Mermaids hate Snorks. They hate Snorks because for some reason the introduction is no longer the one where you hear the awesome story of Captain Ortega's ship sinking after a pirate attack, and instead you have to listen to the archly vexing "Come Along with the Snorks" lyric over and over and over again.
Mermaids probably get along fine with actual Snorks, even if Snorks are ugly ovoid-headed polyp creatures that wish they were Smurfs. Yeah, Snorks are probably some sort of undersea fungus – the difference between male and female Snorks is essentially one of choice. Theirs is a very open-minded society in which Snorks all respect the personal gender choices that their otherwise asexual people elect.
Snorks actually reproduce by budding.
All told, this makes Snorks pretty uninteresting to Mermaids. Snorks lack a certain rye sense of humor that Mermaids take for granted in a well-rounded individual, and so come off as naive in the world of the ocean.
Typical of Captain Ortega's log on that ten-day excursion to Snorkland are entries much like the following:
19 Febrero – Comí algas de nuevo. Toqué harmónica subaquatica diminutiva. ¿Como es que puedo respirar?*
Ortega clearly got really bored of all this, and so decided to escape Snorkland; I assume with the help of sympathetic seventeenth-century mermaids. Ortega probably didn't write about the mermaids either because he was a gentleman and he wouldn't betray a lady's reputation (half-fish or no), or because there was no profit in adding to the already massive catalog of mermaid tales when he had this crazy story about inch-tall fungal polyp creatures with plastic drinking straws on their heads.
In fact, Captain Ortega invented plastic shortly after his return from Snorkland, but the recipe was stolen by English privateers who didn't fully understand the importance of the discovery. Ortega lived out the rest of his life cursing Francis Drake and the bastard's mother, too,† but when drinking straws were finally introduced to the consumer market he took begrudging solace in knowing that his tribute Snork Bend‡ was preserved in the design.
Budding Snorks are really terrifying. One emerges out of the other gradually, over the course of a week, and both bodies suffer severe pain and mental dislocation throughout the entire process. That's why you never see it on the show – it's too fundamentally unsettling for a TV G rating.
That's also why Snorks all wear clothes – in theory clothing hadn't occurred to them until Captain Ortega arrived fully dressed to their lagoon, but you can see from the introduction that they're already wearing clothes as they approach Ortega's sinking ship. It's not that you'd see little naughty Snork parts, it's just that Snork anatomy is so alien that to show it would corrupt the minds of children everywhere. In fact, Ortega invented a bunch of lies to Snorks about the necessity of clothing just so he wouldn't have to look at the nipple-less, belly-button-less bodies all the time.
It's not entirely accurate to say that Snorks don't have belly buttons. They have a similar physical byproduct of their budding, but it looks more like horrible bodily scarring. So in addition to looking like bizarre bald creatures, they have irregular masses of scar tissue all over their bodies from where their identical bud-progeny split off. These wounds never heal fully, due to the corrosive action of their salt water environment.
So, unclothed Snorks are really horrible little things to look at. Captain Ortega's log also gave some indication of the trauma from which he he would never recover upon his escape out of Snorkland – he played that harmonica to keep from going insane.
* February 19th - Ate kelp again. Played tiny underwater harmonica. How am I breathing?
† loose translation
‡ Curva Snorkel
Did El Capitan include any illustrations of snorks in his log?
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