Mermaids are not real. They are based on stories from history where sailors thought they saw a half-woman, half-fish but what they were actually seeing was the Manatee, or sea-cow.
What are mermaids? Are they real and how do they survive in the water or in the oceans?
Mermaids are fictional humanoids whose part human and part fish. The upper half distinctly represents the average human female, while the bottom half displays a multitude of gills, and a tail fin, representing fish-like traits.
Mermaids appear in the folklore of many cultures worldwide, including the Near East, Europe, Africa and Asia. 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.
In actuality, the roots of mermaid mythology are more varied than one would expect. In modern myth, we tend to see mermaids in a singular way: Kind and benevolent to humans who keep to their own kind in the deep waters of the ocean. Not all stories go this way, though, and in most cases the most ancient tales of mermaid mythology follow quite a different view.
Some believed that well-intentioned mermaids would cause great danger to men who believed they saw a woman drowning and would dive into the waters to save them.
Other tales suggest that mermaids either forgot or didn't understand that humans could not breathe underwater, and they would pull them down into the depths of the sea, accidentally drowning them in the process.