The Answer To "What's Wrong With This Picture?"

I'm happy to say that just about every answer I got to the question a couple of blog entries back -- WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? -- was ABSOLUTELY CORRECT:

>>   Mermaids were, indeed, phased out as recruiting operatives much, much more than a century before photography was invented, and scuba gear came out even later than that.

>>  A real mermaid would never, ever allow herself to be spotted, LET ALONE PHOTOGRAPHED, by a featherless biped unless she knew he had not seen a featherless biped female in at least 2 years and would be too sea-happy to distinguish one of his own kind from ONE OF US.  Our concealment techniques have COME A LONG WAY since those days, but for quite a while we had to rely on recruiting male humans who could no longer tell a pretty human girl from a Dugong:

>>  It seems clear from the whole look of the obviously-staged quiz photo that the diver got into the water to photograph the mermaid, although I may be reading too much into the image.  A Homo sap., dragged into the water by the song of a REAL SIREN, would never have the presence of mind to get into a wetsuit, assemble and test his breathing gear, load film into a camera and so forth.  If this were an actual mermaid recruitment, the guy would have done something more like this:  

>>  She is not KILLING or EATING him, although I agree the photo is ambiguous -- she may be on her way to doing just that.  

>>  The dead giveaway, though, is her SIZE.  As we all know, REAL mermaids were never that large:

Of course, this famous recruiter is a bit WIZENED after having been out of the water for A GREAT MANY YEARS before this photo was taken.  BUT YOU GET THE IDEA.