The Useful Manatee

For planters in Britain's steamy Latin American colony of British Guiana, one of life's great irritations has long been the weeds and grass that flourish in Guiana's irrigation and drainage ditches. Until last year, to keep the weeds from choking off the water flow, the ditches had to be cleared expensively by hand labor or chemical herbicide. Then William H. L. Allsopp, a British zoologist at the government fisheries laboratory in Guiana's capital city of Georgetown, took a fresh look at the weed problem. In Britain's Nature, Allsopp unveils his novel solution: the manatee, a clumsy, somewhat seal-like aquatic mammal* that flounders in the rivers and sloughs of tropical America.

Allsopp's inspiration came when he noticed that the manatees in the Georgetown Botanic Gardens nibbled their pool so clean of weeds that they had to be fed large quantities of grass. So he put two manatees in a weed-grown irrigation canal 22 ft. wide and nearly a mile long. In 17 weeks they had it clear and kept it that way. Allsopp figured that each of the manatees consumed more than 100 lbs. of forage per day.

The work of Allsopp's manatees was so dramatic that planters and irrigation officers all over British Guiana demanded some of this free labor for their own ditches. Allsopp encouraged fishermen to net the harmless beasts gently (despite their 8-ft. length, manatees are easily bruised or drowned) in the jungle rivers, and he rigged a laboratory truck with a sort of canvas bath to carry them to the ditches. He now has 31 at work, happily chewing water weeds throughout the colony, and 65 more have been ordered from the fishermen. Inquiries about manatees as ditch cleaners have come from Thailand, Ceylon, Malaya and other weed-bothered tropical countries.

The chief risk in using manatees is that they are locally considered very good eating and so are apt to be surreptitiously turned into steaks and chops. Allsopp hopes to get strict legislation to protect both wild and tame manatees from this fate. But his chief remaining problem is how to multiply his gentle servants, who, left to their own devices, seem to be both slow and unenthusiastic in reproduction.

* Whose Asian cousin, the dugong, is believed to have inspired ancient sailors to spin the first mermaid yarns.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.