Manatee Blues (3 page)

Behind us, Carlos drives the
Gordito
, the center’s special rescue boat, with four staff members on board to help. The
Gordito
is designed especially for work around manatees. The engine sits under the middle of the boat instead of hanging off the back end, and the propeller blades are shielded with a special guard to prevent manatee injuries. The back is cut low, almost down to the surface of the water, so a manatee can be hauled on board.

Gretchen fills us in on manatee behavior as we scan the water for our patient. “Manatees spend their days searching for food in rivers and canals
and along the coast,” she explains as she pilots the boat. “They’re herbivores, which means they eat only plants. The average manatee eats one hundred pounds of vegetation a day. They’re like vacuum cleaners.”

“Wow!” Zoe says. “A hundred pounds!”

“I know,” Gretchen says. “A lot of veggies, isn’t it?” She pauses to steer the boat around a drifting log. “Manatees spend eight hours a day swimming and eating. They move very slowly and are extremely hard to see if the water is murky. If boaters are driving too fast, or not watching out for them—
boom!
Boat hits manatee.”

“Wait!” I call out. “Is that it over there?”

A gray lump of something drifts in the current. Gretchen and Dr. Mac crane their necks for a better look, then Dr. Mac picks up a long pole from the bottom of the boat. She stretches out and prods the gray blob.

“False alarm,” she says as she lifts the dripping thing in the air. “It’s just a trash bag.” She dumps the bag in the boat and puts the pole away. “Keep your eyes open.”

“Do a lot of manatees get hit by boats?” Zoe asks.

Gretchen slows down a bit as we enter a sharp curve in the river.

“It averages out to about one boat strike a week,” she explains. “Some manatees die from eating trash thrown into the water, like that bag. And they die of natural causes, of course. They’re tropical animals and very sensitive to cold. If we have an unusually cold winter, the number of manatee fatalities goes up.”

“Don’t forget red tide,” Dr. Mac adds. “That’s a kind of algae that killed a couple hundred manatees a few years ago.”

“That’s so depressing,” I say.

She glances back at me. “I know. Florida manatees are our most endangered coastal mammal. There are fewer than three thousand of them left right now. That’s not many.”

“How much farther?” Maggie asks as she slaps a mosquito on her arm.

“A little while yet,” Gretchen says. “Walker’s Point is about a half mile from here.” She keeps her eyes focused on the water as she drives the boat.

I scan the area with my camera. The river-banks close to the rescue center were wild with trees, shrubs, and vines, all draped with strands of Spanish moss. But here the river is lined with neatly mowed backyards. There are houses everywhere, lots of them with private docks jutting into the water. I didn’t realize that manatees lived so close to people.

I turn the camera from the houses back to the water. The sun glints off the surface of the river, making colors swirl and shift, murky blue to pale green to stone gray.

Hang on. What’s that?

“Gretchen, look over there!” I say, focusing the lens. The patch of gray in the water is striped with red. Blood.

“It’s the manatee!”

“It’s Violet!” Carlos shouts as he cuts the engine. “She’s alive!”

Gretchen brings our boat alongside the injured manatee, drops the anchor over the side, and turns off the engine. Carlos does the same, positioning the
Gordito
so the back end faces the manatee.

Maggie, Zoe, and I crowd the side of the boat for a better look. The manatee is huge. She’s longer than my dad is tall, and shaped like a seal: roly-poly round in the middle, then slimming down to a paddle for a tail. She’s rolled up on her side. That can’t be good. Manatees normally float straight up and down.

I can’t keep my eyes from the horrible gashes that have opened up the skin on the manatee’s back—seven deep, straight lines, four of them curving around her side. I shudder, then snap a picture.
Click!

“Yep, definitely Violet,” Gretchen says. She kicks off her sneakers and slips into a pair of rubber shoes.

“The manatee has a name?” I ask.

“We’ve treated her before. She’s had a few run-ins with boats. Look at her tail,” Gretchen says, pointing to its jagged edge. It looks like something took a bite out of it. “We identify manatees by their scars. That is definitely Violet.”

Gretchen puts her hands on the edge of the boat and hops into the waist-deep water. Carlos and a couple of his staff do the same thing.

“What are they going to do?” Zoe asks Dr. Mac nervously.

“They need to examine Violet’s injuries,” Dr. Mac says. “If she’s not hurt too badly, they can treat her cuts and release her to heal on her own.”

Gretchen and Carlos talk quietly as they inspect the cuts on Violet’s back. Carlos puts on a stethoscope and places it on the broad back of the manatee to listen to her breathe.

“She’s so calm,” Maggie says.

Dr. Mac frowns. “That’s not good. It could be a sign that she’s really run down and exhausted. Normally, she’d swim away from people.”

Gretchen grabs a face mask and snorkel off the
Gordito
, puts them on, and ducks her head underwater. When she comes back to the surface and takes off the mask, her face is grim. She wades back to our boat, climbs in, and opens one of the medical kits.

“How is she?” I ask.

“She’s in serious trouble,” Gretchen says. “It’s definitely a boat strike—the propeller marks prove that. She has a pneumothorax. The propeller
probably broke a couple of ribs, and the ribs made a hole in the left lung. Air from the punctured lung is trapped in her chest cavity. That’s keeping her rolled up on her side. She’s like a cork floating on top of the water. We have to get her back to the center, or she’ll die.”

I have a million questions, but Gretchen is too busy to answer them.

Some of Carlos’s staff are unfurling a big net. One of the men slowly drives the
Gordito
in a big circle, pulling the net so that it wraps around Violet. Carlos and Gretchen wade out of the way so they don’t get caught in the net themselves.

“Dr. Mac, how are they going to get her out of the water?” I ask. “She must weigh a ton!”

“Probably close to a half ton,” she replies. “They certainly can’t pick her up the way we pick up an injured cat or dog. They’ll use the net to pull her up into the boat. That’s why the boat has no real back end—to make it easier to transport manatees.”

I adjust the focus on my camera and snap a few shots of Violet being loaded onto the boat. It takes all six adults to pull her in by hand. Once she’s secured, Gretchen wades over to us again.

“Brenna, do you want to ride along in the
Gordito?
” she asks.

“Are you kidding? Sure!” I bolt from my seat and raise my foot to climb into the water.

“No, hang on,” Gretchen laughs. “Wait a sec. Carlos will bring the
Gordito
alongside.”

When the rescue boat is right next to ours, I step into it. There’s a tiny bit of room for me behind Carlos, right next to Violet’s head. I sit down, and the boat heads slowly back to the center.

I can’t believe I’m actually this close to a real live manatee!

Violet’s leathery skin is gray like an old nickel and has bristly hairs on it. Algae and barnacles are growing on her back. When I did my report, I found out that fish snack on the algae that grows on manatees, like they’re floating dinner tables or something.

I sneak a look at the deep propeller cuts on her back and sides. I can see the white layer of blubber under Violet’s skin. Those cuts must feel like the worst thing in the world. Manatees are sensitive to touch. They like to cuddle with each other and nuzzle with their funny snouts.

She opens her nose flaps and exhales, then inhales quickly. Manatees have to come to the surface of the water to breathe. That’s part of the problem. When they’re near the surface, they’re more likely to get hit by boats.

“Here, listen to her lung for me,” Carlos says, handing me his stethoscope and watch. He points to where I should listen, on the right side
of her back. “You won’t get any respiratory sounds on the left because that lung is punctured. She should be breathing about once a minute right now, her heart beating once a second. Let me know if it changes.”

“I thought manatees breathed slowly, like once every fifteen minutes,” I say as I fumble with the stethoscope.

“That’s when they’re sleeping. When they’re swimming in the water, they breathe once every three minutes. Her heartbeat and respiratory rate are faster than normal right now because of the stress she’s feeling,” Carlos says.

I listen carefully.
Lub-dub … lub-dub … lub-dub.
Her heart beats like waves rolling up onto the beach. Her lung whooshes with a giant exhale, then quickly fills with air again.

Violet’s eyes roll back to look at me. They’re small, not much bigger than a pair of dimes, dark, wet, and soft like a deer’s.

What is she thinking? Does she know we’re trying to help her? Does she recognize Carlos from the last time he treated her?

“Can’t we drive faster?” I ask.

Carlos shakes his head. “These are manatee waters,” he says. “It doesn’t do us any good if we hit another manatee while we’re rescuing this one.”

“But can’t you do something? I mean, isn’t she in pain?” When an injured animal comes into the clinic, Dr. Mac and Dr. Gabe treat it right away.

“Transporting her like this puts a lot of stress on her,” Carlos explains to me. “If we started to poke and prod her now, that would make things worse. We have to get her back to the center before we start any treatment.”

“Is she going to make it?” I ask.

Carlos glances down at the water before answering. “We’re going to try our best, Brenna.”

Violet closes her eyes and sighs.
Lub-dub … lub-dub … lub-dub.

Hang in there, Violet. Don’t die!

W
hen we finally get back to the rescue center, we dock the boats. Gretchen hops into a forklift with a small crane built onto the front end, and drives it to the edge of the dock. We sure don’t have any equipment like that at Dr. Mac’s Place!

Carlos and his staff slide Violet into the water, then onto a sling. They hook the sling up to the crane. Gretchen maneuvers the crane and carefully hoists Violet into the air. With Carlos walking next to Violet, the crane and its load slowly make their way through the open doors of the rescue center’s manatee wing. The rest of us are close behind.

The manatee wing has two tanks, a large one with a glass wall that you can see through from the center’s exhibition area, and a smaller behind-the-scenes tank that is connected to the larger one by a chute. Gretchen rolls the crane to the edge of the chute and waits while Carlos and the others climb down into it. At his signal, she lowers the sling until Violet rests on the floor of the dry chute. Gretchen grabs a red plastic equipment box and climbs down to join her patient. An assistant is already listening to Violet’s heart and lung with a stethoscope.

“I suppose you want to watch the examination,” Dr. Mac says knowingly.

I look at my friends. We’re all thinking the same thing.

“You’d better believe it,” I say.

We sit cross-legged on the cement floor above the chute and watch what’s going on below us. Gretchen takes a clipboard out of the equipment box and hands it to one of the assistants, who starts writing.

“She weighs nine hundred pounds,” Gretchen says.

“How does she know that?” I ask Dr. Mac.

“The crane has a scale built into it,” she replies.

Gretchen and Carlos stretch a measuring tape from the tip of Violet’s snout to the end of her ragged tail. “Two hundred seventy-two centimeters long,” Carlos reads. They measure around Violet’s tail, too. “Peduncle girth, one hundred seven centimeters.”

“What’s a peduncle?” I ask Gretchen.

She points to where Violet’s body meets her tail. “The peduncle is the narrower area between the body and the tail paddle. It’s the closest thing the manatee has to a rump. That’s where we usually give injections.” She moves up to Violet’s head and points. “Can you see this indentation behind her head?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“It shouldn’t be here. A healthy manatee has a fat, round head with no signs of having a neck at all. This”—she kneels down and points to the curve in Violet’s head—”is what we call ‘peanut head’ because it’s shaped like a peanut. It is a sign that she’s dehydrated—she doesn’t have enough fluids and nutrients in her body. I’m sure you know how dangerous that is.”

Gretchen stands up. “Violet was probably hit by that boat a couple of weeks ago.”

“Weeks ago?” I echo. “She’s been hurt like this for weeks? That’s horrible!”

“I agree,” Gretchen continues. “She hasn’t been eating and has gotten weaker and weaker from her injuries. She’s lost a lot of weight and is worn out. Another day or so and she could have died.”

“Are you going to give her an I.V.?” Maggie asks Gretchen.