Manatee

Manatees typically range from eight to eleven feet in length and weigh anywhere from four hundred pounds to as heavy as 1,320 pounds. Unlike other marine mammals manatees lack a signature tail fluke like cetaceans. Instead they have a horizontally compressed paddle-like tail that serves for swimming. Additionally separating them from the cetaceans is that manatees still retain finger nails on their flippers.

Manatees are completely herbivorous and as such feed on aquatic plants, with seagrass being a large stable, although they have been known to rise partially out of the water to feed on some land plants, notably they enjoy banana leaves. This grazing habit takes up around 5 hours of their day in which they will eat around ten percent of their body weight. Because of this constant grazing and generally docile nature many people have affectionately dubbed manatees as "sea cows."

Rarely is a manatee ever angry. Always looking for social interaction manatees can usually be found in pairs or in a group called an aggregation of around a dozen. Usually manatees approach divers and other sentient races with curiosity and may even attempt to play with them. Most notably manatees can often form close friendships with merfolk. Usually these tamed ones become a bit of a family pet and are close within the family.

Manatees are by no means a dangerous animal. Usually swimming as fast as the average man's walking pace, manatees avoid predators through living in shallow water. Where what animals do live there usually do not have the strength to take on a ten foot long animal. Of course when the shallows become dangerous from a predator entering they can swim away in a short burst of speed to retreat.