Mote Aquarium in Sarasota, FL

It's probably the best aquarium in the world for its size. I highly recommend it.

Great whites don't handle captivity well. There are only a handful of preserved specimens on display worldwide.

Speaking of great whites, the snack bar serves the beer from Jaws. Beer and aquariums...2 great things that are even better together.

This pint cost me $7.50, but that's OK. It keeps the place in business.

The shark tank had few species of sharks plus barracudas. None had lasers attached to their frickin' heads.

There's a barracuda on the right. Fun fact: the barracuda was named by a French polymath.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_Samuel_Rafinesque

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Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz (French pronunciation: [kɔ̃stɑ̃tin samɥɛl ʁafinɛsk(ə)ʃmalts]; 22 October 1783 – 18 September 1840) was a French early 19th-century polymath born near Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire and self-educated in France. He traveled as a young man in the United States, ultimately settling in Ohio in 1815, where he made notable contributions to botany, zoology, and the study of prehistoric earthworks in North America. He also contributed to the study of ancient Mesoamerican linguistics, in addition to work he had already completed in Europe.

Rafinesque was an eccentric and erratic genius.[1] He was an autodidact, who excelled in various fields of knowledge, as a zoologist, botanist, writer and polyglot. He wrote prolifically on such diverse topics as anthropology, biology, geology, and linguistics, but was honored in none of these fields during his lifetime. Indeed, he was an outcast in the American scientific community and his submissions were automatically rejected by leading journals. Among his theories were that ancestors of Native Americans had migrated by the Bering Sea from Asia to North America,[2][3] and that the Americas were populated by black indigenous peoples at the time of European contact.[4]

...

In the summer of 1818, in Henderson, Kentucky, Rafinesque made the acquaintance of fellow naturalist John James Audubon, and stayed in Audubon's home for some three weeks. Audubon, although enjoying Rafinesque's company, took advantage of him by practical jokes involving fantastic, made-up species.[17]

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He also tried and failed to join the Lewis and Clark expedition.

I sent this pic from my phone to my email, and somehow it got a little distorted. How odd. 

This is probably the best explanation of how the legend of merfolk began. Note that the 2 tentacles up top are in their retracted position.