Hi, I’m Sam Anderson. This is my podcast, “Animal.” Follow me on a journey to meet new creatures and the people who love them.
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If you ever catch me staring off into space, with maybe a whole ice cream cone melting down my arm, or bath water spilling all over the floor, don’t be alarmed — I’m just imagining myself many miles away, floating in a tropical lagoon, bobbing around with some of my favorite creatures on earth: manatees. This is one of my go-to forms of stress relief. I find it extremely relaxing, a form of meditation. (Manatation?) Because, in my manatee fantasies, I can just float there. There’s nothing to do, nowhere to go, no deadlines, no schedules. I can just be.
Do you know what a manatee is? Maybe you’re thinking of a seal, or a walrus. But a manatee is something else entirely.
A manatee is a very strange creature: a huge underwater pudgy dumpling, so thick and awkward and galumphing that it’s often referred to as a “sea cow.” Except manatees are much weirder looking than cows. If you ever drove past a field of cows that looked like manatees, you would immediately crash into 800 other cars that had also stopped and crashed out of sheer amazement.
Manatees are shaped sort of like croissants, but if the croissant were the size of a VW bus. They have two little front flippers that are bent like boomerangs, plus a giant round tail the size of a manhole cover. They are gray, like elephants, which they’re actually closely related to. (Many millions of years ago, one ancestor stayed up on land and became elephants, one went down into the swamps and became manatees.) And they have big droopy soft snouts. I swear their faces look kind.