Manatees can be divided up into three distinct species that roughly correlate to where they live. The\u00a0West Indian manatee\u00a0lives in the Caribbean and is divided into two subspecies: the Florida manatee and the Antillean or Caribbean manatee. Manatees also live in the\u00a0Amazon\u00a0and off the\u00a0West African coast, called the Amazonian manatee and West African manatee, respectively. (A possible new species of dwarf manatee has been seen in freshwater habitats in the Amazon, but the veracity of that claim in in question.)According to the IUCN, all three extant species of manatee are considered vulnerable, which means that they are at a heightened risk of extinction. The manatee\u2019s Pacific cousin, the dugong, is also vulnerable. Hopefully, we\u2019ll be able to learn a lesson from our experiences with another manatee relative, the Steller\u2019s sea cow, which humans hunted to extinction less than 30 years after its discovery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-9370","news","type-news","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n