Manatee Munches on Submerged Florida Yard After Idalia Flooding

While Hurricane Idalia has left destruction and flooding in its wake, one peaceful creature seemed to be enjoying the change in scenery.

A gentle manatee was captured on camera on Wednesday munching on the grass in a Florida yard that had been flooded by the hurricane's storm surges.

"It's a manatee. He's eating the grass. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. We're trying to save the boat, and here's a manatee," a voice can be heard saying in the video. "He's not gonna get stuck. He's swimming. He loves it. He's having like a little extra food."

The video was captured by Kathleen Eisenhauer, whose yard looked out onto the water in Port Charlotte, which was one of the many towns across the U.S. southeast battered by Hurricane Idalia's strong winds and intense rain.

Hurricane Idalia made landfall in Florida's Big Bend area as a Category 3 hurricane, with windspeeds approaching 125 mph. Many homes were damaged by the winds and the intense flooding caused by the hurricane's storm surges, exacerbated by the higher-than-usual tides due to the full supermoon.

"Catastrophic storm surge occurring along the coast of the Florida Big Bend and damaging winds spreading inland over northern Florida," the National Hurricane Center posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday morning.

Thankfully, there have been no confirmed deaths from the storm, but over 225,000 people were left without power in Florida as of Wednesday night, with another 230,000 in Georgia as the storm moved north.

The manatee in the video didn't seem affected by the storm at all, happily enjoying its newfound access to the grass on a submerged yard lawn.

Manatees, also known as sea cows, are marine mammals native to Florida, the Caribbean Islands, Central America, northern South America and western Africa. These creatures usually grow to around 10 feet long, and are aquatic herbivores, mostly grazing on marine plants such as seagrass. All three species of manatee—Amazonian manatee, the West Indian manatee and the West African manatee—are listed as "vulnerable" by the IUCN.

Florida is home to a subspecies of the West Indian manatee known as the Florida manatee. The West Indian manatee had seen extremely low numbers due to a range of threats, including habitat destruction, but due to improving population sizes, was reclassified from "endangered" to "threatened" under the federal Endangered Species Act in 2017.

Other threats that face this species include boat strikes and algal bloom toxins: over 20 percent of manatee deaths every year are due to collisions with watercraft, with 137 having died in 2019 alone as a result of boat strikes. Red tide algal blooms can also lead to large numbers of manatee deaths, due to the toxin produced by the algae poisoning the creatures.

There was some concern that Idalia could lead to increased numbers of manatee deaths due to the storm surges sweeping the mammals inland and stranding them once the waters recede.

"That's what we're concerned about," James "Buddy" Powell, chief zoological officer of Clearwater Marine Aquarium and executive director of Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute, told The Wall Street Journal. "They'll get themselves up little creeks and into flooded areas. As the water recedes, they'll get stranded. A few years ago, the state had to rescue ones that ended up in a pond in a golf course."

In 2016, this exact issue occurred when eight manatees became marooned in a pond in the northwestern Florida city of Crystal River in the aftermath of Hurricane Hermine.

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