Return to The Free Lance-Star Online

Stafford woman sacrifices to help save 'sea cows'

January 18, 2002 2:31 am

Caryn Sullivan wants the rest of the world to care about manatees the way she does.

She'd love to have schoolchildren across the country save their nickels and dimes for manatees the way they've helped dolphins and whales.

But manatees aren't as cute as marine mammals named Flipper, and they haven't been featured in popular movies like "Free Willy."

So, the Fredericksburg-area native, who spends half a year studying manatees in Central America, has found another angle.

For centuries, sailors told stories of beautiful creatures--half woman and half fish--living in the sea. Many believe those mermaids were manatees.

"When Columbus came to what he thought was America, he said he saw mermaids everywhere, but they weren't as pretty as he thought they'd be," Sullivan said Wednesday night in Fredericksburg.

Sullivan, 48, spoke to about 35 people at a Battlefields Sierra Club meeting. She's trying to raise money for Sirenian International, an organization she helped create to study and protect manatees, especially in developing nations. The mammals, also called sea cows, are found in coastal waters around the world, including Florida.

The manatees weren't exactly household words in Stafford County, where Sullivan grew up, raised a family and sold real estate for years.

But they became part of her world almost a decade ago when Sullivan decided to change her life. At 39, she left home for college, and has spent the last eight years taking classes and doing research around the world. She was featured in The Free Lance-Star in July 2000.

Sullivan hopes to get her doctorate's degree before she's 50 and continues to split her time between Central and North America. She leads research studies off the island of Belize six months a year, works with her adviser at Texas A&M University a couple months and spends the rest of her time in her parent's basement in Fredericksburg.

That's when she sees her three children and three grandchildren.

In recent weeks, Sullivan has taken her research to the public. She's spoken to several school and environmental groups.

She'd like to raise enough money to hire someone to maintain the organization's Web site and apply for grants. (That address is www.sirenian.org.)

Sierra Club members were moved by her efforts--and enthusiasm.

"Where do we sign up?" asked chairwoman Doris Whitfield.

"I was riveted," said member Catherine Farley, who didn't notice that Sullivan had gone beyond her time limit. "Usually, when someone runs over, I'm well aware of it long before."

Sullivan told the environmental group about her typical day in Belize. She leads teams of volunteers, who pay $1,700 for a two-week "vacation" and the chance to do field studies.

The fee covers the volunteer's accommodations and helps pay expenses for the camp, boat and gas. Most of Sullivan's funding comes from the worldwide conservation group, the Earthwatch Institute.

In Belize, Sullivan and her teams spend eight hours a day on the water--which is 80 degrees in the winter and 85 in the summer--and chronicle the manatees and their habits.

Sullivan stays in a fishing camp, a structure built on stilts over the water that has no electricity and few modern conveniences. She goes to Belize City once a week for supplies.

Every day at dusk, she stops what she's doing--as does everyone else there--to watch the sun set. "It's a camp rule."

She's studied the Antillean manatee for several years, but there's still not much known about them.

Their eyesight is poor, but tiny hairs on their bodies detect the slightest movement in the water.

When Sullivan gets within 20 feet of the animals--which she once said looked like gray-colored sweet potatoes--they sense the change in water pressure and scoot away.

At the Urbanna Oyster Festival in November, she talked with several sailors who said they see the manatees all the time. One, named Chessie, has made regular treks from Florida to the Chesapeake Bay, and has been spotted as far north as Rhode Island.

"I think there are more of them around than we know," she said.

But like other endangered species, manatees are threatened by a loss of habitat. A third of the "mermaids" Sullivan sees have been scarred by boats. The manatees spend most of their time in water that's about 20 feet deep, in the same areas as pleasure boats.

"Most manatee deaths come from watercraft," she said. "They're either hit by the hull or cut up by the propeller."

On Jan. 30, Sullivan will return to Belize for three months. When she's not in the water, she'll continue to try to find other groups that will help her spread the message about the manatees--and the legend of the mermaids.

1. Watercraft related injuries account for most of the human-related manatee mortalities - not total mortalities. This translates to about 25% of total mortalities. These approximate statistics are from Florida, and probably do not represent the global situation. See FMRI (http://floridamarine.org/news/view_article.asp?id=14277) for links to detailed mortality statistics in Florida.

2. Columbus "thought" he had navigated to the Indies (Indo-Pacific area), not America; he really was in America, today known as the West Indies - which is how they got their name.

3. The sailors I chatted with at the Urbanna Oyster Festival said they see manatee(s) every summer, "not all the time".

4. Belize is not an island, but our research station is located on a mangrove island off the coast of Belize, which is located between Mexico and Guatemala on the isthmus that connects North and South America.

5. Although I grew up in Stafford County, I lived and raised my family in Spotsylvania County and the City of Fredericksburg, all of my adult life.