[Music] [Music] thank you hi Rachel hi Miss Penny I am so excited to learn about manatees today we're so excited to have you here great what is a manatee a manatee is a Marine Mammal so Marine means it spends its whole life in the water and a mammal is an animal that has hair on its body breathes Air does not lay eggs so they have live birth and drinks milk from its mom when it's a baby wow manatees do all that yeah just like we do we're mammals too where do they live anywhere where there's warm shallow water with lots of food what kind of food do they eat their favorite food is seagrass but they'll eat any plants they can find so this is our little Manatee friend here and we're going to learn about the different parts of the manatee so we'll start here at the tail so the tail of a manatee is called a paddle and they use that to swim in the water so they don't have legs like you and I do to walk around on land since they spend their whole life in the water they have that strong tail to help them swim the next part of the manatee that we could talk about are the flippers so inside of these slippers they have all the same bones that we have in our hands but it's kind of like wearing an oven mitt where they only have control to bend it up and down they can use those flippers to help shovel food to their mouths when they eat and when they eat they use their lips so they have really cool lips that are split in the center so our lip is just one lip on top they have a split lip that they can use to help grab Foods so they're flippers and their lips help them grab food and seagrass and pull it up to eat it there is so much to learn about manatees let's go [Music] foreign wow this is amazing what is this these are Believe It or Not life-sized Manatee statues so they're about 10 feet tall which is as long as the average Manatee and they weigh about a thousand pounds wow they must have to eat a lot if they get to be a thousand pounds they do the average Manatee is going to be to eat about a hundred pounds of seagrass every day oh my goodness that's a lot of sea grass yeah and the baby manatee is a life-size baby manatee so babies are about four feet long when they're first born so these help give you a scale of how big manatees really are and Miss Penny do you notice anything about their flippers that might look kind of similar to our hands it looks like they have nails yes manatees have fingernails on their flippers just like we have fingernails on our fingers so would you like to learn a little bit more about some of their bones I'd love to let's go check it out let's go [Music] wow okay Vision kids look at all the bones that the manatee has [Music] shiny what do you have there a skeleton is a framework of bones that hold up bodies and look manatees have some really big bones that must mean that they are pretty big animals thank you shiny do you want to find out more about the bones of a manatee let's find out [Music] all right everyone we're gonna look at some Manatee bones so what do you think this is the rib cage these are this is a manatees rib so this is the same thing this is another rib but look what we did what did we do to this one we cut it in half do you want to know why we cut it in half to show everyone that the bones of a manatee are totally solid look at that there's bone all the way through our our bone salad no our bones have something called narrow inside of them it's a soft tissue Manatee bones are completely hard all the way through so do you think that means that they're heavier or lighter than ours heavier do you all want to hold a manatee bone all right everybody step back we're gonna use both hands to hold it oh [Music] who remembers what manatees eat seagrass fantastic so we have some fake seagrass here for us to play with seagrass is a plant seagrass is a plant that grows in the ocean so manatees are something called herbivores that means they eat plants do manatees have fingers does everyone here have fingers everybody wiggle your fingers [Music] everyone's gonna put on an oven mitt that's kind of like a Manitou slipper so now that I put this Flipper on can you can I move my fingers not really right I can only go like this with them try and grab a piece of seagrass [Music] thank you [Music] do you all know what this is yeah what is it garbage it's garbage it's fishing line pollution is any sort of garbage or trash that ends up in the environment or in the water that could hurt these animals so when manatees are eating all this seagrass do you think that things like this could be dangerous for them yes they could get tangled in it and they could get stuck or they might accidentally eat it so now we're gonna put some of this pollution or trash into our seagrass we're going to play our activity again this time we're going to put our mittens on and we're going to try and only take a piece of seagrass without getting any of the trash all right and so I don't really know the difference between the pollution and the Sea grass I have to be very careful that I choose the right things and I don't know so I might eat it by accident when I'm picking it up and then what's going to happen to me yeah I could get sick okay dire I could get sick so that's why people have to be very careful not to pollute the waters and the seagrass where the manatees on thank you so much for telling us about how manatees eat and how we have to be careful about pollution because it's very dangerous for the manatees around us what else can we find out about manatees well why don't we go learn what other kind of things manatees need to survive thank you a habitat is the natural home or environment of a plant or an animal a habitat contains all the things a plant or animal needs to survive such as food water space and shelter estuaries are habitats for many types of marine life [Music] So today we're going to use this sheet in order to pretend that it's all the manatees habitat what are some of the threats to manatees that we talked about what are some of the dangers to manatees pollution was one of them so all this water guess what happened all this habitat some of it got polluted and it made it unsafe for the manatees to live in oh no what's going to happen to the manatee and we're gonna fold it in half because now there's not as much left because some of it got polluted now what else is a danger to manatees boats are dangerous to manatees they can get hit by boats and leave a scarf so some of this area is being used up by lots and lots of boats so it's not safe for the manatees so now we're going to fold it in half again perfect and sometimes habitat can get lost people like to build in these areas that the animals live so now some of these areas got built up and we're going to fold it again now it's tiny so we're folding up the sheet to show that the habitat is being taken away from the manatees not as many manatees fit in this habitat now right what are some of the things we can do to help there's lots of things that everyone can do to help the manatees and the environment pick up garbage yes we're gonna pick up garbage and make the habitat even bigger we can do Beach cleanups pick up trash off of the waterways or the land you can also make sure you dispose of your trash properly throw it away in the trash can when you're done and Reduce Reuse and recycle right so if you have a water bottle that's empty don't throw it in the trash can throw it in the recycling bin so everybody watch out let's unfold our sheet here we're gonna recycle and now they're getting more room because we're giving them more space we're picking up our garbage we're recycling our water bottles so we can take areas where there were things that people had built and we can give them back to Nature that's called restoration restoring a habitat is when you bring it back to the animal so let's unfold again we've restored some of that habitat and now we have all this space okay Vision kids we can do these easy things every day to help keep them safe and healthy not only do these actions help manatees but they also protect other animals and actually the whole environment thank you so much for coming I'm glad you learned a lot about manatees [Music]