Dead manatee found along Patuxent shore

Florida native likely killed by winter

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

A 9-foot male Florida manatee carcass was discovered by a Calvert Marine Museum employee the evening of April 12 along the Patuxent River shore, a rare find that might be the first of its kind in Maryland.

Skip Edwards, a model maker at the Solomons museum, was passing by an area about two miles north of Point Patience where he frequently stops for a morning cup of coffee when he noticed an unusual number of buzzards flocking above the shore.

Edwards went to investigate the shoreline and happened upon the carcass, which he initially mistook for a pig.

But after getting a closer look at it, Edwards said he could tell it was a manatee because of its resemblance to a replica model that was made at the museum.

Still, the decayed and scavenged remains were a far shot from a living, breathing animal.

"It was sort of flattened," Edwards said of the carcass. "It looked like basically, turned upside down, but it looked like a plastic bag filled with bones."

Edwards called Stephen Godfrey, the museum's curator of paleontology, who quickly confirmed the skeleton as being that of a manatee.

"He was all excited. You know how them guys get," Edwards said.

The museum worked alongside the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to document the remains and perform a necropsy.

Manatees are warm-water mammals that sometimes migrate north along the inter-coastal waterway during summer months.

While Florida manatees have been spotted alive in Maryland waters since the mid-1990s, a dead specimen had never been recorded in the state before.

The carcass may have been that of a manatee spotted in the Patuxent River last September, according to a museum release.

"This is pretty rare. As far as we know it's the first one that's been stranded in Maryland," said John Nance, paleontology collections manager at the museum. "They usually find their way back to Florida."

The carcass was too decomposed to determine a definite cause of death, but undigested grass in the mammal's stomach suggested it didn't die of malnutrition but probably succumbed to hypothermia during the winter, when Maryland waters are far too cold for manatees to survive, Nance said.

The carcass probably floated ashore as spring temperatures warmed the river, according to the release.

Once the necropsy was finished — "It was messy, and it was pretty smelly," Nance said — museum staff removed most of the remaining flesh and skin and transported the carcass to the Smithsonian Institution's Silver Hill annex in Suitland, where the bones are being completely cleaned of flesh.

Despite the decay, nearly the entire skeleton was recovered, Nance said.

The museum would like to maintain the bones and possibly create an exhibit, but will defer to the Smithsonian if the latter decides it would like to keep the skeleton, Nance said.

The museum actually added to the discovery Monday when Nance and Godfrey took an eighth-grade student to the beach in search of more bones as part of the Calvert County Mentoring Partnership's Job Shadow Day.

"When we collected the skeleton we were pretty sure we didn't have everything," Nance said. "So we wanted to go back during low tide and make sure we didn't miss anything."

Evidently, they did — the mentoring dig turned up four rib bones that were left behind.

They were quickly cleaned and will likely remain with the museum, Nance said.

jnewman@somdnews.com