ALGA: a plant or plantlike organism; very small green and red
algae grow on the skin of manatees; when manatees rub against objects or other manatees, scar
like patterns appear where the algae are removed.
ANTERIOR: situated before or toward the front; near or toward the head.
AERIAL SURVEY: an airplane flight to collect data; manatees that could
be seen in rivers and coastal areas were counted.
BARNACLE: marine animals with feathery appendages for gathering food that are
permanently attached (as to rocks, boats, manatees); related to crabs, shrimp, and lobsters.
BOGUE: a channel of water that flows between two land formations; the channels which
run between the mangrove cayes in the Drowned Cayes: e.g. Sugar Bogue,
Bannister Bogue, Hushner Bogue.
BUCCANEERS: pirates and other sailing explorers found in the Caribbean during the 1600s.
DORSAL: near or towards the back especially of an animal like a manatee.
ELUSIVE: tending to avoid, escape, evade; we call manatees elusive because they are
hard to find and observe - they can easily stay underwater for 3-6 minutes during
which time they often swim away!
EXPLOIT: to make use of meanly or unjustly for one's own advantage; we say that manatees
and other marine animals are exploited when humans hunt them faster than they can reproduce.
EXTANT: living; currently or actually existing; not destroyed or lost; we refer to
plants and animals which are still living on the earth today as extant - as opposed to
those which are extinct.
EXTINCT: no longer existing; manatees are considered to be threatened with
extinction because there are fewer of them than there were before humans began exploiting
them in the New World.
EXTIRPATE: to destroy completely; Steller's sea cow is extinct because it was hunted
for food until the last animal was killed.
G SQUARED: goodness of fit; a statistical term that describes how well a set of data fits a relationship.
HYPOTHESIS: an idea or an assumption made about an observation that can be tested;
one hypothesis about manatees in the Drowned Cayes is that they travel to and
from the Belize River to get fresh water.
KRUSKAL-WALLIS: a statistical test to see if data in different categories are similar or
different.
LATERAL: near or toward the side; on manatees we mean the left and right sides of the
animal.
MANATEE RESTING HOLE: concave depression in sandy or muddy substrate where manatees
are reliably found resting; the manatee resting hole at Swallow Caye is visited by many
tourists who want to see manatees living in the wild.
PROXIMITY: the quality of being close, near, immediately preceding or following
SIGNIFICANT: in science, when we say something is significant, it means that the
relationship has been tested with statistical
methods and falls within some accepted range.
SIRENIA: the taxonomic order of aquatic herbivorous (plant eating) mammals including the manatee,
dugong, and Steller's sea cow
SITE FIDELITY: how faithful an animal is to a particular area; e.g. does
this manatee always rest in the same resting hole? feed on the same seagrass bed? give
birth in the same place?
SUBSPECIES: a classification below the species level; a population that can be
distinguished from another population of the same species,
but may be capable of interbreeding where their ranges overlap; the Florida and the Antillean
manatees are considered subspecies of the West Indian manatee.
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: mathematics dealing with the collection, analysis,
interpretation, and presentation of data.
TAXONOMY: orderly classification of plants and animals according to their presumed
natural relationships.
VENTRAL: near or towards the belly; opposite of the back.
Z: a statistical value which describes how data fall when the population is thought to
have a normal (symmetrical, bell shaped) distribution.
