Manatees and Florida seem to go hand in hand like guava and cheese or key limes and pie. According to new research, however, manatees may not have always been year-round residents of the Sunshine State.
It turns out there is some evidence to suggest that manatees were permanent residents of the Caribbean who vacationed in Florida before going back to the Caribbean to enjoy its warmer waters.
Videos by VICE
All of this changed in the late 19th century and early 20th century when manatees finally started to hang around Florida year-round. There are two big reasons for this shift: climate change and nuclear power plants.
The study, published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE and conducted by archaeologists from the University of South Florida, involved analyzing historical accounts and archaeological reports describing nearly 2 million animal bones. Some dated back to 14,000 years ago, while others came from animals who lived as recently as the 1950s.
By combining all of this research, scientists created a roadmap of the Florida manatee’s origin, helping to explain where they’ve been, where they’ve called home, and when.
The biggest problem is archaeologists have discovered very few manatee bones in Florida over the years, and the few they have found were carved into tools and ornaments. Manatees didn’t show up in historical documents until the 1700s, and even then, they didn’t appear that often. Heading into the 1800s and early 1900s, manatees are hardly ever mentioned in Florida newspapers.
An explanation for this, the researchers theorize, is that the indigenous populations of Florida, along with European settlers, weren’t hunting manatees at the time. The researchers admit it seems unlikely since everything with a pulse was being hunted back then. But if they were being hunted, you’d think they would be mentioned in historical accounts more often than they were. Even if they stretched it back to the 1600s, they still found a shocking lack of manatee talk.
It wasn’t until they hit the 1920s that manatee sightings started happening with any kind of frequency, and it wasn’t until the 1940s that they started to become a Florida tourist attraction. The reason for this could be climate change.
There is a period that lasted from the 1300s to the mid-1800s known as the Little Ice Age, wherein some parts of the planet were a little cooler than usual. When it ended, and Florida’s waters warmed up, manatees swam over to bask in the pleasant waters.
Eventually, they stuck around when the warm water discharged by power plants provided year-round warmth, which is why you can still find manatees hanging out by energy plants around Florida to this day, especially during the winter months.
