Injured manatee released
Sea cow was near death in February

By DAVID E. PLAZAS, dplazas@news-press.com
 

State officials and manatee specialists Wednesday released a manatee to the waters where they first found him six months ago.

TIME TO GO: Lowry Park Zoo workers, assisted by the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, carry a manatee from a transport truck at the Port of the Islands, south of Naples. The male sea cow was released at the marina there after it was treated for cold stress at the David A. Straz Jr. Manatee Hospital in Tampa. Click on image to enlarge.

 
 

They recovered the manatee, named Cupid, on Valentine’s Day, thinking he was dead. Cupid suddenly took a breath on the way to a pathologist in St. Petersburg and they changed course to Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa.

On Wednesday Cupid endured a 3 1/2-hour ride in the back of a U-Haul truck from Tampa. When the truck arrived in Collier County, zoo and state wildlife officials tagged him with a sonic transmitter and a VHF antenna to keep track of him.

The transmitter and antenna won’t impede his swimming and can be detached if it gets stuck somewhere, said Valerie Burke, assistant curator of marine mammals at the zoo.

Cupid suffered from cold stress — the equivalent of frostbite in humans. He weighed 430 pounds when they found him — nearly 200 pounds underweight. The 8-foot-long creature was paralyzed when he was taken to the David A. Straz Jr. Manatee Hospital at Lowry Park Zoo.

Burke helped take care of Cupid, who is 3 to 4 years old, during the six months he spent in rehabilitation. She helped tube-feed him four times a day when he first arrived, and slowly he recovered.

“He started eating right away,” Burke said. “He’s always been the best manatee.”

The zoo has released four manatees who suffered from cold stress this year. In the last three months, it has released six that suffered a variety of ailments, Burke said.

The biggest single threat to manatees are boaters, who collide with them. Since 1976, 25 percent of all manatee deaths — 979 of a total 4,007 deaths — were caused by boats.

On Wednesday, it took 10 men and women to pick up the now-605-pound Cupid on a blue tarp and carry him into the water.

Twenty onlookers took photographs or filmed the release. Some had never seen a manatee before.

Margie Barlas, a marine mammal biologist for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, rescued Cupid.

“He was suffering,” Barlas said. “Parts of his body were beginning to shut down. He lost a lot of weight.”

Many manatees suffered this last winter because of the unusually cold temperature, she said.

Port of the Islands community resident Duane Otto, 68, helped Barlas rescue Cupid.

“They needed another hand,” Otto said Wednesday after watching the release. “It was just sick. I was surprised they were bringing it back to the same spot.”

Among the observers were two foreigners working with the state: Patrick Ofori-Danson, a research scientist from the African country of Ghana, and Juliana Vianna, a Brazilian graduate student.

Brazil and Ghana have manatee populations threatened by hunters, they said.

Dewey Harrington, 73, of Naples, does guided boat tours on the waters around the Port of the Islands and said he doesn’t understand why the state sends so many manatees back in the wild.

“I think they’ve gone overboard,” Harrington said. “This one had malnutrition. There’s not enough grass out there for them.”

Laura Combs, Southwest Florida regional coordinator of Save the Manatee Club, said there’s no hard evidence to say whether the population has risen or fallen.