Results tagged “manatee”

With Sad Rat and Sad Panda making us all so sad, it's nice to have Happy Manatee around. Ilya was rescued from the cold clutches of New Jersey earlier this week, and flown down to the more manatee-friendly state of Florida yesterday. The NY Post reports that he is expected to make a full recovery, and a rep at the US Fish and Wildlife Service confirms: "He is safely home in Florida, and currently in a nice pool at the Miami Seaquarium."

Good news! Just as the Marine Mammal Stranding Center was losing hope, Ilya the manatee has been rescued! 1010Wins reports he is currently "headed back to Florida aboard a transport jet after being rescued from murky waters near a New Jersey oil refinery."

Earlier this week NYMag reported on Ilya the manatee, "who traveled to Cape Cod this summer via New York Harbor," and ended up in New Jersey this past Friday. Ilya hasn't been spotted since, with the Marine Mammal Stranding Center unable to track her down. Today someone reported they saw the manatee off the coast of Bayonne, but the MMSC says the report came in 8 hours after the spotting, and Ilya is still nowhere to be found.

Looks like the manatee off Long Island is on the move: Newsday reports on the second and thirdsightings of the sea creature in the past few days. A family saw something on Friday afternoon--the grandmother said, "I hear this grunting noise and I look down, and at first I thought it was a mass of seaweed. Then, all of a sudden, it's this huge mass coming down." Her brother said, "It snorted at my sister. She was shocked, and screamed that it was one of those elephants of the sea. My nephews were amazed." Then yesterday, father and son were fishing off Centreport. MTA staffer Doug Johnson said his son yelled that he saw a manatee, "At first, we only saw the silhouette, but then we saw the entire back and the tail." A U.S. Geological Survey biologist says it could very well be the same one seen by a family in Stony Brook Harbor a few days ago.

A family tells Newsday that they spotted a manatee while fishing at Smithtown town park on Long Island. The family is pretty certain, because they had lived in Florida for two years where they saw the large mammals all the time. Tara Inzone said, "I was untangling my line at the end of the dock and I heard a spouting sound -- a psffft. I looked over and I said 'What the hell is that?' My husband said 'It's a dolphin.' I said 'That's not a dolphin. Look at how wide it is.' I thought it was a whale at first. Then its tail came up -- and it was a manatee tail. It was wide and distinctive." The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it's "not uncommon to see them pretty far up the East Coast," as manatees will chase the food supply. The last time a manatee was spotted in these parts, it was two years ago in the Hudson River.