New Baby Manatee Needs 'Boost' From Mom While Learning How to Navigate Florida Spring

A few spring breaks ago, I got up in the pre-dawn darkness, put on a thick wetsuit, and motored out to the middle of a crystal-clear river in central Florida to await the lumbering passage of a giant aquatic potato. Yes, I went swimming with manatees, and it was magical. These slow, gentle creatures can be found crowding the springs and rivers of Florida every winter, devouring sea grass, keeping warm, and charming tourists who come to watch these adorable, harmless, and entirely charming “sea cows.”

If only I’d seen a baby like this one.

In this video, a kayak guide on a Florida river introduces us to the cutest little nugget of a manatee calf you’ve ever seen. Manatee babies, it turns out, are pretty much just like any other mammal baby— a smaller, cuter, more rambunctious version of their adult species. And given how cute manatees already are, it’s pretty dar adorable.

All About Baby Manatees

Poor manatee moms are pregnant for twelve to fourteen months before giving birth to their calves, who weigh about seventy pounds at birth. Like all marine mammals, learning to swim well is vital to their survival from the very start, as they need to regularly ascend to the surface and breathe. As you can see in this video, mantle babies may struggle to swim at first, and need boosts from their mom to get where they are going.

Manatees nurse for a year or two and stay very close to their mother during this time, learning swimming, foraging, and even migratory routes. Manatees, like all mammal, produce milk for their young, and in their case it’s distributed through glands found in their “armpits” — i.e. beneath their forelimbs.

All throughout this video you can see this baby manatee swimming her little flat tail off and her mom coming in to make sure she gets where she needs to go. It’s good to see this manatee is doing well, especially as she seems to have already sustained a serious injury along her back.

Dangers Facing Manatees

Most manatees you meet in Florida rivers have scars along their long, oblong bodies, souvenirs from boating accidents where the giant but extremely slow-moving creatures collided with speedboats in Florida rivers. Sometimes these injuries are minor, and sometimes they result in the animal’s death.

Even this tiny baby has a scar, though the person making this video doubts it’s the result of a boating accident, as the baby manatee is probably too small to survive a collision like that. Rather, it may just have been a collision with a rock or sharp stick in the river, because, just like a human toddler, the baby manatee isn’t always sure where she’s going.

That’s why experts advise boaters to wear polarized sunglasses to help them see below the water’s surface as well as to keep to moderate speeds whenever they are boating in rivers that manatees frequent. Manatees cluster in the rivers and springs of Florida during the winter months because they are extremely sensitive to cold water.

That’s why winter is such a great time to take out small paddle boats like kayaks and check out these gentle and majestic creatures.

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