Playing with Manatees, the gentle mermaids of the Amazon

I have always wanted to see manatees and platypus as I find them unusual mammals – different to other mammals and in danger of extinction. They are so strangely built and have a pleasant nature... and they seem so human. To quote Wikipedia, "Manatees - family Trichechidae,  genusTrichechus are large, fully aquatic, mostly herbivous marine mammals sometimes known as sea cows. The name manatí comes from the Taino, a pre Columbian  people of the Caribbean, meaning "breast". There are three living species of Manatees : the Amazonian manatee, the West Indian manatee and the West African manatee".

Our trip to Iquitos began with a visit to The  Amazonian Manatee Rescue Centre. The Amazonian Manatee is very rare and endangered mammal unique to the Amazon Jungle. This centre focuses on rescuing orphaned manatees who have been victims of poaching. The centre helps rehabilitate and reintroduce these wonderful creatures back into the Amazon Basin. Here we saw the efforts of the rescue centre in not only looking after manatees but also monkeys, sharks, turtles and other wildlife which is injured and then sent back into the jungle.

 

The centre is quite large – in the grounds, they are equipped to teach and educate the locals with various aids. 18,000 school children come annually to the centre. There is a building where the guides teach them about manatees and local history along with how to look after the jungle. The river’s contamination is the main subjects stressed to the children so they become aware of the problems faced by the aquatic wild life, especially manatees. The centre has released 17 manatees after rescuing and treating them and when we visited they had five manatees under treatment.

Thanks to their conservation and education work, the centre has been recognized with different awards such as: “Ciudadanía Ambiental Award” – Voluntariado Ambiental – Ministery of Environment of Perú” (2009, Perú); “Rotary Club of Iquitos” (2010, Perú); “Protagonistas del Cambio Award” UPC – International Youth Foundation (2010, Perú); “Global Youth Action Net” – International Youth Founation (2012, Turkey),

 Kunan Award (2014, Perú) y Recognition of the Congress of Perú (2014, Perú) .                                                                          

The wooden carving on the right is a local fairy tale deity which is for the children who visit. The centre raises environmental awareness to the Amazonian population about manatees conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. They have designed a methodology called “Playing with the Nature”, where they use games as the main tool to transmit information about conservation, and give thousands of children the opportunity to reconnect with the nature, in order they can love it, respect it and create positives emotions that inspire them to take actions to protect it. As per local data, they benefited  nearly 80,000 people all around the Amazon.

                                                                  We first saw an otter which was in a tank and then an owl monkey which was like a baby but in fact an adult. Both shy and possibly emotionally damaged animals. The otter certainly felt constricted in that small tank of his.

 

The Centre has the Charapia or fresh water turtles which grow upto 19 cms and weigh upto 60 kgs  and Tariqua turtles which grow upto 15 cms and weigh upto 12 kgs. The centre has rescued a 1,000 turtle babies.  

Whilst we were to see young manatees, I am told that they measure up to 13 feet (4.0 m) long, weigh as much as 1,300 pounds (590 kg) and have paddle-like flippers. The females tend to be larger and heavier. At the Cape Kennedy centre, we came upon a large manatee which must have been upto 10 ft long. When born, baby manatees have an average mass of 30 kilograms. They have a large, flexible, prehensile upper lip. They use the lip to gather food and eat, as well as using it for social interactions and communications. Manatees have shorter snouts than their fellow sirenians, the dugongs. Their small, widely spaced eyes have eyelids that close in a circular manner. The adults have no canine or incisor teeth, just a set of cheek teeth, which are not clearly differentiated into molars and premolars.

At any given time, a manatee typically has no more than six teeth in each jaw of its mouth. Its tail is paddle-shaped, and is the clearest visible difference between manatees and dugongs; a dugong tail is fluked, similar in shape to a that of a whale.

I am fascinated with their internal build - like horses, they have a simple stomach, but a large caecum, in which they can digest tough plant matter. In general, their intestines have a typical length of about 45 meters, which is unusually long for animals of their size. Manatees produce enormous amounts of gas, which contributes to their barrel-shape, to aid in the digestion of their food.

Apart from mothers with their young, or males following a receptive female, manatees are generally solitary animals. Manatees spend approximately 50% of the day sleeping submerged, surfacing for air regularly at intervals of less than 20 minutes. The remainder of the time is mostly spent grazing in shallow waters at depths of 1–2 metres (3.3–6.6 ft). The Florida subspecies has been known to live up to 60 years. 

Manatees are capable of understanding discrimination tasks and show signs of complex associative learning . They also have good long term memory. They demonstrate discrimination and task-learning abilities similar to dolphins in acoustic and visual studies. The manatee has been linked to folklore on mermaids. Native Americans ground the bones to treat earache and asthma. In African folklore, they were considered sacred and thought to have been once human. Killing one was taboo  and required penance.

At the end of the rescue centre, there was a very large cage for the monkeys which in fact roamed freely. I felt that it was a trip which began rather auspiciously with a learning experience of mammals in danger and as we were leaving the heavens let loose a huge downpour of rain for nearly 15 minutes as we moved towards the M V Amatista – our home for the next one week. Do read my blog on that experience.

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