Corrected entry: In the film it is advised that the creature be maintained at 5 - 8% salinity. The sea is only around 3.5%. It seems odd that he should need so much salt.
Join the mailing list
Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.
Correction: The film states he's not from the ocean. He's from a specific, presumably fictional, area of the Amazon where he was worshiped as a god. We can simply assume the area has water with a higher salinity level than ocean water. (As there are places around the world that have water with significantly higher salinity levels than ocean water).
TedStixon
Those bodies of water on the earth's surface with much higher salt content are invariably isolated lakes and inland seas that were formerly connected to the oceans in the distant past. Such high-salt lakes are the result of many millennia (even millions of years) of evaporation and reduction, which results in the nearby terrain becoming almost devoid of vegetation (due to the increasingly high alkalinity of the surrounding water table). So, you would expect to see near-desert-like conditions in the vicinity of isolated salt lakes and inland seas and virtually no large wildlife (except maybe migrating flamingos at certain times of the year). Point is, while there is evidence of "marine incursion" across the northern half of South America as far back as 14 million years ago (which did, in fact, produce the largest salt flats in the world at Uyuni, Bolivia), these salt lakes are very hostile and even toxic to complex life. Large animals, such as gill-people, simply couldn't have evolved there, with a saline content more than twice that of the ocean and virtually no food chain.
Charles Austin Miller
He's meant to be a river god, as confirmed by the director, who wrote: "It is a river God. It's not an animal. It's a river God in the Amazon. There was never another one." Therefore, it's entirely possible he survived in such a harsh environment and thrived.
TedStixon