I am going to start a “Student Spotlight Post” where I will be sharing a post written by one of my students on their blog. The first Student Spotlight Post goes to Josie….

Manatees
from Josie’s Journal by josiele4
Today I am going to talk about Manatees. These are large,adorable creatures that are endangered that means there are not many of them left. The reason I want to talk about manatees is because I finished reading one of my favorite books from this series Vet Volunteer by Laurie Halse Anderson and at the back of he book is this article written by Dr. J.J Mackenzie (character), I saw this heading talking about what I can do to help! This blog address was at the bottom of the article www.savethemanatee.org , I went to the website and there were pictures of manatees everywhere. This one post really caught my eye, it said adopt a manatee and I thought in the back of my mind ” this is so cool”. So I checked the post and you can really adopt a manatee I mean you won’t take home with you, it will stay where you adopted it from but you will get an adoption certificate, picture of your manatee,and information about manatees! So I asked my mom if we could adopt one but she said maybe so I wrote a letter to Save the manatee Club for more information about adopting a manatee and checked there website out more and turns out you can pick the one you want to adopt you just click on it’s picture and it tells you some information about that mammal, then you go to the adopt a manatee post and pick the name of the manatee that you wanted to adopt! Isn’t that cool. I can’t wait for the Save the manatee club to respond to my letter to see if my mom and dad will let me adopted one!

Manatees are Florida’s most endangered coastal marine mammals we’re losing 10% of the population every year! Researcher think there are only 3,000 of them left. For us to help them we have to understand them but manatees are very large mammals so it is hard for us to study them so we observe them because manatees are endangered we cannot capture them for the sole purpose of studying them. Researchers observer them most while they a rehabilitating from injuries mostly caused by boat propellers. Researchers also study them in the wild.

Manatees also die from natural causes just like anything else,but a large number of manatee died from red tide. A few years ago several hundred manatees died from an algae bloom called red tide. Red tide poisoned there nervous system. Researchers and volunteers work hard to help manatees but we (humans) are still the manatee biggest threat. Warm waters that shelter manatees from cold winter also attract people who build house near water and motor-boaters. Boat strike cause many manatee injuries and deaths, much work is being done to educate these boaters and house owner of the danger the pose to these adorable creatures. But there is still a long way to go!

What you can do to help: Join the save the manatee club, educate people about manatees, drive the boat speed in manatee areas,but mostly check out there website for more!

Image from:http://www.flickr.com/photos/26606055@N03/2495377462/

If you’d like to comment on Josie’s post or read more of her posts, hop on over to her blog, Josie’s Journal.