Okay, so I wrote this paper about manatees for my marine mammals
class, and while it was a good paper and fun to write, I could only write
about a limited range of stuff, and I had to leave out all the good bits! I
read four books and countless journal articles for a tiny three-page paper,
so I have tons of extra stuff. Hold onto your hats, here are Fun Facts About
the Florida Manatee!First, so you know a little bit about them, manatees belong to the order Sirenia, although they look nothing like mermaids. They are huge, fat, slow, unintelligent herbivores. They just swim around all day eating, sleeping, and scratching (actually, one of my books said that due to their diet, they're very flatulent), they like to "kiss" and nuzzle each other, and are quite curious. Manatee mothers have one calf at a time, and they nurse them for one or two years. The sad thing about manatees, and what I wrote my paper about, is since they are slow and like to hang out by the shore, they get hit by boats a lot, enough so that boat-strikes are the major cause of their death, and almost every adult manatee has propeller scars in its back. If Florida boaters can't quit running over the slow and mild manatee, they're extremely likely to go extinct. I think that's one of the most terrible things I've heard of, because there are only four species of Sirenians left, and they do good things like keep down amounts of algae by eating it. Also, they're just generally amiable creatures. If you ever go to Florida, please don't run over any manatees. They don't like it.
Just what's so cool about these dang manatees, you ask? Well, let me tell ya! Manatees have nipples in their armpits! So if you see a small manatee with its nose buried behind a big manatee's flipper, that's a mother nursing a baby. I'm pretty sure they're the only mammals with armpit nipples. Also, the male's penis is halfway up its body - right below the bellybutton! Weird!
Manatees grow new teeth all the time. They grow in from the back, and come forward, and their old, worn down teeth just fall out the front of their mouths. I'm kind of into this idea - no more fillings ever! But it would be pretty disgusting to have your teeth falling out of your mouth all of your life. Also, all your teeth would have to be the same shape and size so that it wouldn't matter what part of your mouth they were in. Cool for the manatees, though.
Another rad manatee thing is that their lungs lay up along their spine, so they can float horizontal with no problem - completely the opposite of other mammals. They also have fingernails on their flippers, can fast for up to seven months, and have the lowest metabolism compared to body size of any mammal. Since their metabolism is so slow, they can survive on only sea grasses, and they die in water that is much colder than what is room temperature to us.
Even though manatees look a bit like walruses, especially around the face, they're more closely related to elephants, having both evolved from the same ancestor. They have very thick, heavy bones, like the bones of elephants.
Manatees are so bad at surviving in cold weather that they hang out around power plants in the winter, which pump out warm water as a result of creating power. It's funny to think that even though power plants can be bad for the environment in some ways, they are one of the few places Florida manatees can go in the winter without freezing to death! In fact, one power plant, when it's temporarily shut down, pumps out warm water from a deep well dug especially for the manatees. Hundreds of manatees will cluster tightly around these power plants when the weather gets colder.
The picture below sort of illustrates how graceful a fat, chunky fellow like the manatee can be [not on webpage!] Also, Shoshanna says I have to mention that manatees have big manatee orgies when they try to copulate with a female and are rejected. They all sort of jump on each other and go crazy. I think there are probably quite a few animals that have orgies though. Who's to stop 'em?
Mainly, manatees are all-around awesome, and as soon as I get a chance I'm going to go out to Florida to dive with the manatees, or at the least, go see them in the Miami Seaquarium. I think I might feel like a jerk going to Crystal River to swim with them, because tens of thousands of people go there to do the same thing every winter, and I certainly don't want to add to the manatee harassment problem. It's sort of hard to resist, though. The moral of the story? Be nice to manatees, they never did anything to you. Thank you and good day.