The Trinidadians also seemed to recognize this and stayed put. You might recognize this as the aquatic equivalent of a dude in an unmarked white van asking you to approach his vehicle. Hoping they would want to trade, he tried to wave them over. Drawing from the writings of Marco Polo, Columbus figured he may have found natives of India who had gold, spices, and people he could enslave. As his ship approached the shore, the explorer spotted people in ornate headscarves near canoes. Per National Geographic, Columbus had plotted a course (for a place he didn't find) and ended up in Trinidad. Why did he specifically reference lady lumps in his assessment? Maybe he was thinking with his man mast. Rather than assuming he made a mistake, he reasoned that the ancient Greeks goofed when they determined the world was spherical. The weather and water seemed wrong, the North Star looked misaligned, and he felt like he was sailing skyward. However, he thought he had reached Asia and noticed discrepancies between his observations and expectations. He also asserted that at the peak of Planet Mammary sat the Garden of Eden -– or as the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert called it, "the nipple of the world." Clearly, this raises some questions, such as, "would that make grass the world's chest hair?" and "are clouds Earth's cotton bra?" But the most pressing question is unquestionably "why?"Ĭolumbus arrived at his idea in 1498 after reaching the coast of Venezuela during his third voyage. But he believed it had a round base and an upright bulge shaped "like a woman's breast," according to the Florida Museum. So join with us in celebrating sirenians on Manatee Appreciation Day.Actually, it's unclear if Columbus thought Earth jiggled. The latter was applied to the fictitious bird-women in Homer’s Odyssey, who lured unwitting sailors to their deaths by singing so beautifully that the mariners sailed towards them, wrecking their ships on nearby rocks. That crossover endures today in the name of the order Sirenia, from the word "siren". During his first journey to the Americas, Christopher Columbus noted in his journal: "On the previous day (8 January 1493), when the Admiral went to the Rio del Oro, he said he quite distinctly saw three mermaids, which rose well out of the sea but they are not so beautiful as they are said to be, for their faces had some masculine traits." … which makes it even more unlikely that manatees were once taken for graceful mermaids. They retain the gas when rising to the surface when diving, they unleash a flatulent gas release and sink! Remember all that vegetation they munch on? Well, it produces digestive gas, which the manatees use to advantage. The longest authenticated dive for a sirenian is 24 min, for a West Indian manatee in Florida, USA. With each breath, they can replace around 90% of the air in their lungs (by contrast, humans replace around 10% of pulmonary air when we breathe). Manatees come to the surface to breathe every five minutes or so. You can find out more about this much-loved (and much-missed) marine mammal here: "He’s definitely more interested in people than other manatees," South Florida Museum’s Jessica Schubick admitted. On his 67th birthday, the museum was swamped with congratulatory birthday cards. Snooty won legions of fans around the world. Their diet includes seagrass on which they graze – hence the common name “sea-cows”, a nod to their bovine terrestrial namesakes. In the wild, manatees consume up to 10% of their body weight every day. And plenty of food too: this quartet of voracious herbivores could get through more than 36,290 kg (80,000 lb) of romaine lettuce and vegetables per year. lived in a 230,000-litre (60,000-US-gal) pool, giving them plenty of space to roam. The safe, controlled environment at South Florida Museum was doubtless one of the reasons for Snooty’s great longevity. In the wild, threats both natural (e.g., algal blooms) and human-generated (e.g., boat strikes and hunting) have seen the species become classified as endangered. In fact, according to the museum, Snooty’s birth in 1948 at the Miami Aquarium was the first documented birth of a manatee in captivity. (The typical lifespan for a West Indian manatee is 30–40 years.) Since the age of two, he’d lived at the South Florida Museum in Bradenton, USA, along with three other male manatees: Randall, Baca and Gale. He was born on 21 July 1948 and passed away on 23 July 2017, two days after his 69th birthday. Swim forward Snooty, the oldest manatee in captivity ever. These rounded, slow-moving marine mammals – also known as sea-cows – are hugely endearing, and one in particular had his very own Guinness World Records title…
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