Those are not mermaids swimming around the second floor of this bewitching Fraserview home – they are sturmaids, as in sturgeon. The home owner commissioned local artist Lance Webb to create the sculptures and the sea maidens’ faces are based on the patron’s daughter.

Sturmaids, as whimsical as they are, make perfect sense for a South Van home, because a few of the knobby-backed fish still lounge in the muddy depths of the Fraser at the base of the hillside neighbourhood.

According to the Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society, sturgeon can live to be 150 years old, which means there may still be creatures along the shoreline that were here in 1868 – before Vancouver existed.

The fish are super agers because they have mastered suspended animation.  Author Terry Glavin explains in A Ghost in the Water that sturgeon can enter a state “... not unlike death, willed upon itself, and from which it can emerge at will.”