than that of humans, a good enough argument for replacing all the politicians of the world with aquariums of Common Bottlenose Dolphins. They are also very sociable, usually living in pods of around 15 animals – though when the party mood takes them, the pod can dramatically expand to around 1000. They talk to one another with signature whistles. Males are famous for their lifelong bromances, displaying the sort of impressive emotional intelligence that might have shocked John Wayne. Females breed every 3 years or so, keeping their young with them till they are up to eight years old. The enviably healthy fish diet helps promote a life expectancy of 40 to 60 years.

Familiar too, albeit in the loveliest of ways, is the Common Dolphin. Widely distributed, happily plentiful in number, it is a most sociable creature, living in packs of a dozen or so, but ones that have been known to come together with others to number 10,000 for short periods of time. Interestingly, unlike many other dolphins, their social order is not matriarchal; indeed, male dolphins probably push the aqua pram more often than do females. Within the pods are sub-pods – mixed-gender nursery pods, all-male pods, and mixed-gender pods of adults and wanna-be adults. Measuring up to 8 feet in length, they display a beautiful two-tone colouration: slate-grey upper sides and white undersides.

Fraser's Dolphin takes social living to new heights in the water. Although most are typically found in the Americas, they are frequent visitors to Asian oceans, making them a strong contender to spot around Sri Lanka. Like an old-fashioned Skoda, they are tiny (about 3 feet in length) and stocky, with the uncertain accolade of having the smallest genitalia of any dolphin. Even so, the species is plentiful and highly social, living in pods of around 100 animals.

Marginally less social is the Spinner Dolphin, which, although also found in pods, is not as trenchantly tied to one another as some other dolphin species. They come in at the smaller end of the dolphin spectrum – around seven feet in length and can be found in gladdening numbers wherever there is tropical or subtropical water. They gain their name (“spinner”) for the considerable athletic, aerial and acrobatic feats they are fond of performing, which may help account for their (compared to other dolphin species) relatively short life expectancy of twenty-five years.

The Pantropical Spotted Dolphin is also something of an acrobat. Slender, elegant, and playful, it is precisely the kind of dolphin you might most want erupting around the prow of your gin palace as you steam out to sea for a hard day’s sunbathing. Although happily plentiful in quantity, their numbers have been falling dramatically over the past decade. Found in tropical and sub-tropical waters, their fondness for tuna has the depressing side result of ensuring that fishermen kill many, a tragic byproduct of the race to keep the sushi bars of the world running smoothly.

Given how beautiful most dolphins are, it is something of a relief to see a Risso Dolphin, a species noted for its stumpy, stocky body, lack of a chin and proclivity for scars. They hug the coastline of most of the world’s continents, including Sri Lanka. Measuring thirteen feet in length, connoisseurs of squid and seaweed, they are usually found in pods of a dozen or more. As with many other dolphin species, bromances are common, and the species enjoys a life expectancy of around 40 years.

The rarest of the lot, though, is probably the Indian Ocean Humpback Dolphin, which is only now found along the eastern African seaboard, around the Arabian Peninsula, and along the coastlines of India and Sri Lanka. They are an endangered species - so spotting one is special. Infant mortality rates are exceptionally high because they are highly sensitive to environmental pollution, habitat changes, and noise. They grow to around 8 feet in length and live in pods of about a dozen family members, with a life expectancy of well over 40 years.

The single porpoise that lives off Sri Lanka’s coasts is the Little Indian Porpoise. Rare, endangered in fact, it ranges from Taiwan and Indonesia to the Persian Gulf. Shy, and most certainly not the boat-leaping show-offs that characterise dolphins, they grow to around seven feet in length, talk to each other, and, when not caught up in fishing nets or polluted out of existence, can live to around 30 years.

“ I would be a mermaid fair,” wrote Tennyson with prescient whimsy, “I would sing to myself the whole of the day; With a comb of pearl I would comb my hair; And still as I combed I would sing and say, 'Who is it loves me? Who loves not me?'

The answer – of course – is everyone, and no one. Despite the ever-greater numbers of people clamouring to spot whales, dolphins and all the other assorted mermaid-like creatures of the seas around Sri Lanka and the rest of the world, the sheer tumult and noise they cause are the reasons these beasts are driven to the edges of happiness. Sustainability is wearisomely double-edged: be interested enough to influence good outcomes, but not so curious as to burst the bubble. “You have to realise,” said the late, great Jane Goodall, “that touching is a real violation of personal space.”

That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbirck at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.