Manatees at The Tampa Bay Electric Company

Being in south Florida, we of course wanted to see some manatees and so we looked at several possibilities before we headed out to the Tampa Bay Electric Companie's Manatee Viewing Center.
We arrived there at the same time as a cold front and had hardly gotten our rain gear on before we were met with a tropical downpour, the likes of which we have never seen in Wyoming.
Still we had to try and see the manatees so we fought the crowds pouring into the spaces underneath the covered walkways and braved the pouring rain. They were there, a group/herd/pod of about thirty manatees basically sleeping and occasional coming up for a breath. They looked like a bunch of floating brown bags with the occasional swirl of a tail.

A volunteer was giving a lecture under a covered area so we headed there to see the display of manatee bones and to get a respite from the rain,(I was already quite soaked as my five year old rain gear had performed miserably). He had a skull and flipper bones, along with several ribs which had been broken by a propeller strike.

He explained how a damaged rib regrows badly and eventually punctures a lung causing manatee mortality. I asked him about annual mortality rates and he said that about three hundred a year died from idiot human boat operators and net and fishing line entanglements. We also learned how manatees are identified from the scars from propeller impacts and sadly all had strike marks.
With varying estimates of 2500-5000 manatees one wonders how much longer the species will survive. As the cows reproduce only every two to five years, the math doesn't seem promising and it is another case of too many humans as another species may disappear from the Florida coastal area.

We enjoyed watching the manatees as they woke up from their siesta and started to actively search for food, some even looking below the deck upon which we stood. It was amazing to see such large mammals slowly move about the restricted area. Renita told me she had read that they were capable of achieving a speed of twenty miles per hour but it didn't seem possible in such a large animal,(they can weigh up to 3500 pounds).
Later we walked down a pier that took us through a mangrove area and explained the difference between red, black, and white mangroves. It didn't take anytime really to see the obvious differences and so now we could appreciate even more the day we spent canoeing the mangrove tunnels at Weedon Island Preserve.

Another volunteer told us that the numbers at the power plant grew to as many as two hundred manatees during a cold spell and also directed us to a speaker where we could actually hear the manatees talking. Their communications sound like a series of clicks, much like dolphins, and of course it was hard not to anthropomrphize the sounds into human conservation subjects.
It was an enjoyably day, even though I got drenched, and as we walked back to our truck a lady got out of her car and asked us, "Did you see any manatees?" We told her there were lots of manatees and that she should park her car and go watch them. I wondered how many she needed to see to make the short walk to the viewing area and mused that we would have been happy if we had only seen one.
Clear skies