Thank you Jonathan!! Jonathan Perez-Rivera left Gabon last night after spending the past 4 months working with orphan calf Victor and training his Gabonese caretakers. Victor is now steadily gaining weight and we’re learning valuable new information about the growth of West African manatees through the data Jonathan carefully collected. We hope he can return to Gabon to continue working with Victor once he finishes […]

News for the week of May 23, 2011 A new online article about my manatee work in Senegal was posted yesterday and they used some of my photos… click here to read it! I arrived back in Libreville, Gabon late last night after a 42 hour journey from Florida. All 190 lbs of my gear made it with me and it’s wonderful to be back

Victor continues to grow! Victor, the orphan manatee calf being rehabilitated in southern Gabon has now reached 30kg! This is a good milestone because it has taken a long time for him to steadily gain weight. When he was rescued he weighed 27 kg, but he lost weight for awhile before he adjusted to his diet of soy milk. For manatees (unlike people) fat is

Senegal: Manatee hunter gives up killing in favor of conservation! Very exciting news from Senegal…. a manatee hunter whose family has been working in the Casamance River for generations has decided to end all manatee hunting and work towards manatee conservation! Last week he gave his harpoon to Tomas Diagne, a manatee researcher in Senegal, as a symbol of his decision. Oceanium Dakar and Tomas

Recent network collaborator fieldwork Here are some recent photos of colleagues in Angola and Nigeria using new field sampling equipment during their manatee surveys. I was able to send them this equipment thanks to several generous grants (much appreciated by both myself and the African researchers!). This equipment, which seems so basic to us in the USA but is so difficult to get in Africa,

The Manatee Scientists The Manatee Scientists book highlighting some of my work in Africa (as well as Amazon and Florida manatee research) has just been released! I’m pretty excited after working with author Peter Lourie for the past 2 years. It’s already listed on Amazon where you can see inside it (click on the title above). I’m biased of course, but I think it looks

Victor photos New photos of the orphan manatee calf in Gabon, courtesy of Jonathan, the Masters student from Puerto Rico who is there working with him until April. Victor’s skin lesions are healing well… He is getting regular medical exams. Here Jonathan listens to his heart rate. Victor sill needs to be bottle fed every few hours Taking Victor’s weight. They’ll need a bigger scale

Update on Victor, the orphan manatee calf in Gabon A manatee Masters student from Puerto Rico, Jonathan, has traveled to Gabon to work with the manatee for several months and it’s going really well so far! After losing some weight the calf is now putting the pounds back on again. Below is a message to Tony Mignucci in Puerto Rico (who arranged for Jonathan to

Happy 2011!! The silence on the blog is due to my travel back to the USA in the end of December. I recently moved my USA base to Gainesville, Florida where I’m working on my PhD focusing on West African manatees at the University of Florida. This semester I’m taking classes, giving several presentations and working to analyze more genetics samples in the lab, so