Around age 9, when I was growing up on Johns Island, S.C., I was shrimping on a July morning with a “drop net” off our dock on a tidal creek.
Suddenly, something huge, long and gray surfaced in the water. I had never seen such a thing. I was a little frightened, but fascinated, as I watched it slowly rise and then sink back into the water. It briefly came up again, making a blowing sound.
I sped back to the house to tell my Daddy, who was sitting on the front porch reading the paper. “It’s a ‘sea cow,’” he said. “Most people probably will never see one.”
He said it liked cabbage, and so we quickly retrieved a couple of heads from the refrigerator. Back down at the dock, we waited and waited for the animal to resurface and offer it the cabbage. It didn’t show up, but I saw it again a month later. By then, I had read that its preferred name is manatee.
I was thinking about this the other day during a briefing on a new multiyear study of manatees along Georgia’s coast. For the study, researchers from wildlife agencies and institutions in Georgia and Florida — including the Georgia Aquarium and the state Department of Natural Resources — have fitted five manatees near Cumberland Island with satellite transmitters.
The devices will allow researchers to track the gentle, slow-moving mammals as they migrate during spring and fall to and from Georgia — they spend the winter in Florida — and learn how and where they spend the summer in the state’s coastal waters.
Results will help wildlife managers devise better strategies to protect manatees, an endangered species. Results so far indicate that dozens of manatees may spend the summer in Georgia, and some may swim more than 3 miles off shore into the ocean.
Manatees subsist on marsh grass and other aquatic plants and can grow up to 10 feet long and weigh half a ton.
In the sky: From David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer: The South Delta Aquarid meteor shower will be visible next week, reaching a peak of 15 meteors per hour Wednesday night — in the southeast from midnight until dawn. The moon will be last-quarter Tuesday. Mercury and Venus are low in the west, Mars is in the southwest, Jupiter is low in the southwest and Saturn is high in the east around nightfall.
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