ISLAND OBSERVER
Manatee off course; cool beach 'stuff '
TONY AMOS

All you could see in the murky w a t e r w a s a brown oblong shape. Every couple of minutes the shape would slowly rise to the surface and a snout with two nostrils would emerge to take in air. It didn't last long and, if you didn'have your eyes or a camera ready and pointed in the right direction, you would miss seeing the creature. At one time it briefly showed its wide rounded tail.

It was a manatee, right here in Port Aransas, on the last day of 2006. Manatees are seen with increasing frequency in South Texas, although they cannot be considered to be common. The last one I actually saw was on the most fateful day of the last century in September 2001 in Aransas Pass. Since then I've chased a half dozen separate reports of manatees seen in the Coastal Bend, but never actually seen the animal until now. Two of those were in our own boat basin at UTMSI.

Manatees are marine mammals. They are exclusively vegetarian, feeding on sea grasses, water hyacinth and other vegetation in both fresh and saltwater habitats. In this hemisphere, the species seen is the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus) with two subspecies, the Florida manatee and the Antillean manatee. South Texas is outside the range of either of these, but it is probably the Florida manatee that wanders into our area from time to time. They are warm water animals and, even in Florida, they seek the warm water from power station outflows in winter in order to survive the cold. Here, one famous manatee, dubbed "Sweet Pea" took refuge in the Barney Davis Power Station canal, the (then) Koch refinery ditch in Corpus Christi, finally seeking refuge, if you can call it that, in Buffalo Bayou in Houston. It was captured there and taken to Sea World in San Antonio and ultimately taken to Florida and released. The same animal was also seen in Rockport, Naval Station Ingleside and the UTMSI boat basin.

.PIPE CLEANERS'

Remarkably, the animal seen on Dec, 31 was seen in Rockport the day before it showed up in Port Aransas. For an animal that moves with glacial speed here, this one traveled at least 15 nautical miles in 18 hours, and probably much longer depending on whether it took the Gulf Intrcoastal Waterway to get here. It is only about 6 feet long, quite small as far as manatees grow (up to 13 feet long and 3,500 pounds!).

Manatee sighting A manatee made its way to the marina at Teal Harbor on New Year's Eve.

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Thanks to the folks at Teal Harbor for the call alerting me to the manatee in their marina; you broke a severalyear long "drought" of my chasing reports but never actually seeing the animal. I am worried about this animal being here in the winter. Seawater temperature was 68 in the marina, but has been much colder already this season - as low as 55 along the Gulf shoreline. There is little food for the animal in our harbors, marinas, and boat basins. I have notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (the federal agency responsible for manatees). Manatees are critically endangered animals. If it were deemed necessary to save this animal, only the experts from Florida would be authorized to do the rescue. If you see a manatee, do not harass it, keep your distance, and call the police or game wardens or call me any time at (361) 442-7638.

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This time of year our tides are generally low, but there are periods when the daily difference between high and low tides is 2 feet or more in (not much, you say) but it makes a great difference on the beach where in the same day the water can be up to the dunes and later leave a wide swath of wet sand. It is there that you can find a lot of fascinating stuff.

Briefly, here's what's there: yellow stringy stuff is the soft coral known as sea whip, or gorgonians (Leptogorgia). There are some huge clumps of that to be found. The pink stalky things (photograph) are "pipe cleaners", or sea pens (Penatula). They are a soft coral and the prime food of the loggerhead sea turtle locally. The green stuff is not lawn clippings, but fresh leaves of turtle grass (Thalassia) and manatee grass (Syringodium) with some germinating black mangrove (Avicenna) seeds among them. The brown balls are what I call tumblegrass balls that I wrote about in a recent column. They are comprised of the remnants of prairie tumbleweeds that end up in the sea and get tumbled one more time.

Also on the beach there are many sea shells and pieces of shells, heart urchins, starfish, worm casts, waterlogged smoothed pieces of wood and not much trash. Enjoy our beach these fine winter days!

Tony Amos is a research fellow at The University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas.