We couldn’t leave Brazil without seeing a manatee (or at least a manatee biologist), and the best place to do that happened to be a short taxi ride from the hotel. Right in the centre of Manaus.
I remembered meeting a charming and delightful manatee biologist (how can someone who devotes their entire working life to studying manatees be anything but charming and delightful?) at the National Institute for Amazon Research. In fact, Douglas Adams and I had spent a couple of days with her, along with several orphaned manatees in her care, when we were in Manaus in the late 1980s.
Almost one-fifth of the entire Amazon rainforest has been destroyed since 1970.
Vera da Silva was still at the Institute (known locally as the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazonas – or INPA) and was as charming and delightful as I remembered her. She was one of a handful of people responsible for discovering most of what we know about Amazonian manatees (which, as it happens, isn’t very much – but that’s not their fault).
We agreed wholeheartedly that neither of us had changed one little bit in twenty years and walked towards a large concrete tank, complete with two enormous windows and four adult Amazonian manatees.
They were farting and sleeping. As we approached, one of them started walking along the bottom of the tank – literally walking, using its long, stubby front flippers to pull itself along in a bouncy, slow-motion way, like an astronaut walking on the moon. We couldn’t believe our luck: an active manatee.
Stephen stood and watched it for a few moments.
‘Oh my, I think I’m in love,’ he said, utterly spellbound. ‘They’ve got that slow grace that big animals, such as elephants, seem to have.’
We stood and watched the manatees farting and pretending to be weightless, plump and graceful at the same time, and marvelled at their sheer loveableness.
You’re probably wondering why we were so taken with these preposterous animals, and I can understand your scepticism. The problem, I think, is that Amazonian manatees don’t photograph particularly well (that’s not a criticism – I don’t photograph well, either, as my passport photograph spectacularly testifies). Look at a picture of a manatee in a book and you get the impression of an animal that only its mother, or a zoologist, could possibly find attractive.
An Amazonian manatee gasping for breath after hearing that Mark is about to get in its tank, and another one being filmed by cameraman Will Edwards.
But we were completely captivated. They looked so gentle, so harmless, so innocent … so sweet. I can’t believe I just said that. I never say an animal is ‘sweet’. It’s so unprofessional. In my defence, though, it was actually Stephen who said it first – more of a ‘sooooo sweeeeeeet’. And, besides, he’s absolutely right.
We’d been filming for over an hour, trying to think of other, more colourful and imaginative words to describe our new-found friends, and were failing miserably. I think it was the heat. We were trying to do it in the relentless glare of the tropical sun.
The day we visited the Institute was staggeringly hot and humid. Having said that, describing any particular day in Manaus as staggeringly hot and humid is a little like describing one particular sloth as exceptionally upside down. It’s rarely anything else.
Give me sub-zero temperatures, biting winds and icicles hanging off the end of my nose any day. I find high humidity a source of unadulterated misery. For most of the trip, every morning arrived complete with a full body sweat that stayed with me for the rest of the day. After a while, I had the permanent look of a red-faced Japanese macaque in a hot spring and felt hugely embarrassed about it from the moment we set foot in Brazil to the moment we left.
A couple of times I noticed super-cool Vera giving me a strange look as streams of perspiration trickled down my neck, off my chin, across my forehead and into my eyes like a series of dripping taps. She must have thought I’d been sweating buckets nonstop in the twenty years since we’d first met.
But I had a crafty plan to cool off and have a really close encounter with a manatee at the same time. I was also very keen to take some underwater shots – few people have had the chance to photograph these secretive creatures. I asked Vera if I could get in the tank. She hesitated for a moment, glanced at the colossal pile of diving kit I happened to have with me, just in case, and said ‘yes’.
I spent two glorious hours under water, with the four manatees and about four tonnes of manatee poo. I think they were excited. In fact, by the time I was ready to get out, there was so much excitement in the water I could barely see the manatees themselves.
They were a little nervous at first (who can blame them?) but got increasingly confident and inquisitive and, by the end of my dive, were out-and-out friendly. They peered into my mask, gently touched me with their tails and even nuzzled me with their rubbery snouts. Every time I tried to photograph one, another would inevitably be watching closely from the sidelines. If they had cameras, I swear they would have been taking pictures too.
Feeding a baby manatee with bottled milk – some people get all the best jobs.
Gently, I ran my hand over the largest manatee’s back. He didn’t seem to mind. It was surprisingly bristly. At first glance Amazonian manatees look bald, but their bodies are sparsely covered in short, wiry hairs (about one per square centimetre: eight per square inch) that are connected to a rich network of nerves. These are believed to give them a kind of sixth sense – by detecting slight pressure changes underwater – that may explain how the animals are able to navigate in their murky riverine home without bumping into things.
Nothing would have compared to encountering an Amazonian manatee in its natural habitat, of course, but a couple of hours in INPA’s tank was the next best thing.
I doubt if I will ever get another chance. As manatee numbers diminish, it will get increasingly difficult to see them wild and free. Rainforest destruction, dam building and accidental drowning in commercial fishing nets have all been taking their toll. Hunting, too, has long been a major threat. More than 200,000 were killed during the period 1935–54, for their meat, oil and hides, and although hunting at commercial levels has largely stopped, many thousands have been killed in the years since.
I couldn’t stop thinking, while making friends with ‘my’ four manatees, how their placid temperament (like that of the iconic dodo) made them all too easy to drive towards extinction.
It’s impossible to say how many are left. Maybe 10,000; maybe more, maybe fewer. But let me put it this way. In the 1980s, there were reports of as many as 1,000 manatees huddled together in a single river or lake. Nowadays, a gathering of half a dozen is considered quite a lot.
I would have stayed in the tank for longer, but Vera was keen to show us her babies. Hidden away in a quiet corner of the Institute were three more tanks. These were much smaller than the main one – more like the kind of paddling pools children in Kensington or Chelsea might play in – and provided a temporary home for half a dozen orphaned manatees.
As well as studying manatees, the staff at INPA provide round-the-clock care and attention for injured adults and orphaned calves. More and more youngsters had been arriving at this makeshift rehabilitation centre in recent years, and no one knew why. Perhaps it indicated a growing population or a greater awareness among the local people? More likely, it was an alarming sign