Me and My Man….atee

At least a couple of times each week my husband and I throw around ideas for blog topics and discuss other writing projects we are working on, often on Skype, our regular evening communication vehicle of choice. It usually starts like this:

[2/7/2013 8:19 PM] Jo Mount: Blog ideas?

[2/7/2013 8:19 PM] A. Mount: Are you looking for anything in particular?

[2/7/2013 8:20 PM] Jo Mount: I don't know.

Well, I am happy to blog that I actually got to communicate with my man in person (vs. Skype) last night since, I made my February return to the Bahamas yesterday afternoon, and he had a blog topic or two already picked ready without me even asking. He suggested I blog about the West Indian manatee because one had been spotted in the harbor here on Andros… Hadn't I read that in his email, he asked? I then had to admit I hadn't read the email (sort of like he doesn't always read my blog-I thought this but didn’t say it out loud). Still, great idea I thought since I’d already blogged about Manti Te’o and manta rays, a West Indian manatee would work. And I love regular manatees. I even have a Save the Manatee T-Shirt and manatee socks, and the Science Club at CRES (the school I worked at prior to retiring) had even adopted one, so I hurried to Google to look up the West Indian version.

Here is what I found out! The West Indian manatee is a manatee (Duh!), and the largest surviving member of the aquatic mammal order Sirenia. Yes, I felt duly chastened after reading this, former science teacher brought down a peg. The manatee spotted off Andros was the same as the ones I’ve seen by the paper mill in St. Marys and the same as the ones my family and I swam with in the Crystal River. These slow moving gentle marine mammals reside mainly in the warmer shallow waters off Florida and the Caribbean but have been spotted and tracked as far north as Cape Cod. They migrate south to warmer waters in the winter because continued exposure to cold temperatures can induce “cold stress syndrome” and eventually death.

I think I may have a touch of cold stress syndrome. It’s predicted to be 31 degrees this up-coming weekend in St. Marys, hence me and my manatee are spending February in warmer waters.