Manatees, Breathing

It was absolutely hypnotic, standing on the dock at Blue Springs, watching the manatees loll in the 72 degree waters. 

They aren't there because they're on vacation. They're in the warm springs because they'd die if they were anywhere else. I was very surprised to learn that prolonged exposure to water below 60 degrees will kill a manatee. They seem sort of blubbery; they seem like they'd be well-insulated, but no...they're delicate tropical beasties and they have to be warm.  Wintry temperatures (it went down to the 20's a lot in much of Florida this winter!) send them packing to power plant outflows and natural warm springs. Warm springs are why only Florida boasts wild manatees, and only Florida will  ever have them. Another reason to love Florida. She gives us so many gifts. Gators. Flamingoes. Manatees.

They'd come up for air with a tremendous whoosh, a sonorous inhalation, then submerge again, shutting their little nostril valves tight.

It was beautiful, standing there in the fog, listening to manatees breathing.

I tear up just thinking about it.

Ghostly tableaux one after another as the fog veiled through...sfffff whoooooof!

A lazy flipper or paddle-like tail would occasionally break the surface. I had to remind myself that these Schmoo-like creatures had bones.

Moving farther upstream, we came upon a mother and her calf. They were mouthing a rock, for what I couldn't divine. A nummy algal coating?

 The whole scene was magic, these big sweet beasts lolling around, placidly sucking on a rock, the palms catching the morning sun.

It was all I could do not to wade in with them, but they don't need more human contact. These are wild animals, and what humans mostly give them, aside from some lettuce and cabbage to eat and an occasional drink from a hose, is horrid white slashing propeller scars on their slow backs. More manatees die from boat collisions than any other single cause. The people who race through manatee zones are the same kind who shoot whooping cranes on purpose...society's filler, the soulless stratum, packing peanuts for brains.

 Manatees remind me of box turtles--just too slow for our inane and selfish pace. Somehow, they hang on.

This mother and child, as yet unmarked by scars. The older ones almost all have them.

All the while, the gentle whoosh of their breath breaking the stillness.

We could have stayed there all day with them, but our flight called and too soon we had to turn for home. You all know how I love Ohio, but I must confess she didn't show her best face as a biting 20-degree wind tore at our light tropical clothing at the Akron airport. Arrrgggh. Scrape the car free, get the heater blowing. Back to reality with a dash of ice in the face.

The whole trip floats like a dream in my head. I'll never look at Florida the way I did before I saw the Real Florida on this adventure. I'd made several trips to the Fort Meyers area, and I have to confess I was shellshocked by the crushing scale of development there. I never could have imagined living in Florida, with my pre-conceived notions of what it represented. And now, having experienced her wild places and met Floridians who love her passionately, even exploited and in some places ruined as she is, I understand. There is still a LOT of the Real Florida left, and Real Floridians are unstinting in their efforts to protect it.

 We are so lucky as a nation to have this funny footlike projection where, by dint of its subtropical climate, so much natural magic happens. Go. Just go. The Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival in late January is an excellent place to start exploring and, if necessary, renovating your feelings about FloridaCracker's "sweet, fragile Florida." For the most fun homework ever, get yourself reading his blog, Pure Florida. You'll thank me!

photo by Cap'n Denny

Don't worry. He let the redfish go. Well, this particular one. A guy's gotta eat.

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.

Blue Springs Manatees

High on our agenda for our Florida trip was a visit to Blue Springs, a bit west of Orlando.  This is a classic limestone (karst) spring, carved out by upwellings of sweet water.  We devoted our last morning to it, as a sweet cherry atop the luscious sundae Sunday of our trip. It was cold and foggy when we arrived, making us envy the manatees stacked like cordwood in the pellucid 72 degree water of the river.  My first wild manatees, anywhere. Yes, I'd seen the Amazonian freshwater manatee in Brazil and Guyana, but only in captive situations. Heck, I'd gotten right down and hugged them!

I was overwhelmed by seeing free-living wild manatees--so very many--I counted 80 in one turn of my head! Yeah, yeah, I was bawling. I'd waited a long time to see my first wild sirenians, and I'd strained my eyes peering into the muddy waters of many a tropical river trying. This was too easy. It was like they were waiting for a bus, and the bus was us!

While we waited for the fog to clear, we looked beneath the observation dock. Some native Florida gar joined a snook, hanging as if on strings in the water. My GarGuru, FloridaCracker, advises that there may be two species of gar here, so he advised me to go against my Science Chimp instincts and not get too specific. 

The spring was almost choked with tilapia, an African escapee from fish farms. They're cichlids, related to those darlings of freshwater aquaria. Pretty good eating, but it doesn't look like we're going to catch up with their reproductive rate any time soon. Sigh. Fortunately (or unfortunately for Blue Springs), tilapia are confined to waters that stay above 60 degrees year-round, meaning that (so far) only Florida has to deal with them, and, outside of extreme southern Florida, generally around power plant outflows.

Farm-raised tilapia fed on corn may be fattier than bacon or hamburger. (Remember when everyone found out that the fish sandwich at Mickey D's is the worst thing you can order? That was because of the way they fry it, though.) And,

 interestingly enough, commercially farmed tilapia are subjected to testosterone baths as young fry, turning them all into males. In this way, pisciculturists can ensure they raise an even-age batch of harvest-sized fish, rather than having to sort the offspring of their inevitable pairings. These look pretty even-aged to me--where are the juveniles? Dunno.

FloridaCracker says tilapia make huge, meter-wide bowl-shaped nests, crowding out native sunfishes. Bah. Why do so many escaped exotics have to live so darn large?

Tilapia have made it to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's 100 World's Worst Alien Invasive Species, having been introduced into tropical waters all over the planet.  They're the big boxy gray fish in this photo.

The blackish banjo-shaped catfish are vermiculated sailfin catfish, native to Amazonia and known in the aquarium trade as Plecostomus catfish, or "plecos." One guess where those came from. I'll give you a hint. When I was a kid, I had one in my tiny 5 gallon aquarium along with the mollies and platies, and it got about 8" long so we gave it to the neighbors, who flushed it down their toilet when it got too big for their 20-gallon tank. Never give anything to your neighbors if you care about it.

In an Amazonian fish market in Manaus, Brazil, I saw Plecostomus catfish for sale, stacked like firewood, upside down, their sucker mouths gasping for air. They were about a yard long. I felt bad about that for years until I saw these.

Why do we import things like this, to put in little tanks and then, when they no longer fit in the tanks, to put in our crystal springs, where they dig the sides out and erode them, making their nests? Why do people keep Burmese pythons and then, when they're too big for the  apartment,  turn them loose in the Everglades, to proliferate to terrifying levels? That's just what we do. Dumb stuff like that. Genies get out of bottles and there is no stuffing them back. Especially when the genies like Florida's subtropical climate.

There were other creatures in with the manatees, which caused the big sirenians no concern whatsoever.

This was the youngest gator we saw, still carrying its banded tail.

It was about two feet long.

Even the big gator seemed not to carry a threat to the gentle mammals, who cruised right under it.

Blue Springs State Park is a magical place. Just the original homestead with the new sun beaming through its Tillandsia-draped tree...oh my goodness. We didn't have time for the house tour. Well, anyway, the Science Chimp can rarely be found on historic house tours--she's usually digging around in the leaf litter instead.

We had only one morning, this misty morning burning off to bright sun, before we had to go back to freezing, iron-gray Ohio.

We soaked it up as best we could.  More manatees anon!

Examining an Armadillo

It was a huge treat to find a roadkilled armadillo the same evening, to be able to put my eyes and fingers on this creature and experience even more of it.

That shell is HARD! You can knock on it and it sounds like hard polystyrene. It was more like a turtle shell than the leathery cape  I'd imagined. Of course this specimen was pretty dessicated, but still, the shell was much harder than I thought it would be.

Such elaborate armor for the tail...does the tail have a function? I wonder. It looks like it could telescope out longer, but of course it doesn't. That would be cool, though...

What a marvelous integument this animal has; how specialized is its skin!

What a wonderful world this is.

Armadillos haul lots of dry grass and plant material into their deep burrows, making a cozy nest where they give birth to their four identical quadruplets right about  now (March/April). The young, born mobile and with open eyes, stay with their mom for most of a year, and then disperse. Armadillos can live about seven years in the wild and up to ten in captivity.

I cannot resist lifting some photos from an excellent overview of armadillos on Armadillo online. Because where else are you going to see babeh armadillos? With floppy wet leather, before their shells harden up?

But oh, they harden up fast.

Imagine how fast these razor claws could slice through sand in a rapid descent into the earth, with all four feet churning at once. I've read that they can just disappear in seconds in a big fluff of sand.

Even the top of its head is armored.

Back to the living armadillo: Before long a little crowd gathered, attracted by my crouching form. We all appreciated the armadillo together. I like being in a place where people habitually stop to admire wildlife. 

photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson

The kids and I were thoroughly amused by the long golden hair on the armadillo's soft underside.

It's an unexpected detail, the mustache on the pretty lady, and it's very cute in real life.  Liam kept saying, "He's so HAIRY!!" I don't know why we expected him to be other thanhairy. Maybe it was the yellowness of it, or the length...it was just a surprise.

Thank you, little armored one, for interrupting your long nap and showing yourself to me and the kids. I owe you one.

Hey! It's a wonderful kind of day! Oh wait. Arthur was an aardvark, wasn't he? 

Our First Armadillo

Warning: This post contains some roadkill photos. Heck, it's a post about armadillos. If it didn't mention roadkill, it wouldn't be about armadillos now, would it? Let's get that first DOA 'dillo out of the way:

There, that wasn't so bad. This poor fella managed to get himself killed in a beach parking lot. That takes some doing on both killer and killee's parts. Armadillos would be OK if they'd crouch down when a car passes over them, but instead they startle and jump straight up, bonking against the chassis and essentially commiting suicide. Armadillos are capable of leaping 4' straight up into the air, so you can imagine the forces when this power is applied to a speeding automobile.

I have always, always wanted to see an armadillo in the wild. Any armadillo (and there are 20 species worldwide, all but one of them in Latin America). In the southern US, we are blessed (or cursed, depending on who you ask) with a single armadillo species, the nine-banded Dasypus novemcinctus.

It's just so cool to have an edentate in the United States. "Edentate" means "toothless," though the nine-banded armadillo is hardly toothless. Here are the weird blade-like teeth of the hapless roadkill I found and examined in Florida. They stood up like an edge cut with pinking shears, more crenulations than teeth. Gross, I know, but look at the teeth, please.

 

Seriously: having an edentate in the US is like our having a flamingo, a spoonbill, an antelope, a lion. It's a lone representative of a cool order we might not otherwise have. D. novemcinctus ranges from Argentina to the southern United States, and it seems to have relatively recently colonized the US, having first been seen here in 1849. Armadillos naturally colonized Florida, but became extinct for unknown reasons. Modern Florida nine-banded armadillos are thought to descend from a pair that escaped from a roadside zoo about 50 years ago in Cocoa, as well as at least one earlier release. Knowing they aren't exactly "native," even if they were historically in Florida, seems to give some people license to hate them. Lots of people hate any animal that digs huge holes, so the cards are definitely stacked against the little armored one. Of all the world's species of armadillos, only the nine-banded has managed to thrive and extend its range. Go novemcinctus!

In deference to Floridians who will doubtless give me their $.02, it's easy to love an animal when it's not excavating your back yard.

But get this: The giant armadillo, Dasypus bellus, once ranged as far north as the Ohio River Valley!! No wonder I was so hot to see an armadillo, even if only its smaller cousin.

Armadillo Online is an amazing compendium of cool armadillo information. Like this: The nine-banded armadillo has a unique salivary bladder surrounded by muscle, a tappable reservoir of gluey saliva that it uses to snare ants, termites, and other insects as it eats.

Did you know that armadillos always have four young, and they are all identical, all the same sex and genetically alike? All four come from the same egg, which divides into four embryos. This makes them good lab animals, because where else are you going to get four genetically identical siblings every time? You've got your experimental animals and your control in one litter. However,  though they quickly become tame, they don't do very well in captivity.

They're also sought after and captured because armadillos can catch and carry leprosy, so a great deal of what we know about transmission of this disease comes from armadillo research. People go out with nets and catch 'dillos and sell them to labs. Unfortunately, people who handle a lot of armadillos sometimes get leprosy from them, yuccch. The armadillo has a weak immune system and an extraordinarily low body temperature -92 to 95 degrees, which is thought to make them susceptible to leprosy. Reason enough not to keep a pet armadillo!

Leprosy, a dreadful lesiony lumpy skin disease caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae and M. lepromatosis, is now treatable with a multi-drug regime of rifampicin, dapsone, and clofazimine given over 12 months. However, the Third World still hosts leper colonies where people suffering from the disease are segregated--over 1,000 colonies exist in India alone. I flew over an island that's given over to people suffering from leprosy in Guyana, in South America. It's still part of the reality for many less affluent countries. That hit me hard, circling over that island just an ocean away from Florida, but decades removed in medical advancement. We are incredibly fortunate in the U.S. I try never to forget that.

Armadillos sleep up to 16 hours a day. Maybe this is why I'd never seen one until this trip to Florida. I've been all over south Texas too, but no go until now. As the kids and I headed to the beach one evening, I saw the trundling shape of my first 'dillo near a busy intersection. I whooped with joy and pulled over to document it.

photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson

Absolutely beautiful it was, a perfect specimen.

I was impressed by its muley ears and perfect carapace; its birdlike snoot and tiny eyes. It spent 90 per cent of its time with its nose deep in the grass, looking for insects to eat, so I have dozens of photos but only a few where you can see its little eye. This is one of them.

More armadillo exploration anon.

And the Birds Came

I am on the beach at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and I have been quietly watching a fisherman catching and processing two Florida pompano. 

There followed a perfect lion kill tableau, complete with marauding hyenas and jackals, all disguised as a fisherman and a few innocent-looking Florida beach birds.

I got down on my knees and shot and shot quickly as the birds quarreled over the pompano carcasses. Macabre? Perhaps, but no more than my own species’ quick rendering of a beating heart and frantic eye into freezable filets.

First and boldest is the ruddy turnstone, here in winter plumage. I adore turnstones, smart opportunistic little brawlers that they are. They aren’t afraid to challenge a gull ten times their size if good food is at stake. 

While a ring-billed gull chokes down a morsel of fish, the turnstone darts in.

A ringbill tugs at a fish’s entrails as a boat-tailed grackle sizes up its chances of joining in. The low-angle evening light lends an epic quality to the tableau, with small hillocks in the sand reading as a dunescape.

The scene constantly changes from one carcass to the other. A laughing gull strides up to scatter the turnstones and a lone sanderling. I’m intrigued by the gull’s posture; it adopts the head-tossing, hunch-backed profile of a juvenile begging from its parent. Odd—is it begging the turnstones for a chance at the pompano? Does the sight of food just set off this juvenile behavior in a mature bird?

 A ring-billed gull swoops in and holds forth over a carcass.

It'll have to get what it can before the boat-tailed grackle steals it.

The ringbill manages to free some food before a herring gull and then a great black-backed gull swoop down and end its picnic.

Not many birds argue with a great black-backed gull, pirate of the sea. The herring gull manages to hold it off for awhile

until a young great-black-backed joins in.

and when they are done there are fragments, just enough for the boat-tailed grackles

little black coroners, pronouncing the pompano dead at last. Oh how I love this shot.

Used up, all the way up, by Homo sapiens, who took the lion's share,

 followed by four species of gull, two shorebirds and an icterid. Eight species all feasting on a silvery lavender blue pompano rimmed in lemon yellow

who only minutes before had been swimming in light surf on a warm evening on Cape Canaveral

whose eyes looked into mine and found me unable to help

but willing to swallow hard and document its final hour.

The fisherman packed up and went home, pompano filets swinging in a grocery bag

leaving me amazed and standing on an empty beach

wondering at the circle of life and death, the beauty of fresh food from the sea, hand-caught;

the stories in every little thing that happens,


 which are there to be shared by the spirit

left open to the thrust of grace.*

I turned back to find my children still playing in the same warm surf

and walked back to join them


rinsed clean 

thinking about everything and nothing at all.

                                                                                                       *Bruce Cockburn, of course.