Pretty late one night in November, we received a call from MARS asking us to help out on a manatee rescue the following day, Thursday November 5th. We quickly got a group together to join MARS and the Miami Seaquarium in this rescue. We knew only that there was a wounded manatee with her calf, and that she'd been tagged. When we arrived, we were told to wait for the MARS team, who was bringing a boat, and the Seaquarium team, who had a vehicle for transporting the manatee to the rescue facility. Wait we did, sitting on a local dock, dipping our toes in the lovely water and watching the interesting sea life pass by on its way to the ocean.
Once MARS and the Seaquarium had arrived, they set out in a fish and wildlife boat to track down mamma and calf. A police officer showed us pictures she'd taken the day prior, when they had tagged the mom. She was severely emaciated and had a series of cuts along her side from an encounter with a boat propeller six months prior.
Cupcake's arrival.
Three hours into our adventure, news came that they had found the calf. When they arrived with the newly dubbed "Cupcake" (a male calf) we all sighed with relief. He was alive! They quickly set up an IV, borrowing one of our own members to be an IV stand. As Cupcake was fed via a tube, we were informed of Mamma's condition- she had died before we arrived on the scene. Cupcake was transported into the Miami Seaquarium Manatee Ambulance and driven off to a better care facility. We volunteers were left with the job of moving Mamma into the boat to be transported to the manatee morgue.
Admittedly, our presence that day probably did more for us than it did for Cupcake. The nine people who attended quickly realized that manatee strandings are long, often boring affairs. We are there purely as grunt labor, useful for hauling tons of manatee flesh out of the water and into the boat, and then from the boat to the Miami Seaquarium rescue facility. I've been on the opposite end of this operation before, waiting long hours for a manatee to be brought in to the aquarium so that I could lend my back and legs to the task of manatee land transport. That's how these things go. But we learned why the veterinarians and other more qualified volunteers did certain things- like blowing on a tube they inserted into Cupcake's stomach to ensure that there were no kinks and Cupcake would actually get the nutrients they were delivering via bottle. MARS representatives explained that the mother had been hit by a boat and had been favoring both the injury and her lungs as a result of secondary infections.
MMST volunteer acting as IV stand.
We learned that the best thing to do in situations like the one we encountered is simply sit back out of the way and wait for someone to point over at us and say "you there, we need you to haul this, tote that, or kneel down and be a stepping stool for that woman over there." And then we hop to. They may not be the most pleasant of jobs, but even the little things we did, like donate towels to Cupcake to keep him moist during the hour long transport, are enough to make the difference between life and death for a marine mammal.
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