By Agency Report
Fishermen sliced up and sumptuously feasted on Manatee, a marine animal, in Odi community, Kolokuma/Opokuma Local Government Area of Bayelsa State.
According to Niger Delta Insider, the fully aquatic mammal was caught on Friday afternoon, July 19, 2024.
Manatees are sometimes known as sea cows. All three species of Manatees are classified as Vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
They are threatened by habitat loss, collision with boats, and pollution.
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Further research by Straightnews shows that Manatees, large herbivores that grace the world’s coastal marine waters, estuaries, rivers, swamps and marine wetlands, are gentle creatures often referred to as “sea cows.”
According to Ecowatch, their enormous size — an average manatee is ten feet long and weighs 1,200 pounds — might remind you of their closest relative, the elephant.
According to Ocean Today, manatees are important for the maintenance of Ecosystem health because of their love of seagrass. Their consistent munching on seagrasses and other aquatic plants — and they eat a lot of them — keeps the grasses short, helping to keep seagrass beds healthy.
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Manatee species that exist today include the West African, Amazonian and West Indian manatee, as well as the Florida manatee, which is a subspecies of the West Indian manatee. All sea cow species are classed as vulnerable to extinction. The imperiled manatee is the official marine mammal of Florida.
Even without any true natural predators, manatees have become endangered due to habitat loss and being struck by boats and ships. In Florida, water pollution has been destroying manatees’ natural source of food, leading many to starve.
A recent examination of fossil evidence suggests that there were once many types of sea cow and that various species coexisted at once, a press release from Duke University said.
In a new paper, scientists Steven Heritage of the Duke University Lemur Center’s Museum of Natural History and Erik Seiffert of the Keck School of Medicine at USC, who is also a research affiliate of the Duke Lemur Center, have put together the most comprehensive account ever of sea cow ancestry.
“The earliest known fossil sea cows are about 47 million years old, and those animals lived along the coasts of northern Africa in the proto-Mediterranean Sea,” Heritage said in the press release. “Our analysis found that this first appearance was about 11 million years after the sea cow lineage diverged from their closest living relatives, the elephants.”
The paper, “Total Evidence Time-Scaled Phylogenetic And Biogeographic Models For The Evolution Of Sea Cows (Sirenia, Afrotheria),” was published in the journal PeerJ.
Throughout sea cows’ long history, the coastlines of all the continents on Earth except Antarctica have been enriched by the gentle marine mammals, the press release said. Once, there was even a species of sea cow that weighed 12 tons naiant in the Bering Sea.
The earliest known sea cow fossil had four legs and was capable of walking on land like an elephant. Elephants’ oldest fossil ancestors were alive in northern Africa in the early Cenozoic era, right after dinosaurs went extinct.
Today’s manatees and their relative, the dugong, both of the Sirenia taxonomic order, live exclusively in the water and have no hind limbs.
The largest dataset to date of living and fossil sea cow species was put together for the study. It incorporated geography, genetics, anatomy and geologic time periods.
To determine the sea cows’ ancestry, Heritage and Seiffert used statistical models set on a time scale, and, in mapping the directions and ages of the sea cows’ ocean migrations, the scientists used historical biogeography models.
Agency report/Ecowatch
