Manatee

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The Amazonian Manatee by Mark Carwardine

The Amazonian manatee is one of the least-known and most outlandish animals on the planet.

Found only in the Amazon Basin, from the river mouth to the upper reaches of calm water tributaries in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana and Peru, it is shy and retiring and likes to keep itself to itself.

With a wonderfully carefree rotund body, predominantly black skin the texture of vinyl, a bright pink belly and diamond-shaped tail, a cleft lip, a unique sixth-sense, a reputation for farting more than any other animal on the planet, and an affinity for remote corners of tropical rainforest rarely penetrated by humans, it is not your average endangered species.

It was first described as a cross between a seal and a hippo, though it's not related to either. Douglas Adams more aptly portrayed it as 'not so much like a seal as like a travelling case for carrying a seal in'.

It likes to live life in the slow lane. Most of the time it eats, then farts, then sleeps. Sometimes it just farts and sleeps. It doesn't leap out of the water to perform breathtaking acrobatics like a dolphin, leap daringly from tree to tree like a monkey, or hang upside-down like a sloth. Its main activity is doing nothing much at all.

Oh, and it is vegetarian (not that there's anything wrong with being vegetarian - I'm just saying by way of introduction).

It eats a heck of a lot - up to 10 per cent of its body weight in a single day. And it's a fussy eater, too, scoffing just a few, carefully selected species of aquatic plants and little else.

Photo by Mark Carwardine

Understandably, those few carefully selected species of aquatic plants don't like it at all. So they've developed a special anti-manatee device. What they've done is to stuff themselves with silica, which is hard and abrasive and wears out the manatees' teeth very quickly.

The manatees, on the other hand, won't allow themselves to be outwitted by a few plants and have responded by growing replaceable teeth. They have a canny conveyor-belt system in which all their teeth move forward about a millimetre a month; as the front ones wear out, and fall out, they are replaced by the next in line.

The good news is that, if you want to see an Amazonian manatee, it is a mammal and therefore has to breathe air. This is where things start to get pretty exciting. When it rises to the surface of the river to take a breath, it pokes its bristly snout nearly a centimetre into the tropical world outside for as long as a second at a time. Few people have seen this happen in the wild but, needless to say, most of them have never forgotten it.

The bad news is that Amazonian manatees are in trouble. Rainforest destruction, dam building and accidental drowning in commercial fishing nets have all been taking their toll. Hunting, too, has long been a major threat. It's impossible to say how many are left. One estimate 30 years ago suggested 10,000, but it's probably even fewer than that.