‘Danger,’ the tiny manatee calf, rescued in Florida Keys after being orphaned
A very small, orphaned manatee calf is headed to Orlando for rehabilitation after being rescued Tuesday by concerned boaters and a fish and wildlife officer in the Florida Keys.
Shannon and Alex Constantinides were heading out to the flats off Key Largo Tuesday morning to target smaller backcountry fish. Shannon, 42, recently had back surgery and didn’t want to risk injuring herself in rougher, deeper water, or by pulling up a big tarpon on the flats.
As they made their way through South Creek into Largo Sound within John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, they thought they saw what looked to them like a struggling grouper in the No Wake zone.
When they got closer, it turned out to be a very young manatee calf.
“We thought, ‘it is way too small to be on its own.’ It was struggling against the current and looked super fatigued,” Shannon, who along with her husband, works in sports medicine in Colorado when not staying at their house in Key Largo.
Alex, 52, carefully drove the couple’s boat around the area hoping to see if there was an adult manatee in the vicinity that might be the mammal’s mother, but they didn’t see any.
They then called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s Wildlife Alert Hotline, and an FWC officer was dispatched to their location.
“We kept an eye on it, and kept other boats away from it, until Officer Jason Rafter arrived,” Shannon said. “I’ve never been so excited to see a law enforcement boat show up!”
The calf was so small, Rafter and Alex Constantinides were able to scoop him up in a regular fishing net, Shannon said.
Amber Howell, an FWC biologist who responded to the scene, said the calf is a male, probably less than a month old, and measuring a little over 3 feet long and weighing 43 pounds.
Manatees typically stay with their mothers for up to two years, but Howell and her team aren’t sure what happened to this calf’s mom.
“Right now, we have no conclusion on what happened to the mother. There have been no manatee carcass sightings in the area, so we have no conclusion she passed away,” Howell, 37, who’s been with the FWC for 15 years, said.
Theories at the moment range from the calf simply got lost or the mother was “too young to have a calf and didn’t know what to do,” Howell said.
Manatee rescues can be difficult, time-consuming endeavors. The large, herbivorous mammals, which can grow to more than 13 feet long and weigh up to 3,500 pounds, can be deceptively fast in short bursts with a flick of the tail. Trying to catch them can take hours.
However, Howell said Rafter and Alex Constantinides caught the calf within seconds because he was wiped out and pushed into the mangroves from struggling against the current so long.
“I’m glad they got him before we got there,” Howell jokingly said.
The next stop for the calf, named Danger by his rescuers because he was found near a sign in the creek that warns of a “Dangerous Bend,” is SeaWorld in Orlando, where he’ll be rehabilitated for eventual release back to the wild, Howell added.
The rehab process will likely take two to three years, because they must be more than 600 pounds before being released.
To report a distressed manatee or any other marine mammal, call the FWC’s hotline at 888-404-FWCC (888-404-3922).
This story was originally published April 15, 2025 at 8:57 PM.
