A baby manatee rescued off West Bay last summer is continuing to grow thanks to expert care at Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo.
Cayman 4-B is weighed at the Tampa Lowry Park Zoo. Photo: Mike Hennessy |
Assistant Florida Mammals Curator Virginia Edmonds says the baby, now known as Cayman 4-B (or Cayman for short), weighs over 100 pounds. He’s still on a liquid diet, but Ms Edmonds says he now takes food through a feeding tube instead of through a baby bottle.
The fact that he’s made it this far speaks well of the care he received in the critical days after he was rescued by a group of fisherman, according to Ms Edmonds.
‘They kept him going for a week until we could get him. So, a lot of his survival is definitely due to those people who put the time and effort in.’
4-B did suffer a minor setback sometime after he got to Tampa when he quit taking his formula from a bottle, most likely because his delicate digestive system wasn’t handling the formula very well. The solution is a feeding tube that puts the food directly into the stomach twice a day.
For the moment, Cayman 4-B remains slightly behind the usual development curve for young manatees, since by now his cousins in the wild are usually beginning to take solid food.
For now, he’s nibbling at the lettuce type food that makes up the bulk of a normal manatee diet.
Once he starts eating solid food Ms Edmonds says he’ll be ready to move on to another manatee facility in Puerto Rico.
‘He’ll go to a halfway house there, somewhere they can get him ready for the wild, and he’ll be released when he’s about 700 pounds.’
For information on adopting Cayman 4-B, or any other animal in the Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo, visit http://www.lowryparkzoo.com/html/l2/l2_zooyou_adopt.html
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