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2 ill manatees at zoo responding to care

Veterinarians at Lowry Park Zoo say Citrus and Oakley seem to be recovering.

By BARBARA BEHRENDT
Published November 19, 2005

CRYSTAL RIVER - The prospects of two manatees from Citrus County are looking up, according to a spokeswoman from the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, where the two female manatees landed recently due to health problems.

Another manatee recently released after rehabilitation needs help of a different kind. He needs people to give him enough space so he can act like a manatee.

A female manatee found in Kings Bay that had a severe gash on her side and was unable to submerge has finally rounded an important corner in her treatment at Lowry, said spokeswoman Rachel Nelson. The manatee, dubbed Citrus by the Lowry staff, was first spotted in the area of Magnolia Springs and Kings Bay late last month.

For two days she led rescuers on a chase, ripping a rescue net and pulling in help from various manatee-related agencies and organizations before she was captured Nov. 1.

Once she got to Lowry, animal care staff took X-rays and found that she did not have a punctured lung as was first thought; rather, she had a severe buoyancy problem. They drained air from her chest, but it immediately returned, Nelson said.

The zoo staff supported and fed the manatee, allowing her to swim in a shallow pool with another badly injured manatee. Then Tuesday the staff again tried to tap air out of the manatee's chest. This time the procedure worked and Citrus was able to submerge and right herself when she needed to, Nelson reported.

While that doesn't mean the manatee is totally out of the woods, "we're feeling pretty positive that the lung has reinflated," she said. "Our staff reports she is feeling better and her appetite has improved tremendously."

Another Citrus manatee that has shown some signs of improving health is Oakley, the manatee from Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park. Oakley lost her appetite and showed a higher-than-normal white blood cell count, forcing state park officials to drop her as one of the manatees they were moving to the Columbus Zoo in Ohio to do research on the papilloma virus, which infects the Homosassa park's manatees.

She has received aggressive treatment since her arrival, and Nelson said park veterinarians report she is making some progress.

The news about another animal found sick and emaciated in the Three Sisters Springs last winter is less positive. The old animal, which was far thinner than it should have been for its size, was called Little Sister. She was treated at Lowry Park for about six months and then she developed a chest infection that is 100 percent fatal, forcing the park staff to euthanize her in August.

Of the 150 manatees that have been treated by the zoo, Big Sister is the only one that has had to be euthanized, Nelson said.

State and federal manatee protection partners are hoping another manatee's story ends far more positively, but they are hoping that the public is willing to help out with this case.

Mo the wayward manatee, the animal captured in various places and released in Crystal River three times now, continues to hang around the Kings Bay area, said Monica Ross of Wildlife Trust, who tracks Mo.

In a health assessment conducted Nov. 1, Ross said she found Mo to have lost considerable weight, more than might be expected. But his body condition still remained good. "We're going to be monitoring him very closely this winter watching if any warning signs go off," she said. "But it's not bad enough that we would pull him in right now."

What Ross did notice was that she observed Mo for a three-hour period while the manatee was trying to sleep. But every time he settled in for a snooze, divers and snorkelers crowded around him. He is an easy manatee to spot because he wears a radio transmitter, which floats above the surface as he comes up to breathe.

"The amount of human interaction is interfering with his normal behavior," Ross said. "He is not getting the rest or doing the things that he needs to do."

She contacted local dive shops and asked them to not use Mo as a target to follow and they agreed.

Ross is hopeful that the fact that the no-entry sanctuaries have been activated for the year will help Mo by giving him a place to go where people cannot follow. She suspects that his weight loss may be because he has had to expend so much energy moving from place to place to get away from the human interactions.

People who see Mo or his tag are asked to stay back 30 feet from him to keep from forcing him to go somewhere else. "We're just asking people to give him some space since he is trying to acclimate back into the wild. He is a special case," she said. "We're not trying to be mean. We just want to give him a fighting chance."

Barbara Behrendt can be reached at 564-3621 or behrendt@sptimes.com

[Last modified November 19, 2005, 01:07:13]