Giraffe Who Made History Pregnant Again
Manatees: Facts Almost Ocean Cows
The manatee is a big marine mammal with an egg-shaped head, flippers and a flat tail. Manatees are also known as sea cows. This proper noun is apt, due to their big stature; slow, lolling nature; and propensity to exist eaten by other animals. Even so, despite the proper noun, they are more closely related to elephants. Though they may seem like cumbersome creatures, manatees can swim chop-chop and gracefully.
Manatees range in size from 8 to xiii anxiety (2.4 to four meters) and can counterbalance 440 to 1,300 lbs. (200 to 590 kilograms). They take big, strong tails that power their swimming. Manatees usually swim nearly 5 mph (eight km/h), but they can swim upward to 15 mph (24 km/h) in short bursts when they experience a need for speed, according to National Geographic.
Habitat
There are three species of manatee: the Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis); the West Indian manatee, or the American manatee (Trichechus manatus); and the African manatee (Trichechus senegalensis). Their names signal the regions in which they live. Typically, manatees stay in rivers, seas and oceans along the coast of several countries. The African manatee lives forth the coast and in the rivers of western Africa. The Amazon manatee lives in the Amazon River's drainage, from the headwaters in Republic of colombia, Peru and Ecuador to the rima oris of the Amazon in Brazil. Their range is estimated to be around ii.7 million foursquare miles (7 million square kilometers), according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The West Indian manatee lives in the southern and eastern U.s., although a few "vagrants" have been known to attain the Commonwealth of the bahamas, according to the IUCN.
Habits
Manatees often swim alone or in pairs. They are not territorial, and then they take no need for a leader or followers. When manatees are seen in a grouping, information technology is either a mating herd or an informal coming together of the species just sharing a warm surface area that has a large food supply. A group of manatees is called an aggregation. An aggregation usually never grows larger than nearly 6 individuals, according to the Save the Manatee Guild.
Diet
Manatees are herbivores. At body of water, they tend to prefer sea grasses. When they live in rivers, they eat freshwater vegetation. Manatees also consume algae. According to National Geographic, a manatee can eat a tenth of its ain weight in 24 hours. That can equal up to 130 lbs. (59 kg).
Offspring
During mating, a female manatee, which is called a cow, volition be followed around by a dozen or more males, which are called bulls. The group of bulls is chosen a mating herd. Once the male person has mated, though, he takes no function in the raising of the young.
A female manatee is meaning for well-nigh 12 months, according to Save the Manatee Club. The dogie, or infant manatee, is born underwater. The female parent helps the calf go to the water's surface for air, and inside the first hour of life, the dogie volition be able to swim on its own. In v years, the young manatee will be sexually mature and ready to have its own immature. Manatees unremarkably alive nigh forty years.
Classification/taxonomy
According to the Integrated Taxonomic Data System (ITIS), the manatee'south full classification is:
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Subkingdom: Bilateria
- Infrakingdom: Deuterostomia
- Phylum: Chordata
- Subphylum: Vertebrata
- Infraphylum: Gnathostomata
- Superclass: Tetrapoda
- Class: Mammalia
- Subclass: Theria
- Infraclass: Eutheria
- Order: Sirenia
- Family unit: Trichechidae
- Genus:Trichechus
- Species: Trichechus inunguis (Amazonian manatee, S American manatee), Trichechus manatus (West Indian manatee, American manatee, Caribbean manatee), Trichechus senegalensis (African manatee, West African manatee)
- Subspecies: Trichechus manatus latirostris (Florida manatee), Trichechus manatus manatus (Antillean manatee)
Conservation status
The IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species lists all manatees every bit vulnerable or endangered and facing a high run a risk of extinction. Populations are expected to decline by equally much as 30 percent over the adjacent 20 years. Numbers are hard to come up by, specially for the secretive Amazonian manatee; the IUCN says the guess of x,000 manatees should be regarded with circumspection because the numbers are supported past trivial empirical data. Similarly, the verbal number of African manatees is unknown, simply the IUCN estimates there are fewer than ten,000 manatees in West Africa.
The Florida manatee and the Antillean manatee were listed as endangered in 1967 and 1970, respectively, nether the Endangered Species Preservation Deed of 1966; the number of mature individuals was estimated to be fewer than 2,500 for each subspecies, and the populations were expected to decline by more 20 pct over the next ii generations, or nearly xl years.
On March 31, 2017, however, the U.S. Fish and Wild fauna Service (FWS) downgraded the West Indian manatees' status from endangered to threatened. Both significant increases in the manatee population numbers and habitat improvements led to the downlisting, according to the FWS.
Equally many every bit six,620 Florida manatees and 6,300 Antillean manatees are estimated to live in the wild currently, according to the FWS.
"Today, we both recognize the significant progress we have made in conserving manatee populations while reaffirming our commitment to standing this species' recovery and success throughout its range," Jim Kurth, acting managing director of the FWS, said in a statement by the FWS.
Simply manatees aren't out of the woods yet, and are still considered a "threatened species." One reason for the condition is that manatees reproduce very slowly — the time betwixt generations is nigh 20 years. In add-on, fishermen trawling with nets in the Amazon and West Africa pose a grave threat to these dull-moving mammals. Besides, in Westward Africa, manatees are hunted for their meat.
Habitat loss from waterfront development also impacts their survival. Manatees are also vulnerable to collisions with speedboats.
Other facts
Manatees are thought to take evolved from 4-legged land mammals more than sixty million years ago. Except for the Amazonian manatee, their paddlelike flippers take vestigial toenails — a remnant of the claws they had when they lived on land. The Amazon species name "inunguis" is Latin for "without nails."
The proper noun manatee comes from the Taíno (a pre-Columbian people of the Caribbean) discussion manatí, meaning "breast."
Manatees' eyes are small, but their eyesight is good. They take a special membrane that tin be fatigued across the eyeball for protection. Their hearing is good too, despite not having outer ear structures, considering manatees have large inner ear bones.
Manatees' but teeth are called marching molars. Throughout a manatee'southward life, the molars are constantly replaced — an adaption to their nutrition of abrasive vegetation.
Manatees have just half-dozen neck vertebrae. Most other mammals, including giraffes, have seven. As a result, manatees cannot turn their heads sideways, and must turn their whole body around to look behind them.
Algae, photosynthetic organisms, often abound on manatees' skin.
Manatees never proceed land.
Manatees don't ever need to breathe. Every bit they swim, they poke their nose upwards above the h2o'due south surface to catch a few breaths every few minutes. If they are simply resting, they can stay nether the water for fifteen minutes without taking a jiff, according to National Geographic.
An creature that is similar to the manatee is the dugong (Dugong dugon). Dugongs are also in the gild Sirenia, merely they are in a different family, Dugongidae. These manatee cousins are plant in the Indian and Pacific oceans. They have a notch in their tails, likewise equally tusks.
Manatees and dugongs may take inspired mermaid legends. In ancient mythology, sirens were monsters or sea nymphs who sang mesmerizing songs that lured sailors to steer their ships onto treacherous rocks. Subsequently a long bounding main voyage, sailors may take idea they were seeing sirens, or mermaids, when they were probably seeing manatees or dugongs.
Additional resources
- The USGS Sirenia Project conducts long-term, detailed studies of the West Indian manatee.
- The Florida Manatee Program can tell y'all where to see manatees and provides a boater's guide to avoid collisions.
- At Save the Manatee Order, y'all can "adopt" a real manatee. Donations help fund manatee conservation."
Alina Bradford is a contributing writer for Live Science. Over the by sixteen years, Alina has covered everything from Ebola to androids while writing health, science and tech articles for major publications. She has multiple health, safety and lifesaving certifications from Oklahoma State Academy. Alina's goal in life is to try every bit many experiences every bit possible. To appointment, she has been a volunteer fire-eater, a dispatcher, substitute teacher, artist, janitor, children'southward volume writer, pizza maker, result coordinator and much more.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/27405-manatees.html
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