A manatee called Tico travelled nearly 2,500 miles over 62 days when he was released back to his native environment after eight years of rehabilitation.
Brazil-based NGO Associação de Pesquisa e Preservação de Ecossistemas Aquáticos (Aquasis) had nursed him back to health and tagged him so they could track his journey in the wild.
They were surprised to see him travel so far so quickly – from Icapuí, Ceará, Brazil to La Blanquilla Island, Venezuela – and realised that Tico must have got into trouble.
lury Simoes-Sousa, a physical oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) was called in to help.
Based on his knowledge of ocean currents, Simoes-Sousa guessed that the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus) had been caught in the North Brazil Current (NBC) and dragged out to sea.
“Studying his path, we can assume that Tico had a very tiresome journey,” Simoes-Sousa says. “It’s likely he encountered multiple violent storms.”
The team used their network to try to find Tico so they could rescue him a second time. Finally, two fishers near Tobago identified him and the NGO was able to get an import license to bring him home.
“We were so happy, some of us cried,” says Vitor Luz Carvalho, a senior veterinarian at Aquasis.
The manatee was in a bad way. He was dehydrated, had lost weight and had a plastic bag blocking his digestive tract.
The rescuers transported him to a local aquarium for rehabilitation and experts have now published study on his astonishing journey.
"Without the additional perspective of lury, I am not sure we would have gotten permission to bring Tico home,” says Aquasis monitoring coordinator Camila Carvalho de Carvalho. “The data provided by an oceanographer was critical in being able to tell the full story of Tico’s incredible, and long, journey.”
Main image: Mikael Holanda, Aquasis
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