Manatees
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
Dive into the fascinating world of manatees with our comprehensive free 79-question trivia quiz with answers! These gentle giants of the sea have captivated marine enthusiasts for centuries with their unique behaviors and remarkable adaptations. Challenge yourself and discover how much you really know about these endangered aquatic mammals.
30 of 79 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Why do Florida manatees sometimes gather around a running garden hose at a dock?
To drink fresh water
To drink fresh water: manatees in salty bays seek it out at river mouths, culverts and hoses. Offering it is against Florida's rules, because animals that learn to linger at docks lose their wariness of boats.
Q 02Which agency gave two ships based near Cape Canaveral water-jet thrusters so they would not harm local manatees?
NASA
NASA's Freedom Star and Liberty Star, which towed spent space shuttle boosters home, got a water-jet thruster because their base was on the manatee-rich Banana River, where a spinning propeller is a hazard.
Q 03Wildlife biologists use which farmyard term for an adult male manatee?
A bull
A bull: the terms follow cattle, with females called cows and their young calves. Bulls leave once breeding is over and play no part in raising a calf, which stays with its mother alone for up to two years.
Q 04In South Park's 'Cartoon Wars', which animated sitcom is revealed to be written by a tank of manatees?
Family Guy
Family Guy's jokes, the episode claims, come from manatees nudging 'idea balls' marked with nouns, verbs and pop-culture references into a machine; take a single ball away and the whole tank refuses to work.
Q 05In Brazil a manatee is a 'peixe-boi', a Portuguese name that translates as what?
Ox-fish
Ox-fish: 'peixe' is fish and 'boi' is ox, the same comparison with slow, grazing cattle that English makes. Brazilians use the name for the river species and for the coastal one, the peixe-boi-marinho.
Q 06In The Simpsons episode 'The Bonfire of the Manatees', who walks out on Homer and ends up rescuing the animals?
Marge
Marge leaves after Homer lets mobsters shoot a film in their house, then joins Caleb Thorn, a manatee-saving scientist voiced by Alec Baldwin, until Homer tracks her down to win her back.
Q 07How does a manatee replace cheek teeth worn down by gritty plants?
They move forward from the back
They move forward from the back like a conveyor belt: fresh molars erupt at the rear and creep along the jaw as worn ones drop out at the front, so a manatee never runs out of chewing surface in its lifetime.
Q 08Which of these land animals is the manatee's closest living relative?
Elephant
Elephant: protein and DNA studies make elephants some of the manatee's nearest living kin, far closer than the whales and seals it looks like.
Q 09Where on a mother manatee's body are the teats from which her calf nurses?
Under her flippers
Under her flippers, about where armpits would be: a calf suckles from one teat on each side and starts nibbling plants within weeks, though it stays at its mother's side for up to two years.
Q 10Which kind of sound do manatee mothers and calves use to keep in touch?
High-pitched squeaks
High-pitched squeaks, with chirps and squeals mixed in, keep a cow and her calf in contact; a calf starts calling at or soon after birth, and each learns to recognise the other's voice.
Q 11Why can water below about 68°F be deadly for an animal as bulky as a manatee?
It has little insulating fat
It has little insulating fat and a very slow metabolism, so it cannot make heat fast enough; a long chill brings on 'cold stress syndrome', which can kill even a full-grown adult.
Q 12How does a manatee drive itself forward through the water?
Pumping its tail up and down
Pumping its tail up and down, as a whale does, moves a manatee along, while the two flippers steer, hold food and even 'walk' the animal across the bottom.
Q 13A manatee's tail is a rounded paddle, but what shape is a dugong's?
Q 21The West Indian manatee has two subspecies: the Florida manatee and which other?
Antillean manatee
Antillean manatee: it ranges from Mexico through the Caribbean to Brazil. The two subspecies look alike, so scientists tell them apart by skull measurements and by where they live.
Q 22Besides manatees, which animals are the only mammals without exactly seven neck vertebrae?
Sloths
Sloths: two-toed sloths can have as few as five neck vertebrae and three-toed sloths eight or more, against the manatee's six. Even a giraffe has the standard seven.
Q 23The 2021 starvation crisis among Florida manatees centred on which east-coast waterway, where pollution had killed the seagrass?
Indian River Lagoon
Fluked, like a whale's
Fluked, like a whale's, with a notch in the middle: the tail is the quickest way for an observer to tell a dugong from a manatee.
Q 14Unlike most mammals' lungs, a manatee's long, flat pair runs along which part of its body?
Its backbone
Its backbone: the lungs stretch a metre or more along the spine, each with its own half of a split diaphragm, so a manatee can adjust its buoyancy and stay level in the water.
Q 15What often grows on a slow-moving manatee's back, tinting its grey skin green or brown?
Algae
Algae grow on the backs and tails of these slow swimmers. Barnacles hitch a ride in salt water too, then drop away once the manatee moves into fresh water.
Q 16Which part of a manatee seals shut automatically each time it submerges?
Its nostrils
Its nostrils sit on top of the snout, so a manatee can breathe by raising just the tip of its nose above the surface; they clamp shut as it sinks back for a dive that can last many minutes.
Q 17What do manatees mainly use the stiff whiskers on their snouts for?
Feeling for and gripping food
Feeling for and gripping food: the bristles flare outward to find and grasp plants, and they are sensitive enough to tell fine textures apart by touch alone.
Q 18Apart from mothers with calves, how do manatees generally live?
Mostly solitary
Mostly solitary: manatees drift together and apart with no leaders or lasting bonds, though they gather loosely where food is plentiful, and several males will trail a single female for weeks.
Q 19As of 2025, what was the IUCN Red List status of all three manatee species?
Vulnerable
Vulnerable sits one step below Endangered on the Red List; for all three species the pressure comes from people, through hunting, fishing nets and the loss of the waters manatees feed in.
Q 20Which body part does a manatee use to grip plants and tear them free?
Its prehensile upper lip
Its prehensile upper lip is split into two pads that move independently to grip and tear plants; manatees also use the same lips for touching and greeting one another.
Indian River Lagoon: algal blooms fed by fertiliser and septic runoff shaded out most of its seagrass, so manatees wintering there starved, and deaths statewide jumped to about 1,100 in 2021.
Q 24In Sierra Leone, West African manatees are treated as pests for raiding which farm crop?
Rice
Rice: in the rainy season the animals drift into flooded fields and graze the plants, and they tear fishing nets too, so farmers and fishermen sometimes kill them.
Q 25Which manatee often has a white or pink patch on its chest and no nails on its flippers?
Amazonian manatee
Amazonian manatee: the smallest of the three species and the only one confined to fresh water, it follows the floods into the forest in the wet season and retreats to deep lakes in the dry.
Q 26What did Florida's Manatee Sanctuary Act of 1978 declare to be a refuge for the animals?
The whole state
The whole state: the act declares Florida 'a refuge and sanctuary for the manatee', so harassing or harming one is against the law in any water in the state, not only inside a marked reserve.
Q 27Where does a female manatee give birth?
Underwater
Underwater: manatees never leave the water at any stage of life. The newborn has to reach the surface for its first breath, and within about an hour it can swim on its own.
Q 28West Indian manatees are 'euryhaline', meaning they tolerate a wide range of what in the water around them?
Salinity
Salinity: West Indian manatees pass freely between rivers, brackish estuaries and the open sea. Their Amazon cousin does not, spending its whole life in fresh water.
Q 29Manatees are the only known animals whose eyes have which feature?
Corneas laced with blood vessels
Corneas laced with blood vessels are a sign of disease in other animals, since a healthy cornea is clear and bloodless; in manatees they may be a response to the fresh water they spend so much time in.
Q 30About how much does a typical adult manatee weigh?
1,000 pounds
1,000 pounds is typical for an adult about 10 feet long, and all of it is built on low-energy water plants, which is why a manatee spends six to eight hours of every day grazing.