The Curious Manatee

We're at Blue Springs State Park not far from Orlando, Florida, watching gators and manatees lie down and laze together in the heated water. It was all I could do not to wade in and get me some manatee love, but that's frowned upon. I did enjoy watching the Plecostomus catfish giving the manatees algae-suckin' rubdowns with their big sucker mouths, something the manatees appeared to be electing to invite by swimming down into the big concentrations of fish. The catfish obligingly worked them over, cleaned them up, just like my old Pleco used to clean up the aquarium walls.

A juvenile manatee swam in from stage right, wearing a belt at the base of his tail. Attached to the belt was a buoy with a radiotransmitter on it. One of the regulars on the observation dock said that this was an injured animal that had been rehabilitated at Sea World, and released with tracking, so they could see how he did. Cool!

We weren't the only ones who noticed the float. A much smaller juvenile manatee swam over and began fooling around with the float. First, she (I didn't know the animal's sex, but it just seemed like a girl thing to do) gathered it in her flippers. She held it underwater and released it, to see how it bobbed right back up.

Boing! She did this a number of times.

It was time for further exploration. She began to mouth the float.

The kids and I laughed to see her mess with it. Meanwhile the tagged manatee lay sullenly on the spring bottom, probably wishing someone would relieve him of this annoyingly fascinating appendage.

It wasn't long before the baby manatee got the whole darn float in her mouth. We wondered if the biologists who attached the transmitter knew it was going to be chewed upon by manatees.

When the baby tired of playing with the float, she went and got her momma, who repeated the entire exercise, even down to practically swallerin' the thing.

I apologize for the low quality of these photos. It was foggy, and the animals were very far away and underwater at that. But I was pleased to capture a little of the manatee way of doing things with the 300 mm. Canon telephoto zoom lens. 

Lots of people love manatees. Curious, gentle, sweet...those are the adjectives you hear over and over when people try to describe the sirenian personality.

I'm glad we've not exploited our native manatees for marine shows. It  probably has more to do with a manatee's decidedly non-flashy, rather blimplike appearance and way of moving than any sort of ethics on our part.

As the white propeller scars on these animals attest, they come into more than enough contact with us and our doings as it is. I'm thankful for preserves like Blue Springs, where these sweet dirigibles can come to spend the winter, warm and relatively undisturbed. And we can come to tell them we love them.

And the people gathered on the observation dock did love them. You could feel it, and I'm sure the manatees could, too.