Manny the Manatee

The news over the last week has been somewhat entertaining around downtown Memphis…

It started out with a couple of fishermen seeing something on Monday in the Wolf River Harbor (slackwater harbor that’s connected to the Mississippi river here downtown). Turned out that it was a manatee.

The TV stations even got it live on video.

So officals cut off boat access to the harbor and called people in Florida to try to figure out WTF to do about it.

On Tuesday, they became concerned about it being too cold for the manatee to survive. Activists got involved and got people from Sea World to come up and check it out.

They got here Wednesday, and became concerned as well. So they decided to attempt a rescue on Thursday morning.

Somewhere along the way, it picked up the rather lame name of “Manny”.

But on Wednesday, the manatee became trapped between a couple of barges, and there was naturally concern all around. They ended up deciding to wait until Thursday anyway.

Then Thursday rolls around, and they can’t find the damn thing.

They tried again this morning, with no luck. Now here it is this afternoon, and they are searching lakes and such nearby, with no success. For four days this giant sucker has been rolling around the harbor, then gives them the slip right when they actually want to find him.

Many of the above links have video links on the bottom left, if you want to watch the news reports.

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