【Manatees - Legendary Mermaids? Four Legged Land Animals from 60 Million Years Ago！】

#animals｜#knowledge｜#learning｜#trivia ｜#manatees ｜#mermaids

【Manatees - Legendary Mermaids? Four-Legged Land Animals from 60 Million Years Ago！】AI 852 See The World - Biology

[Manatees] are a kind of big aquatic mammal, mostly hanging out in freshwater or shallow seas, chowing down on plants, and they’re the only genus in the “Sirenia” order’s “Manatee” family. As for dugongs and sea cows, they’re part of the “Sirenia” order’s “Dugong” family. Manatees and dugongs look pretty similar, but their tails are different: manatees have a flat, round tail, kinda like a big paddle; dugongs have a forked tail, like a whale’s.

Habits
Adult manatees grow to about 3 to 4 meters long, weighing around 600 kilograms, with females usually bigger than males. They don’t have dorsal fins, their back legs have shrunk into a wide tail fin, and their front limbs have turned into paddle-like flippers, perfect for cruising slowly along the bottom. Their lungs are huge, giving them buoyancy; they spend most of the day snoozing, popping up to the surface to breathe every 5 to 20 minutes, and the rest of the time they’re usually munching at 1 to 2 meters deep. Their teeth are just molars, and they keep replacing them, with new ones slowly moving forward from the back of their mouth; each jaw has no more than 6 teeth at a time; their upper lip is flexible, used not just for grabbing food but also for socializing and communicating.
Manatees are thought to have evolved from four-legged land mammals 60 million years ago, and their relatives are elephants and hyraxes. Studies show manatees have long-term memory, can learn complex tasks, and their ability to recognize visuals and sounds is on par with dolphins, plus they make different sounds to communicate.

Endangered
Right now, all three species of [manatees] are endangered, but it’s not because predators are hunting them. The real threat to their survival is human activity in their habitats. Manatees swim slowly and are super curious, so they often bump into boats from coastal folks or tourists, getting hurt or even killed by propellers. Because of how their hearing works, the sound frequencies they pick up are higher than the ones most boats make, so they can’t hear the motor noise clearly and don’t dodge in time. Some manatees are found with up to 50 propeller scars on their bodies, and those wounds can get infected, sometimes leading to death.
The waters near power plants often get warmer from discharged cooling water, and manatees will swim to these warm spots to stay cozy, so you’ll often see tons of manatees hanging around power plants, sometimes hundreds of them. Manatees are starting to rely on these artificial warm-water zones and aren’t migrating to tropical seas in winter anymore. Recently, a bunch of power plants in the U.S. have shut down, and U.S. organizations are now trying to figure out how to help keep the water warm for manatees.

Mermaids?
The name “Sirenia” comes from those mysterious mermaid-shaped creatures in ancient legends, said to lure sailors to their deaths with their songs. In Western legends and fairy tales, mermaids are usually half-human (mostly female) on top and fish on the bottom. Some say people back in the day might’ve mistaken dugongs and manatees living in the ocean for monsters, which is how the stories got started, but there’s not much solid evidence for that idea.

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