Extraterrestrial Reappears at Tampa Power Plant

September 4, 2025 | September 2025,

Moo Shoo resting in Blue Spring in March, just a few days before she left the spring for the season.

Blue Spring State Park Adoption Update

By Wayne Hartley, Manatee Specialist

In the last Manatee Zone issue, I gave the number of park visits of each of our Blue Spring adoptees. The following are the days they departed for the season. In January, Flash left on the 16th, Whiskers on the 27th, and Deep Dent on the 29th. February saw Doc depart on the 26th, Una on the 27th, and Margarito on the 28th. It was surprising how late Margarito stayed for the season. Floyd departed on March 4, Paddy Doyle and Philip on the 11th, Ester and Nick on the 13th, Annie, Brutus, Howie, Moo Shoo, and Merlin on the 22nd, Aqua and Phyllis on the 23rd, Gator and Lily on the 24th, and finally Rocket on the 25th. Rocket was another surprise straggler. Since the end of the season, we saw Annie on April 23, Una on June 19, Lily on July 25, and Phyllis in May, June, and July.

Sadly, Merlin showed up in March with a new set of propeller scars on his lower right back (circled yellow). They appear to be superficial marks, but researchers kept a close eye on him just in case.

A hard part of this job is to ID manatees that are found deceased. This is best done in person but is usually done from photographs instead. Since last August, we have lost eight Blue Spring manatees. Four from boat strikes, one from a canal lock entrapment, one from natural causes, and two from unknown causes. The death of our adoptee Paddy Doyle hit us the hardest, but all the manatees are dear to the researchers.

Manatee ‘E’ appeared at Blue Spring for the 2020-21 winter season after previously only having sightings on Florida’s west coast.

On a happier note, a manatee we saw only during the 2020-21 season at Blue Spring reappeared this year on the west coast of Florida at the Gannon power plant in Tampa. When we first saw her, she had a big ‘E’ scar on her back, and I thought she was a juvenile, but she turned out to be at least six years old then. We were disappointed when she did not return to Blue Spring for any more seasons. Now we know ‘E’—whose actual name is Extraterrestrial—was documented at the TECO Big Bend power plant on the west coast as far back as 2014 by our partners at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. But wanderlust overtook her in 2017, and she somehow ended up at Blue Spring by December 2020. She must have traveled around the bottom of Florida or through Florida’s huge system of connected lakes, rivers, and canals. Part of manatee research is tracking through pictures and sharing them with other researchers across the state to make these kinds of links.

News