By Eva Dasher
On a bright summer day, when the temperature hasn’t yet chased everyone indoors and the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens is teeming with excited children recently released from school, I peer into a tank at the Manatee Critical Care Center (MCCC) and spot two manatees gently swirling around each other in the lettuce-covered water.
“We have two manatees in here right now. One is Applejack, we just microchipped her today because she is going to be released soon. She came here with two calves. One of them is at the Georgia Aquarium and the youngest one, he got hit by a boat and that is why all three of them came to the zoo,” explains Dani Perez, one of the zoo’s manatee care specialists. “The other one who’s pretty notable because she has that white back, that’s Nymeria. She’s been with us since August of 2021. She beached herself right down by the ferry. When they beach themselves, they are either getting away from a mating herd or for her, she was really ill. So, we rescued her quickly and she had a normal gray back and then it started blistering—it almost looked like a severe sunburn.”
Nymeria soon began to suffer severe skin loss and required a surgical procedure. “We debrided about 10 pounds of dead tissue from her back,” says Perez. After months of daily skin treatments, Nymeria started to heal and now has a large white scar covering her back as a permanent reminder of her ordeal. “She has done amazingly well. We still don’t know what caused it but there’s lots of theories.”
For manatees like Applejack and Nymeria, the zoo’s MCCC is the only such critical care center in the region and is the northernmost center in the country. “We’ve been picking up animals as far as the Carolinas, they’re moving farther north, and we are the farthest north facility. We receive them first and we may check them out and triage them or send them somewhere else or we will keep them if we can,” says Cullen Richart, the zoo’s construction projects manager. What Richart means by keeping them if they can, is that the MCCC currently only has room to rehabilitate five to six manatees. Fortunately, that will all change by late 2025 when the zoo’s highly anticipated Manatee River habitat will debut with the ability to care for 15 additional manatees. Now under construction, the Manatee River is part of the zoo’s spectacular completely reimagined entrance area that will be positioned at the center of the zoo, rather than at one end. A big part of the new entrance is that “you can literally come in and make a loop, so you don’t have to double back in at all,” says Jeffery Ettling, the zoo’s president and CEO. And central to that entrance will be the Manatee River habitat.
