A manatee is a large, slow sea animal. It has flippers, a big flat tail, and a round body, and it eats plants in warm, shallow water. People sometimes call it a sea cow, because it grazes the way a cow grazes grass. Manatees live in the Caribbean, around Florida, and in some rivers such as the Amazon; they are not fish, and they come up for air. Sailors’ stories sometimes mixed them up with mermaids — though actually, once you have seen one, the round snout and whiskers do not look like a person at all. A close cousin, the dugong, lives in the Indian and Pacific oceans, nearer to Taiwan; a manatee is the Atlantic and American one. The name came into English from Spanish manatí, from a Cariban-language word meaning “breast,” because the mother feeds her young from teats on the chest.