NGOs save Belizean manatees from deadly boat collisions

From an article by Rob Goodier from Eco-Exchange, a publication of the Rainforest Alliance:

Boaters and manatees have a fabled history of killing each other, often inadvertently. Early sailors are rumored to have confused the gray seagrass grazers with mermaids. Their... well... curvaceous figures and "fish" tails caused enamored captains to wreck their ships, which says more about the effect of weeks at sea on a man than it does about the manatee's good looks. This phenomenon lent the creatures the name of their scientific order, Sirenia, and now gives boat guides a good joke for manatee watching tourists.

Eventually sailors no longer fell for the siren's lure, so the fatalities became one-sided, starting with man's hunting one manatee species, the Steller's seacow (Hydrodamalis gigas), to extinction in the mid-18th century, and continuing today with the accidental maiming and killing by boat propellers, a leading threat to manatees.

Nicole Auil, program director for the Wildlife Trust in Belize, is working to reduce boat injuries of the Antillean manatee, one of two subspecies of the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus). Though manatees are one of the great marine mammals, little is known about their behavior or populations. The best studied are the West Indian manatees that cruise the warm, shallow coasts and estuaries of the Caribbean and Mexico. They are divided into two subspecies, commonly called the Florida manatee and Auil's specialty, the Antillean.