Manatees Invade the Northeast

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Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times is a trend. The manatee in the Hudson River was an accident -- the Christopher Columbus of manatees if you will. The manatee in Rhode Island is a coincidence. I blame it on the grad student from our lab who moved to Florida to study manatees. She probably told them all about how great it is to live in the Northeast United States, so they came up here to check it out. Let's hope she didn't tell all of them about it; I don't want any trendy manatees hanging out in my neighborhood.

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Have they been told about the winters?

Manatees used to have a much wider home range, before they were massively slaughtered by the Spanish, etc for food when America was first being explored. They eventually became conentrated in FL due to the relatively large number of interconnected and safe waterways. Maybe their migration north is just another example of global warming?