What It Takes to Save a Manatee: Planes, Cranes and Automobiles

The orphans, three baby females, arrived one after the other at ZooTampa’s manatee hospital.

The first had been found swimming alone in shallow waters, her umbilical cord still attached. Two months later, another was rescued from a canal. Then came the smallest they’d ever gotten: Manatees typically should weigh about 65 pounds at birth, but this one was only 44 pounds.

They were named Calliope, Soleil and Piccolina.

It was 2021, a bad year for Florida manatees. On the state’s east coast, decades of sewage and fertilizer pollution had led to a mass die-off of seagrass, which the animals rely on for food. Wildlife officials tallied hundreds of emaciated corpses. Elsewhere, other threats continued, like collisions with boats and poisoning from red tide, a toxic algae.

No one knows what happened to the mothers of the three babies, who were rescued on Florida’s west coast. Normally, a calf stays with its mother for up to two years, swimming right behind one of her flippers as it learns where to find both food and the warm-water areas it will need to survive cold spells.

“Obviously some sort of trauma happened,” Molly Lippincott, who manages Florida species at ZooTampa, said.

And so Calliope, Soleil and Piccolina joined the scores of manatees each year who get personalized interventions akin to ambulance rides, intensive care units and long-term rehab. Some even fly on airplanes before they’re released back in the wild.