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When visiting the Miami Seaquarium one of the species you can see and learn about is the Manatee that belongs to the family of the Serene from the species troches manatees, the West Indian Manatee, the largest member of the aquatic mammal. At the Miami Seaquarium they are big marine mammals that can weigh up to 2000 pounds and 12 ft. in length. Due to their low metabolism and lack of the body fat insulation they are limited to the tropic and subtropical areas.

As mammals they need to breath air but they can hold their breath for around 20 minutes. Despite that they use to go to the surface and breathe every 3 to 5 minutes.

When manatees breathe they exchange almost 90 percent of the air in their lungs, in humans when breathing the exchange is around only 10 percent of the air in the lungs. To do this manatees exhale really hard when their nose get to the surface of the water, like the whales do, this way they have significantly more fresh oxygen in their lungs which allows them to be under water longer periods of time. When you go to the Miami Seaquarium to see the manatees normally swim at speeds of 3 to 5 miles per hour but they can reach speeds up to 20 miles per hour.

Their eyes are small but they can see really well. Manatees are the only herbivore marine mammals and to maintain their body warm they need to eat approximately 1/10 of their body weight every day, for the typical manatee this means around 100 pounds of aquatic plants. They’re known as the cows of the sea, the name manatee comes from the Taine, a pre-Columbian people of the Caribbean, it means “breast”.

Manatees are pretty smart animals, they are able to understand discrimination tasks, and show signs of complex associated learning and advanced long term memory. They demonstrate task-learning similar to dolphins and pennies in acoustic and visual studies.

Manatees usually breed once every two years, which isn’t much and the pregnancy stage lasts about 12 months and it takes an additional 12 to 18 months to wean the calf, only 1 calf is born at a time and stays at its mother side or males follow a receptive female, they’re generally solitary creatures. Seaquarium Manatees reside in shallow, marshy coastal areas and rivers of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, the Amazon Basin, and West Africa. Although swim with dolphins is popular, If you live near where they live you can sometimes see signs that warn you that manatees are around and direct boaters to proceed with caution, they are very sensitive animals and it’s common that they are killed when a boat collides with them. The number one threat to manatees are humans, the main causes of their deaths are human related issues, habitat destruction, human objects such as boats, harpoons, or litter, and natural causes such as temperatures and disease. All three species of manatee are listed by the World Conservation Union as vulnerable to extinction, it is considered a crime to abuse, kill, or hunt manatees

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