This Dave Barry column was originally published April, 26 1998

As a nature-lover, I enjoy seeing animals in their native wilderness habitat, provided that it is within 20 yards of plumbing and fast food. So recently I journeyed into the heart of the city of Miami (proud motto: "No Top Elected Officials Indicted So Far This Week") to see the wild manatees.

Manatees are large, benign, vegetarian creatures that spend their lives in the water, although they are mammals, just like whales, or dolphins, or human beings who have not graduated from law school. A full-grown manatee, which can weigh more than a thousand pounds, looks like the result of a genetic experiment involving a walrus and the Goodyear Blimp. We are not talking about active, otter-like animals, here: We're talking about animals that generally display the same level of friskiness as the Chrysler building. If manatees kept their schedules on those little organizers that businesspersons are always consulting, a typical working day might look like this:

10 a.m. -- 2:14 p.m. -- Float.

2:15 -- 2:17 p.m. -- Emit three to four blooping, aromatic bubbles of manatee gas.

2:18 p.m. -- dusk -- Continue floating.

This schedule may not look productive, but it puts manatees ahead of most branches of the federal government. The manatees have pursued this lifestyle for eons, and things were going pretty well for them until the Earth's climate changed, allowing the emergence of one of the most dangerous forces in all of nature: the recreational motorboater. I used to do some recreational motorboating, and I can tell you for a fact that there are recreational boaters out there whose nautical alertness is such that they would not immediately notice if they drove their boats into a shopping center food court.

The result is that boaters often hit manatees. Nevertheless the manatees return, over and over, to the same boat-infested areas, because they are big believers in tradition, and also because, to put it diplomatically, if the animal kingdom were an elementary school, the manatees would not be in the gifted class.

Fortunately, the manatees have friends, including a Miami group called The Manatee Project. A researcher who works for this organization, Kit Curtin, offered to take me to see a group of manatees who hang out in one of the waterways that pass through downtown Miami, on the condition that I would not reveal where the hangout is. Kit wanted to keep it a secret because, aside from boats, the other big threat to manatees is the public. It's a well-known fact that although the public is fine when taken individually, when it forms itself into large groups, it tends to act as though it has one partially consumed Pez tablet for a brain. So when the public finds manatees, it often hassles them, or worse, it "helps" them by feeding them such foods as pizza, which you rarely find growing naturally in the underwater environment.

The Secret Manatee Hangout turned out to be in what is sometimes called a "changing" neighborhood, in the sense of, if you were there alone at night, you would be changing your underwear often. There's a fair amount of criminal activity, although Kit told me that some of the criminal elements are quite protective of the manatees; when these elements are not threatening to kill people over drug deals, they are helping to preserve the planet's delicate ecological balance by threatening to kill people who hassle the manatees. Al Gore take note!