The Aquactic management has one natural way of controlling waterweeds, that being the mammal, the Manatee. These creatures weight up to 2,000 pounds, and the adults are up to 10 feet in length. The females give birth to a calf every 2 years. The Manatee can live up to 40 years. They are very quiet and solitary animals, except in colder weather when they gather around the warm water outlets near power plants.
They are very slow moving, but can swim quite rapidly for short distances. They move by means of paddle-shaped flippers and tails. Manatee's are herbivorous and eat large quantities of plants of every description. They seem to prefer submersed plants, but also eat floating plants and shoreline plants.
Mantee's breathe air through their nostrils, and can hold their breathe for several minutes in order to eat submerged aquatic plants.
Manatee's are able to maintain neuital buoyancy, kind of like submarines do, so they can easily float underwater while feeding in the rivers and bay areas, estuaries and ocean areas. While living in Florida, I had a chance to enjoy seeing a group of Manatee's up close and personal, while sitting on our dock along a oxbow off the Caloosahattee River. An oxbow is a part of the old river that had wound in and around groves of trees and outcroppings of land, before it had been straighted, making it's way from the Alantic Ocean to the Gulf Of Mexico. I will explain this in more detail later on.
The group of manatee's swam past our dock, then turned around and swam back a short distance as the babies played a game of racing ahead and then stopping and racing back to their mothers. It was easy to trace the trails made, as a line of bubbles followed above them on the surface of the water. One large adult manatee raised it's head out of the water near where I sat and stripped the leaves off brazilian branches that dipped down near the edge of the water. It was so neat seeing this as a manatee head, kind of reminded me of a cow's head. Just as quick as they had arrived, they left the oxbow and returned to the main river channel.
