CRYSTAL RIVER, Fla. — The world’s ugliest mermaid wants to give me a big, sloppy kiss.
Disney’s doe-eyed Ariel she clearly is not. This mermaid is jowly and fat and wrinkled and whiskered and she’s puckering up just inches from my face mask.
There’s nothing to do but lean in and let her plant a wet one on my cheek.
What can I say? I’ve got a thing for manatees.
Practically speaking, there’s only one place in the United States where you can legally swim with the creatures that the lonely, grog-addled sailors of yore somehow mistook for lusty fish-women: the water around the otherwise unremarkable towns of Crystal River and Homosassa, on Florida’s west coast.
When winter comes, thousands of West Indian manatees head for the Sunshine State.
They lack the insulation of other marine mammals, and when ocean temperatures drop they can die from hypothermia if they don’t escape the chilly water.
Seventy-five miles north of the Tampa-St. Petersburg metropolitan area is the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge, an 80-acre site, accessible only by boat, that is winter home to about 15 percent of Florida’s manatees.
Visitors to the refuge are allowed to swim with the creatures, and “limited animal-initiated contact” is permitted.
A proliferation of outfitters here offer swim-with-manatee tours year-round.
On our visit last January, my wife, Jeri, and I chose one, Bird’s Underwater, that went out earlier than other tours to beat the crowds, and left from the dock next door to the Best Western motel where we were staying.
I should pause here to point out that swimming with, and touching, manatees in the wild is a matter of controversy among wildlife enthusiasts.
The Save the Manatees Club, founded in 1981 by singer Jimmy Buffet and Sen. Bob Graham (Florida’s governor at the time) opposes it because it can disturb the creatures, alter their behavior, separate mothers from calves and chase them from their warm-water havens.
“It’s gotten out of control,” said Pat Rose, the group’s executive director. “The sheer masses of people out there in the water is a big problem.”
As an alternative, the group offers “Do Not Disturb” tours in kayaks and pontoon boats.
But others counter that physically interacting with manatees, if regulated and managed properly, creates a bond you can’t forge any other way, and turns passive wildlife watchers into active manatee defenders. It’s a tradeoff that’s necessary, they say, to create a constituency with enough clout to protect the species.
“Getting in the water and seeing how friendly and curious the manatees are — it changes people in a way that just doesn’t happen when you’re just seeing their backs from a boat,” said Marty Senetra, manager of Bird’s Underwater. “As soon as they get back to the dock, they ask who they can write to, where they can donate money, what they can do to help.”
And the creatures certainly need help. Last year was the deadliest on record for Florida manatees, with 417 dying out of a population of only 3,200. And yet the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, under pressure from boaters and developers, has been evaluating the removal of their protection as an endangered species. The Florida Wildlife Commission recently deferred a proposal to do the same thing.
Manatees are sometimes called “sea cows,” but, perhaps as a nod to the mermaid legend, they’re classified in the biological order of sirenia, named for the singing temptresses of Greek mythology who lured sailors to their deaths.
It was probably Christopher Columbus — a man who tended to get things wrong in a big way — who first confused manatees with mermaids.
In 1493, off the coast of what is now the Dominican Republic, he spotted three in the water and noted in his log that they were “not as pretty as they are depicted, for somehow in the face they look like men.”
But in 1614, Capt. John Smith encountered one in the Caribbean and described it as “by no means unattractive,” adding that he’d “begun to experience the first effects of love.”
The day of our tour, as we signed waivers and struggled into wetsuits, we were shown a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service video that laid out the rules of engagement: Stay on the surface; don’t approach manatees — they can approach you if they want; don’t ride, chase, poke or surround manatees; stay out of the roped-off sanctuaries; don’t splash or make noise; and never separate a mother from her calf.
I’d just lowered myself into the murky, chest-deep water when I was nudged gently from behind. I spun around to find myself eyeball to eyeball with a manatee.
There was absolutely no reason for fear. Despite weighing up to 2,500 pounds, manatees are among the least aggressive creatures on earth, herbivores with no natural enemies. They don’t have much in the way of teeth, only a couple of molars they sometimes clean by flossing with the boat’s anchor rope.
The manatee moved in slowly and nuzzled up against me. She clearly wanted to be scratched. Her skin was tough and leathery, like that of an elephant. She had no barnacles, as some manatees do, but her skin was covered with algae.
I gave her back a vigorous scratching, and then she rolled over so I could have a go at her soft, smooth belly. When I finished she spun slowly around, and, with a gentleness I could scarcely believe, pressed her whiskery face up against mine. If it wasn’t technically a kiss, it was as close as a manatee could manage.
For more than two hours I was approached by one manatee after another. They lifted their front flippers so I could tickle under their arms, they offered up barnacled backs to be scratched and they spun like a rotisserie chicken so I could rake my fingers over every side.
When it was time to get out of the water they clustered around the boat ladder as if to say goodbye. As we pulled anchor I found myself sympathizing with Capt. John Smith: I, too, was beginning to experience the first effects of love.
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