Nature's Preys - Ep.2: Mermaids

Welcome, to another thrilling episode of Nature’s Preys! With your host, Maxwell Worthingsmith. In today’s episode, we follow the enchantingly beautiful mermaid.

A creature of immeasurable beauty and grace, mermaids are immensely popular in Eutopia’s seas. Their slim, human-like torsos and their voluptuous exposed breasts are enough to drive any ship towards the rocks. Their long, colorful hair is often decorated with various starfish and ocean flowers, and their attractive faces always feature a charming smile. Though a mermaid’s upper body has the size of an average human female, they are between 6 and 7 feet long, due to their gorgeous finned tails, colored an eye-catching mixture of blues and greens of the ocean.

While the mermaid’s graceful, slender fishtail grants her agility and dexterity as she slides through the ocean’s underwater environment, it is her general sense of curiosity and her attraction to all things beautiful, which can prove deadly weaknesses. In this rich ecosystem of various fishes, corrals, invertebrates and seaweed, some organisms have evolved to exploit this creature’s fondness for beauty.

Such an organism is the giant carnivorous plant, known as the “Sea Orchid”. At first glance, this plant appears rather serene and harmless, despite its volume. The plant’s single flower can spam up to 6 feet in diameter. Its colorful, silky smooth petals create wonderful patterns across their surface, drawing further attention to themselves. While you’d assume the Sea Orchid strikes a resemblance to our know orchid flower, the plant is more mischievous than that, its flowers often disguised as those of other giant and harmless flowers, in order to trick even the wiser, mature mermaids to approach it.

We now see, as a young mermaid, with gorgeous long fire-red hair that match her alluring lips and reach down her waist. A set of perky, round titties wobbles with any change in direction. The fin of her long tail is swaying left and right propelling her hour-glass physique through the waters. The young mermaid is probably heading to meet her friends, the mermaids being a rather social creature, when her gorgeous ocean-green eyes catch the sight of a gorgeous Sea Orchid!

“What’s that gorgeous flower!” her expression appears to betray. And rightly so! This 8-petaled beauty, with bright red, blue and purple colors, is definitely worth a small detour for the unsuspecting mermaid. She’ll steal a few moments to marvel it, then back she’ll swim towards her destination.

The mermaid swims over to this dazzling flower. The plant appears to have sprouted on top of a big rock, half-submerged on the ocean floor, the rock covered by a layer of fungus and green mold. The pistil of the flower, the round part on the center of its petals, features about a dozen leafy vines, each slim and about 5 feet long. They appear very much like seaweed, as they gracefully wave along with the ocean’s underwater current.

The mermaid gingerly floats over to the plant. We watch as she appears rather mesmerized by the flower’s sheer beauty. She cannot take her eyes off its soft colorful petals. Our crew observes as she lays a delicate hand onto the petals, wanting to feel their smooth texture.

Being intimately close to the flower, the mermaid does not pay attention to the pistil vines, which, quietly rustling with the water’s movement, barely come in contact with her soft body. The young mermaid does not know that these inconspicuous vines are actually the plant’s external sensors, able to detect if an innocent “lunch” is within striking distance.

Our camera focuses on the peacefully smiling mermaid, humming herself an ethereal mermaid tune as she floats suspended just above the graze the flower, her face only a few inches from it, her tail gently swaying above her.

The mermaid’s shoulders subtly graze a couple of the plant’s floating vines. In an instant, the plant’s vines all swarm the blissful mermaid, wrapping around any body part they can find! The mermaid girl flinches and goes to back away, but the carnivorous plant’s vines have already tightly wrapped themselves around the girl’s face, neck and delicate skinny arms, actually pinning the later folded against her ample chest with relentless tension!

The mermaid screams in utter distress, but a few vines have actually coiled over her pretty lips, drowning, no pun intended, her chances at alerting others to her danger. Her eyes pleading scan around for any help, but then a couple of more vines wrapped themselves over those charming eyes, further disabling the poor creature. The distressed mermaid wildly flails her strong tail, attempting to dislodge herself from this plant, but the vines are stronger, not only holding, but also pulling their helpless catch towards the center of the flower.

The plant works swiftly and with high intensity. It doesn’t have all the time in the world to secure its prey, or it might find a way to escape. We see in real time the mermaid go from care-free to utterly panicked, as in mere seconds, her alluring body becomes more and more entangled and restrained by the Orchid’s vines, as they bring her closer towards the pistil, which doubles as the plant’s secret mouth. The unlucky mermaid’s tail is now also wrapped tightly, at the base of her fin, and multiple other spots. All vines now work to immobilize the mermaid, who is shaking and twisting her tail and upper body under her vine bondage, with no effect.

As the struggling fish-girl is being quite literally reeled in by the Orchid’s vines, the flower’s pistil has already buried itself inside the flower, revealing a 5-6 inch opening which will expand as much as it needs for its writhing meal to go through. The plant’s vines are also revealed to be sprouting from inside of the plant as they pull the squirming mermaid head-first inside the snug hole, which expands just enough for the mermaid’s shoulder to squeeze through it.

As soon as the creature’s frantically wiggling tail disappears through the flower’s center, the pistil moved back to its original place, like a putting a lid to the stew that’s about to start cooking. The young female is actually encased inside the plant’s bowels, cleverly disguised to appear like the rocks it sprouted on. What a genius organism!

The acid-proof mini-camera we’ve stashed beforehand in the plant’s bowels lets us observe the whole digestion process. The mermaid might appear eaten, but the plant’s digestion is a slow, torturous ordeal for the unlucky mermaid. Tightly encased inside the plant’s slimy, mucus-y innards, which snuggly squeeze every inch of her body, the writhing, vine-wrapped meal is promptly dowsed with a strong, flesh-dissolving acid, that the plant’s encasing bowels secrete from the surface of its walls. It’s a slow and agonizing way to go, but that’s nature for you. As cruel as it is majestic.

The end result of the silently squealing mermaid’s fate can be seen a few feet below her, as we lay eyes on a – still ruthlessly wrapped up – carcass, the vines still squeezing the skull, skeleton and fishbone of the previous meal’s tail. It will take at least two whole days for the digestion process to kill the hopeless prey and over a week for its body to be completely consumed by the carnivorous plant.

On the outside, the alluring Sea Orchid appears as peaceful as before, with only difference its missing vines, currently holding its food down the gullet. The mermaid’s desperate squirming is totally concealed by the rocky exterior of the plant’s “body”. Another victim of its captivating beauty.

Join us next week on Nature’s Preys, to learn why goblin girls shouldn’t go near lake-sides!