West Indian Manatee (Trichechus manatus): Facts and Habitat

What is a West Indian manatee?

The West Indian manatee belongs to the order Sirenia, a small group of fully aquatic plant-eating mammals. Only four species survive today: three manatees (the West Indian, the Amazonian and the West African) and the dugong of the Indian and Pacific oceans. Despite living in water, sirenians are not related to whales or seals. Their closest living relatives are elephants and the small, rodent-like hyraxes of Africa and the Middle East.

Two subspecies are recognized. The Florida manatee (T. m. latirostris) lives mainly in Florida and the southeastern United States, while the Antillean manatee (T. m. manatus) lives in the Caribbean, along the Gulf of Mexico coast of Mexico, in Central America and along the northern and eastern coasts of South America.

The word “manatee” comes from the Spanish manatí, which was probably borrowed from an Indigenous language of the Caribbean. Its old nickname, sea cow, reflects its grazing habits, as explained in Why are manatees called sea cows? In 1975 the manatee became Florida’s official state marine mammal.

What does a West Indian manatee look like?

A manatee has a thick, rounded body that tapers to a broad, flat tail shaped like a paddle. Its skin is gray to gray-brown and often looks green or patchy because algae, small crustaceans and barnacles grow on it. White scars, often left by boat propellers, last for decades, so researchers use them to identify individual animals.

The front limbs are flexible flippers with three or four nails at the tip, and the manatee uses them to steer, “walk” along the bottom and hold food. There are no hind limbs and no external ears. The nostrils sit on top of the snout and close with valves when the animal dives.

Fine, sensitive hairs called vibrissae grow sparsely over the whole body. Around the mouth they are about 30 times denser, forming stiff bristles on a split, highly mobile upper lip that works almost like a short trunk to grab and pull plants into the mouth. Manatees also have unusually dense, heavy bones that act as ballast, and long lungs that lie along the back. Together with a diaphragm divided into two halves, these let a manatee rise, sink or tilt in the water with little effort.

How big is a West Indian manatee?

The West Indian manatee is the largest living sirenian. Adults are usually 2.7–3.5 m (9–11.5 ft) long and weigh 200–600 kg (440–1,320 lb), and females tend to be slightly larger than males. A few exceptional animals have reached about 4.5 m (15 ft) and more than 1,500 kg (3,300 lb).

A dugong is usually smaller and slimmer, with a fluked tail like a dolphin’s. The differences between the two sea cows are covered in manatee vs dugong.

Where do West Indian manatees live?

West Indian manatees live in shallow, warm waters along the Atlantic coasts of the Americas. They range from the southeastern United States through the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea to northeastern Brazil. The species is native to about 20 countries and territories, including the United States, Mexico, Belize, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas and Brazil.

Manatees prefer water about 1–5 m (3–16 ft) deep and rarely use water deeper than about 6 m (20 ft). They are found in bays, lagoons, estuaries, mangrove channels, rivers, canals and freshwater springs, and they move easily between salt, brackish and fresh water.

Florida manatees spread out along the coast in summer. Many stay in Florida, but some reach Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia, or swim west to Alabama, Louisiana and Texas. In 1995 a famous radio-tracked manatee named Chessie traveled from Florida to Rhode Island, and rare wanderers have since been seen as far north as Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Manatees have a low metabolic rate and little insulating fat, so they cannot stay for long in water colder than about 20 °C (68 °F). Each winter, Florida manatees gather at warm natural springs and power plant outflows, as described in Where do manatees go in winter? Antillean manatees live in warmer waters and do not need winter refuges.

What do manatees eat?

The West Indian manatee is a herbivore that eats more than 60 kinds of plants. In the sea, its main foods are seagrasses such as turtle grass, shoal grass and manatee grass, a seagrass named after it. In rivers and springs it eats freshwater plants such as eelgrass, hydrilla and water hyacinth, and it also feeds on algae, fallen mangrove leaves and grasses that hang over the water’s edge.

Manatees graze for about five to eight hours a day and eat roughly 4–10% of their body weight in wet plants daily. For a 450 kg (1,000 lb) adult, that means about 18–45 kg (40–100 lb) of vegetation. They use their flippers to dig up roots and their bristly lips to rip and gather plants.

Abrasive plants wear teeth down quickly, so manatees have “marching molars”. New cheek teeth form at the back of the jaws and slowly move forward, by about 1–2 mm a month, while worn teeth fall out at the front, and the supply never runs out. Food then passes slowly through a very long gut, where bacteria ferment tough plant fibers over about a week.

Behavior and communication

Manatees are mostly solitary or live in small, loose groups. They have no territories and no fixed social ranking, and the only lasting bond is between a mother and her calf. Larger groups form at winter warm-water sites, at rich feeding grounds and around females ready to mate.

Much of the day is spent resting on the bottom or just below the surface. An active manatee breathes every few minutes, while a resting one may stay down for up to about 20 minutes. Manatees normally cruise at 5–8 km/h (3–5 mph) but can sprint at roughly 25–30 km/h (15–20 mph) for short distances.

Manatees communicate with chirps, squeaks and squeals, especially between mothers and calves, and studies suggest that individuals have recognizable voices. Their hearing is good, but the hum of an approaching boat can be hard to pick out in noisy, shallow water. Touch also matters: the whiskers on the face and body can detect textures and the movement of water, helping manatees find their way in murky channels.

Reproduction and life cycle

Manatees can breed at any time of year, although in Florida most mating and births take place in spring and summer. When a female is ready to mate, a “mating herd” of several males, sometimes up to about 20, follows her for days or weeks and competes to mate with her. There are no lasting pairs, and males take no part in raising the young.

After a pregnancy of 12–14 months, the female gives birth to a single calf, or very rarely twins, underwater. The newborn is 1.2–1.4 m (4–4.5 ft) long and weighs about 27–32 kg (60–70 lb). Calves nurse from teats located behind the mother’s flippers and start nibbling plants within a few weeks, but they usually stay with their mother for one to two years. During that time they learn the routes to feeding areas and the warm-water sites they will return to every winter.

Females can conceive from about three to five years old, although most first raise a calf successfully when they are older. Because a female usually has only one calf every two to five years, manatee populations recover slowly from losses.

How long do manatees live?

Florida manatees can live for 60 years or more in the wild, but many die much younger because of boats, cold winters and red tide. Scientists estimate the age of dead manatees by counting growth layers in their ear bones.

The best-known long-lived manatees were raised in captivity. Snooty, who lived at a museum aquarium in Bradenton, Florida, died in 2017 at the age of 69. In February 2026, Guinness World Records recognized Romeo, a Florida manatee at the Gulfarium Marine Adventure Park in Fort Walton Beach, as the oldest manatee on record, at an estimated 71 years.

Predators and threats

Healthy adult manatees have almost no natural predators. Large sharks, American alligators and American crocodiles may occasionally attack one, but such cases are rare. Because they evolved without many enemies, manatees have little instinct to flee, which makes them vulnerable to human threats.

• Boat strikes: Collisions with boats cause roughly a fifth or more of known manatee deaths in Florida in many years, and nearly all adult carcasses examined carry scars from earlier strikes.
• Cold stress: Long cold spells can kill manatees that cannot reach warm water. A harsh winter in 2010 caused about 280 cold-related deaths.
• Red tide: Blooms of the toxic alga Karenia brevis poison manatees through the water, the air and the seagrass they eat. Red tide killed a record 276 manatees in 2013.
• Loss of seagrass: Pollution and algal blooms have wiped out large seagrass meadows, especially in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon. In 2021 a record of about 1,100 Florida manatees died, many of them from starvation.
• Entanglement and debris: Fishing line and crab trap ropes can cut into flippers, and swallowed plastic can block the gut. Flood-control gates and canal locks can also crush or trap manatees.
• Hunting and bycatch: In parts of the Caribbean, Central America and South America, Antillean manatees are still poached for meat or drown in fishing nets.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List classifies the West Indian manatee as Vulnerable, based on an assessment completed in 2023. It estimates about 8,200–11,300 mature animals in total and expects the species to keep declining. The Florida subspecies is also listed as Vulnerable, while the smaller and more scattered Antillean subspecies, with an estimated 2,100 or so mature animals, is Endangered and decreasing.

In the United States, the Florida manatee was among the first animals listed as endangered in 1967. Decades of boating speed zones, sanctuaries and habitat protection helped numbers rise, and in 2017 the species was reclassified from endangered to threatened. A 2021–2022 survey estimated about 9,800 manatees in Florida, within a range of roughly 8,350–11,730. In January 2025 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed keeping the Florida manatee as threatened while listing the Antillean manatee as endangered. The full story, including the mass die-off of 2021, is told in Are manatees endangered?

Manatees are also protected by the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 and the Florida Manatee Sanctuary Act of 1978. The Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge was created in 1983 specifically to protect them.

Manatees and people

People have hunted manatees for meat, oil and hides for thousands of years, from Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean to European colonists. Commercial hunting for meat and leather continued in parts of Latin America well into the 20th century and wiped manatees out of many coasts, including most of the Lesser Antilles. Some historians think manatees also inspired sailors’ stories of mermaids, including a well-known entry in Christopher Columbus’s diary from 1493.

Today manatees are a major attraction in Florida. Every winter, visitors watch hundreds of them from the boardwalks at Blue Spring State Park and from viewing areas in Crystal River and Apollo Beach.

Watching manatees is best done from a distance. In the United States it is illegal to feed, touch, chase or harass them, and boaters must follow posted slow-speed zones where manatees live.