Marble Manatee

Manatees are the gentle giants of warm coastal waters. They spend their days grazing quietly in shallow rivers, bays and estuaries, and every so often one wanders a long way from home. In September 2025, one turned up right here on the Jersey Shore, in the Shark River at Belmar.

"It was hanging out there for over an hour. It was beautiful."

, Josh Vallario of Belmar, to FOX Weather (2025)

The Florida manatee, Trichechus manatus latirostris, is one of two subspecies of the West Indian manatee; the other, the Antillean manatee, lives from Mexico and the Caribbean to northeastern Brazil. Adults are typically 9 to 10 feet long and weigh around 1,000 pounds, though some reach more than 13 feet and 3,500 pounds. A calf weighs 60 to 70 pounds at birth. It is also Florida's official state marine mammal. Manatees eat plants, mostly seagrass and other aquatic vegetation, and move freely between fresh, brackish and salt water. They cannot tolerate water below about 68 degrees Fahrenheit for long, so in winter they gather in peninsular Florida at natural springs and the warm outflows of power plants. In summer they spread out, and the Fish and Wildlife Service says their range may reach Delaware Bay and potentially beyond.

• Prolonged cold causes "cold stress," when a manatee loses body heat and cannot digest its food properly; it can be fatal.
• In 2017 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reclassified the West Indian manatee from endangered to threatened. It is still protected under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
• The Service estimated 6,620 Florida manatees in 2017, up from a few hundred in the 1970s.
• Because they are large and slow, boat strikes are among the leading causes of manatee deaths.
• The Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine has responded to five manatee strandings in New Jersey since 1978.

The Belmar manatee was first seen on the morning of Saturday, September 6, 2025, when Harry Conover and his father went out on the Shark River for bait and found it gliding along the bulkheads and docks of a lagoon near the inlet. "We come across a 12-foot manatee," Conover told News 12 New Jersey. "It was just absolutely incredible." They were the first to report it to the Marine Mammal Stranding Center. Hours later it was a few feet from Josh Vallario's floating dock, behind his house on a private lagoon. He first took it for a garbage can blown into the water, then called his wife and daughters out to watch. "They are the gentle cows of the ocean," he said. Photos of the visitor soon went viral on social media. "I was shocked to see a manatee up in these waters," Vallario told NBC10 Philadelphia. On Sunday, local photographer Kate Watt filmed it swimming slowly through the river.

The Stranding Center confirmed it was a Florida manatee and said it looked healthy and did not need help. The center believed it was the same animal seen off Cape Cod in late July and later off Rhode Island and Connecticut. Manatees sometimes follow warm currents north in summer and head back as the water cools in fall. Its last confirmed sighting, the center said, was on Sunday night, swimming actively close to the inlet. "It's not unheard of anymore. These guys do make their way up north," Jay Pagel of the center told News 12 New Jersey. The center said it would keep monitoring the manatee, and that if it stayed on as the water cooled, it might send a relocation team. The advice was simple: stay at least 150 feet away, do not feed it or offer it water, slow down if you are on a boat, and report any sighting to the center's 24-hour hotline at 609-266-0538. The center asked anyone who spotted it to take a photo and send the location right away, and experts told NBC10 it could next turn up in the waterways of Ocean, Atlantic or Cape May counties.

Belmar's visitor was not the first to come this far. In 1994 a manatee nicknamed Chessie lingered in the Chesapeake Bay into the fall and was rescued and flown back to Florida. The next summer, wearing a satellite tag, he swam north again, up the Chesapeake, along the New Jersey shore, through New York City's East River and as far as Point Judith, Rhode Island, which the Fish and Wildlife Service then called the farthest north and east a Florida manatee had been documented. In October 2009 a manatee later named Ilya was pulled from a creek at an oil refinery in Linden, cared for at the Brigantine center and flown to Florida on a Coast Guard C-130. Ilya died in 2018 after being struck by a boat off the Florida coast, and in 2020 another manatee was found dead on a beach in Middle Township, Cape May County. Chessie himself turned up again in Calvert County, Maryland, in July 2011, identified by U.S. Geological Survey biologists from the markings on his body, and in 2021 he was rescued in poor condition from Florida's Lake Worth Lagoon, nursed back to health at SeaWorld and released that May.

About This Piece

• Carved marble manatee, sized for a shelf or mantel
• Polished gray-green finish
• Rests on a carved red and tan base
• Natural stone, so color and markings vary from piece to piece
• Shipping weight: 5 lb
• A nice keepsake for the manatee lover in the family

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