Mermaid

A mermaid is an aquatic creature with the head and upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish. Mermaids appear in the folklore of many cultures worldwide, including the Near East, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The first stories appeared in ancient Assyria, in which the goddess Atargatis transformed herself into a mermaid out of shame for accidentally killing her human lover. Mermaids are sometimes associated with perilous events such as floods, storms, shipwrecks, and drownings. In other folk traditions (or sometimes within the same tradition), they can be benevolent or beneficent, bestowing boons or falling in love with humans.

The male equivalent of the mermaid is the merman, also a familiar figure in folklore and heraldry. Although traditions about and sightings of mermen are less common than those of mermaids, they are generally assumed to co-exist with their female counterparts.

Characteristics
Mermaids possess a strange, alluring quality that many humans are drawn to which is present in both their human and aquatic forms.

Merpeople have a noticeable sexual dimorphism in terms of their aquatic forms. While mermaids and mermen share the same scaly upper bodies, fangs, claws, webbed hands, webbed underarms, a pair of small fins right above the caudal fin, and dolphin/whale shaped caudal fins, their tails and back fins are noticeably different in appearance. Mermaids have a large, single fish-like fin running down their human backs, three long sets of webbed fins running down their tails(one along the back, and two smaller ones each positioned on the side of the tail), and a stinger growing out between the caudal fins.

Etymology
The word mermaid is a compound of the Old English mere (sea), and maid (a girl or young woman). The equivalent term in Old English was merewif. They are conventionally depicted as beautiful with long flowing hair. As cited above, they are sometimes equated with the sirens of Greek mythology (especially the Odyssey), half-bird femmes fatales whose enchanting voices would lure soon-to-be-shipwrecked sailors to nearby rocks, sandbars or shoals.

Sea Also

 * Ichthyosis
 * Kelpie


 * Sea Territory Inhabitants
 * Melusine
 * Merman
 * Sea Monster
 * Sea Witch
 * Selkie
 * Undine