Manatee baywatch - look but steer clear
After a couple close encounters with people over the weekend near Havre de Grace, the visiting Florida manatee named Ilya seems to have grown shy. No new sightings have been reported the past couple days. according to Jennifer Dittmar, coordinator of the marine animal rescue program at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.
That's just as well. Manatees, slow-moving and favoring shallow inshore waters, are prone to being run over by powerboats. In fact, that's how biologists in Florida were able to identify this upper Chesapeake Bay visitor - Ilya had distinctive scarring on his tail from wounds received years earlier - presumably from an outboard propeller. Such collisions with boats rank among the marine mammals' chief threats to survival.
Wayne Bowie, manager of the Penns Beach Marina in Havre de Grace, says the manatee appeared in good health while grazing on bay grasses by the dock Saturday afternoon.
Bowie said he didn't believe the boater who first informed him there was a manatee in the marina. He'd seen manatees before in Florida, but just didn't think they would travel this far north. Once he eyeballed it himself, Bowie said, he knew it wasn't from around here.
"It sat in the marina and just kind of popped up every few minutes to take a breath of air, and ate some seaweed," the marina manager said. Police, the aquarium and the state natural resources department were called, and pretty soon, a crowd of 25 or 30 people had gathered to watch the manatee pull up some of the bay grasses that seem to be flourishing in the upper bay these days - a sign of recovering water quality there.
Bowie said his 30-year-old son even reached down and touched the manatee. "It was just too tempting," he said of the docile "sea cow," a nickname given manatees. Experts, however, caution against getting too close to them -- not because they're dangerous, but because humans are potentially dangerous to them. If they get too accustomed to being around people, they may venture more often into boat-infested waters, putting themselves at risk.
This animal seems already to be unafraid of getting close to people - all the more reason to go slow on the water and be on the lookout.
Meanwhile, Robert Bonde, a biologist with the Sirenia Project at the U.S. Geological Survey's Florida Integrated Science Center in Gainesville, reports that the population there is generally doing "quite well." He says there's even talk of "weaning" them from the strict protection afforded by the federal Endangered Species Act, but experts are still trying to figure out what would be needed to safeguard their survival if that were to happen.
