‘Animal’ Podcast, Episode 3: Manatees

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

From “The New York Times,” this is “Animal.” I’m Sam Anderson. Episode three, Manatees.

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^KAITLIN ROBERTS^ All right.

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For some reason I do not fully understand, I’ve always wanted to get in the water with a manatee.

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A manatee is a big, pudgy, blubby-looking — I don’t know — cross between a walrus and a potato? Sometimes people call them sea cows because they basically just float around grazing. But they’re a lot weirder looking than cows. They have these funny little flippers, sort of boomerang-shaped flippers up front that they use to navigate around, and then this big, flat paddle of a tail, like a super beaver or something. They eat wet vegetables, seagrass mainly. Almost never aggressive. They kind of float outside all of these cycles of predators and prey and doing stuff.

They just float there. And I sort of want to float outside all of those cycles and just not worry about deadlines and meetings and whatever.

It’s stressful out there, but not under the water.

So when I think about getting in the water with a manatee, I don’t know exactly what I want to happen. But when I really try to imagine it, I think what I want is for a manatee to look at me. I want to see a manatee seeing me. I want to look at a manatee, and I want the manatee to look back at me. And I just want to have a moment of connection or whatever it is.

Now, manatees are a protected species. And the only place I know of in the United States where you can legally swim with manatees is a place in Florida called Crystal River. I’d heard about that place from watching the classic manatee documentary made by Jacques Cousteau back in the 1970s. And Jacques Cousteau and his whole crew of French oceanographers with their little red beanies, they have a local guide. And it’s a kid, a teenager named Buddy Powell.

And Buddy Powell is actually still there. In the decades since, he’s become maybe the pre-eminent manatee scientist in the world, and he’s the director of a big marine center not far from Crystal River. And he occasionally will still take people around Crystal River, where he grew up, as he did for Jacques Cousteau.

So we arranged a private boat tour with Buddy Powell, me, and my colleague Kaitlin Roberts, who is there with the microphone.

Buddy’s PR person Kelsey is going to join us too. She’s running a little late.

So Kaitlin and I had actually been in Florida for about a week before this swimming day, criss-crossing the state, talking to various manatee experts, getting ready for that moment when I get in the water and have an encounter.

And once you start — as soon as you start learning about manatees, things get pretty heavy. Because from a distance, manatees make me very happy, and I find them very soothing. Manatees, I don’t think, experience life that way, which we found out very quickly.

We talked to a guy who works with the Save the Manatee Club. And he paddles around in his canoe, and he recognizes all the manatees by their scars, by the damage that they’ve taken. So manatees are — they’re huge animals. They float slowly and often right near the surface. And so when a speedboat comes ripping through, often it will hit a manatee. And getting hit by a speedboat is basically like getting hit by a truck that has swords all over it.

So he’s seen manatees sliced up so badly they don’t have tails or hit so hard by a boat that their ribs are sticking out, just the worst of the worst. He also told us some really freaky stories about alligators that I’m not going to get into right now, but — [LAUGHS]

OK. Where else did we go? We went to this pathology lab in Tampa where they actually do autopsies on every manatee that turns up dead in Florida to figure out the reasons why. And they’ve been seeing a huge increase in the number of manatees that are coming in. Sometimes, it’s just days on end, 8, 9, 10 manatees. And when they open up the door the next day, it’s just that many manatees again. And it’s just nonstop. The boat strikes.

There’s something called red tide, which is a kind of algae that blooms in the water under certain conditions and makes manatees drown. And then, lately, they’ve been seeing something really horrible, which is a new front in this crisis, which is starvation — finding manatees with sand in their stomachs because they’re just desperately rooting around, trying to find any bits that they can eat. Because the water quality has become so bad that these huge seagrass meadows where manatees have been feeding for hundreds and thousands of years are dying off. And so they go there to eat, and it’s just fields of sand.

I kept asking these experts, like, how do you deal with this emotionally? Is it hard? Do you cry? And —

— a lot of them were able to have a kind of scientific detachment. They’re just really trying to diagnose what’s wrong and help as best they can.

But I remember one guy I spoke with —

— he surprised me a little bit. I said, do you have hope for the future of manatees?

And he said, deep in my heart, no.

But he said he’s still — deep in his heart, no, but he still hopes.

He also said, if we can’t save manatees, we can’t save anything because manatees are so resilient. They have really tough skin that’s hard to cut. They have very fast coagulation in their blood, so their wounds heal very quickly, which is how they’re able to survive so many of these boat strikes. And so if we can’t find a way to keep manatees alive, then we’re not going to be able to save anything.

So after we signed all of our forms, and squeezed into our wetsuits, and watched this video, we stepped outside, and the sky had cleared miraculously. And we got ready to step on this boat, where Buddy was going to drive us around and hopefully make my stupid manatee dream come true.

So Buddy Powell, the local guide —

— gets us in our boat, and we toodle off into the water.

I wanted to know all about his Jacques Cousteau experience and what that was like.

To be a kid who loved nothing more than being in a boat, who had memorized all the creatures that lived in this habitat that he grew up in, to get a call from Jacques Cousteau in the 1970s, when that name was as big as a name could be, especially for a kid like that.

And so, yeah, he’s steering us all over his childhood territory. And he’s, of course, able to say, you know, this used to be like this, and this used to be like that. And now there’s a giant mansion here. And now — he said the water used to be — I mean, it’s called Crystal River because the water used to be crystal clear. And now it’s pretty murky in most of it. The water quality has really plummeted.

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And you used to see none of the boat traffic that we were seeing that day. You would not see groups of tourists out there looking for manatees. It was just Buddy and the manatees all alone back in those days.

I keep seeing things in the water. You see a little — something pop up from the water, and I’m like, manatee! But he’s like, nope, that’s a turtle. And something would jump out of the water and just be a fish. But then, at one point, he did say —

And we saw this manatee off to the left of the boat.

We could see its back come up and then its tail. And it would leave these — what Buddy called tail prints on the water. That’s so you could sort of follow where it was going. And it was really thrilling to see one so far from shore, just doing its natural thing.

So we’re cruising around. He’s taking us down a little side coves. And as we’re cruising around, we keep seeing —

— these other tourist boats and crowds of people in the water. And that was the fastest way to find a manatee. It’s kind of like when you’re at Yellowstone. The fastest way to find a bear is to find the traffic jam of people looking at the bear on the side of the road. Here, there were traffic jams of boats and crowds of tourists who were floating with pool noodles, and flippers, and goggles, and they’re all just kind of hanging around a manatee while it’s eating.

So we’re kind of keeping our distance because once I see that, it’s not what I imagined for my manatee encounter.

So we basically did this all day. We’d see a manatee. It would be surrounded by a crowd, and I would say, well, let’s try another one. And finally, the day was over. I was sunburned. We had to take the boat back. And we went into this little lagoon, and there was a manatee, and there was a crowd of people around it.

I thought about it, and decided, OK.

Came all this way — I don’t want to miss my opportunity and regret it later. So I guess I’ll just —

— be one of the crowd and get in there.

And sometimes Buddy would point out, like, oh, they’re kind of harassing that manatee. You’re really not supposed to be that close, or you’re not supposed to be swimming after it. You just stay still and let it do what it wants, and you don’t follow it, and you don’t interact. You just look.

^KAITLIN ROBERTS^ All right, so Sam, I’m probably going to stay up here. Maybe you can tell me what you’re doing as you’re doing it, as you’re getting in the water.

So I was in my wetsuit already. I put on my flippers, and my goggles, and my snorkel and got in the water.

Kind of chilly water.

So I get in, and the water is very murky. There’s a lot —

There’s a lot of plants, a lot of seagrass. And so it’s just, like, murk and seagrass, and I can’t really see where I’m going. But I know the general direction the manatee is in, and Buddy is kind of shouting out, it’s at 11:00, and he’s guiding me across the water.

So I’m kind of just swimming with a face full of murky seagrass. And I can’t see where I’m going, and I’m not sure if I’m going anywhere. And then all of a sudden — it was such a shock. All of a sudden —

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— I come shooting out of the murk, and I’m just — I’m, like, on top of the manatee, practically. I did not see it coming. By the time I saw it, I was there. And it’s eating, facing away from me. And so I come to a stop basically right next to its gigantic tail, which I know, from my manatee research, is so strong and potentially dangerous. And so I was instantly kind of panicked.

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But I also knew that rule number 1 of being near a manatee is that you can’t panic and thrash around because you’ll scare the manatee, and then it will potentially thrash. And so I had to work as hard as I could to stop my momentum as quickly but as gently as I could until my momentum stopped just, like, inches from the manatee tail.

And I was able to kind of scooch backwards very slowly until I was a few feet away.

^KAITLIN ROBERTS^ Sam is about a manatee away from the manatee, a manatee-length away.

And then I just watched. I just stared because this thing was so otherworldly, almost ghostly pale kind of gray color, almost glowing in the light. And it’s just peacefully eating grass. And all these other people around me, but we’re not noticing each other at all because we’re all just so in awe of this manatee, really.

And I don’t know how long I floated there, but for a pretty long time. And then I decided, all right, I saw a manatee. It didn’t turn around and look at me, which, I mean, why would it? But that was OK.

So very gently, I turned, and I swam through the murk back to the boat. And just as I was starting to tell everybody what I had seen, one of the little crowd watching the manatee eat shouted, it’s turning! It’s coming your way!

And I turned, and the manatee had turned around and was swimming directly toward our boat.

And so I just gently let go of the ladder and dropped back under the water to see what it was going to do. And the manatee came right over to me and started grazing the seagrass right next to our boat, kind of down below my flippers. And so I just floated there, suspended, watching it.

KAITLIN ROBERTS Now he’s right next to the boat. And Sam is right next to it, directly next to it.

And then, after a few seconds, the most magical thing happened, which is the manatee stopped eating. And it tilted its body up vertical, and it floated up toward the surface. And it paused, and it looked at me.

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Like, it really looked me in the eyes. And I was looking at the manatee, and the manatee was looking at me. And I always fantasized about this moment and all the many feelings that would pass between us. And we would just kind of beam warm feelings back and forth to each other. I felt — in the manatee’s gaze, I felt nothing.

[CALM MUSIC]

There was no magical soul connection. And that was good and normal. And the fantasy I had was abnormal. And I should probably talk to my therapist, Susan, about it on Friday at 1:00 PM.

[CALM MUSIC]

And so it kept drifting up, and it took a breath.

And then it went back down with bubbles coming out. And it tilted itself back to horizontal, and it started just swimming past me and under the boat.

And this thing was so huge, it took forever, it felt like. It felt like it was swimming in slow motion. I just watched its whole pale, glowing body kind of pass right in front of my face, peacefully, gracefully. And its huge tail came by last, and then it was gone.

And I went back up to the surface.

And I really was so jazzed. I really was — it was very profound.

It just looked at me. ^KAITLIN ROBERTS^ How are you feeling right now?

I wonder where that manatee is now. I bet it’s right near the same spot, eating — eating grass, taking a nap, farting, sending bubbles up to the surface, big jowls shaking while it chews it’s lettuce, it’s grass.

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This episode was produced by Kaitlin Roberts and Larissa Anderson with help from Cristal Duhaime. It was reported by me, Sam Anderson, and edited by Wendy Dorr and Larissa Anderson. It was engineered by Marion Lozano. Our executive producer is Paula Szuchman. Original music by Marion Lozano and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Ana Alvarado.

Special thanks to Jake Silverstein, Sasha Weiss, and Sam Dolnick, also, to all the manatee experts we met — Wayne Hartley, Martina Devitt, Andy Garrett, Wanda Jones, and Tom Pitchford, and to Craig Pittman, who wrote the book “Manatee Insanity,” which was a great resource.

You can listen to all of our episodes wherever you get podcasts or visit our website at nytimes.com/animal. I’m Sam Anderson. Thanks for listening.

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