When you are taking a long trip, do you ever ask, “Are we there yet?” For manatees the answer is always “no.” Manatees travel throughout their lives. They may stay around one place for a few days, weeks or months, but eventually they will move to find new food sources and warmer waters.

A manatee will eat over 60 different kinds of plants, so it seems like it would have no problem finding something that it likes to eat. A manatee can eat about ten to 15 percent of its body weight each day. Since the average manatee weighs about 1,000 pounds, that means it can eat 100 to 150 pounds of sea grass a day! Altogether, a manatee spends about six to eight hours of its day grazing. Just think if you spent six to eight hours a day picking dandelions in your backyard. Depending on the size of your yard, it probably wouldn’t be too many hours or days before you would have to look for dandelions to pick in someone else’s yard.

The other reason manatees move, or migrate, is to stay warm. Even though they seem to be huge animals to us, they have very little body fat to keep them warm. It is difficult for a manatee to survive in water whose temperature is below 68 degrees. In the winter months in the United States, manatees live off the coast of Florida. In the summer, when the water gets warmer, they may travel as far north as Virginia or as far west as Louisiana.

Manatees can survive in both salt water and fresh water. They like to travel along the coast in shallow water like bays, rivers, canals and estuaries. Unfortunately, this is where boats like to travel as well. A large number of manatee injuries, not to mention deaths, are caused by collisions with motor boats. Many other manatee deaths are also caused by humans through pollution, accidental drowning in fishing nets and loss of habitat. Because the population of manatees has gone down so much, they are protected by the United States’ Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act.