Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times is a trend. The manatee in the Hudson River was an accident -- the Christopher Columbus of manatees if you will. The manatee in Rhode Island is a coincidence. I blame it on the grad student from our lab who moved to Florida to study manatees. She probably told them all about how great it is to live in the Northeast United States, so they came up here to check it out. Let's hope she didn't tell all of them about it; I don't want any trendy manatees hanging out in my neighborhood.
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I grew up in Florida, in central Florida to be exact. As a kid we went to Blue Springs and other manatee havens on field trips, to observe these gentle and curious animals.
No time for anything new (working on a book chapter and putting the finishing touches to the Tet Zoo book), so here's this, from the archives. NOT properly updated, so please be aware that it's more than four years old...
Some news from my old stomping grounds at Mote Marine Lab in Sarasota, Florida.
Have they been told about the winters?
Manatees used to have a much wider home range, before they were massively slaughtered by the Spanish, etc for food when America was first being explored. They eventually became conentrated in FL due to the relatively large number of interconnected and safe waterways. Maybe their migration north is just another example of global warming?