GLOSSARY

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.


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Copyright 1999 Caryn Self Sullivan, Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-2258. The research presented in this poster was funded by The Oceanic Society of San Francisco, CA 94123 and supported by an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Permission to print and reproduce these 6 poster pages is hereby granted for non-profit educational use, only.