UNCW’s Dr. Michael Tift, the marine mammal stranding director, coached students and staff as they maneuvered the nearly 900-pound male manatee out of the truck and onto the lab’s examination table. It’s only the second time in the lab’s history they’ve studied a deceased manatee.
Once the scientists got him settled, the necropsy took about six hours to complete—after that, they had some answers.
“There was some hemorrhage in the thorax, right near the diaphragm, so it appears that the laceration actually went deep enough to hit part of the diaphragm. That is what makes boat strikes so dangerous because it does not have to go very deep to lacerate that diaphragm and affect the breathing of the animal," Dr. Tiffany Keenan, the marine mammal stranding coordinator, said.
While that boat strike, which happened in the last week or so before the manatee died, is likely one of the main culprits, it had other odd markings, too.
“And the shark bites look like they happened kind of pre and post-mortem. The animal may have been dying and then been nibbled on a bit, and the cold just did it in, most likely, since we had that freezing night the other night, which may have been lucky for the manatee, so it didn't linger and suffer, because they can live a really long time with those injuries,” Keenan said.
Tift said it’s becoming commonplace to see them in North Carolina in the summer, but they should be heading back south when it turns to fall and winter. He cautions the public not to do anything that would make them stay.
“So a lot of people either think it's in the interest of the manatee's health, or that it's fun to give manatees drinking water from a hose, or maybe some lettuce, and the manatees would eat the lettuce and they would drink from the hose, but those are the things that can draw them to areas where there are boats or that encourages them to stay,” he said.
And if the public sees them in the fall and winter months, Keenan said, there’s still time for researchers, especially ones from Sea World’s manatee rehabilitation center, to capture it and transport it back to Florida. That happened last month when they came and got one swimming in the Tar River.
“Those that stick around into December, definitely risk these cold snaps that kind of come through in North Carolina, which can be lethal," she said.
Another manatee was found deceased this year in Beaufort, North Carolina, in early November.
"It was a boat strike from the propeller. It actually went into the brain case of the animal, unfortunately," Keenan said.
Tift added, "We do have a manatee reporting form on the UNCW Marine Mammal Stranding Program website, and anytime you see a manatee, if you have photos of a manatee or a video; those are really worth their weight in gold. Suppose you see a manatee that you think is injured or even deceased or entangled, or something that you're concerned about; in that case, we have a straining hotline number - 910-515-7354, and you can call that number, and that's an emergency that we need to respond to really quickly.”
Besides showing up in marinas and off the shore, for boaters, they'll see what's called a footprint in the water.
"When you see an animal, when its paddle or fluke goes in a downward motion, it creates basically what looks like an oil slick on the water. And so, if you see sort of a big, circular shape several feet in diameter, it's potentially that there's an animal that just was in that location, but if you see that, slow down," Tift said.
He said that they can contact North Carolina Marine Fisheries as well as the Coast Guard, who can put out an alert on Channel 16 (the VHF channel serving as the distress, safety, and calling frequency for maritime communications in the United States) and alert mariners to the fact that there are manatees in the area.
"Because in North Carolina, we're really not out there looking out for manatees. We don't expect to see them, so getting the word out to mariners is important," he said.
While this male manatee couldn’t be saved, the scientists at UNCW can learn more about his life.
“We had some folks reach out to us in the last few days asking about what types of seagrasses were in the stomach they want to identify. There are also some folks who look at the parasites, and are collecting them, so we can actually look at the health and what's affecting these animals, and maybe what they're picking up here that they don't have in Florida. So it gives us the first kind of look into these animals' health, and then also how, as a species, they're making their way in our area,” Keenan said.
Prior reporting
