When the Mermaid Virus broke out across the planet, scientists and epidemiologists were stymied and impeded at every stage. The disease, (if indeed it was a disease, as many a conspiracy theorist claimed it wasn’t), manifested seemingly simultaneously across dozens of coastal locales across the Earth.
These “spawning grounds” seemed to have manifested almost simultaneously in the world’s oceans, some near highly populated coastal population centers, others deep in remote zones of the oceans, frequented only by cargo freighters or navy task forces. This made pinning down a case zero or origin point for the virus nearly impossible, as there were multiple equally viable possibilities. As a result, scientists turned instead to documenting the various “regional strains” of the virus, finding that subtle bit relevant differences in each, ranging from the infection rate and duration of transformation, to the types of merfolk produced, to the frequency of sex changes resulting from the infection. One such study was conducted in: