i'm sitting in at the clearwater international airport, a quarter-mile structure that makes lehigh valley international look like laguardia. they are actually announcing individual flights that are landing, to the people waiting in the cafeteria with me, for their relatives to arrive. i've seen one plane land in the last hour, and one commuter jet take off. the "restaurant" reminds me of my grandmother's bingo hall in espy, pa--if it ain't fried, you're SOL. you order at the counter from the corrugated plastic signs patched with various colored letters.

i've spent the last two weeks at marvet, at the mote marine laboratory, listening to lecture-upon-lecture on marine mammal and reptile medicine--primarily Atlantic Bottlenose dolphins, sea lions, otters, Bowhead whales, and Loggerhead, Ridleys, and Green sea turtles. i ultrasounded a loggerhead a captive sea turtle;  i watched another dig in the sand and lay her eggs on a beach near sarasota, where she was tagged with a satellite transmitter. yesterday, i was able to scrub manatee wounds and weigh babies.

this wild one was found tangled in four lobster traps and a channel marker near tampa. you can see the scar running across the neck. the monofilament fishing line entanglements, among others, lead to strangulation if not decapitation of the animal, not dissimilar to the puppies chained to trees and neglected, whose collars fail to grow with them. and then there are the once-every-six-minutes boat strikes.

they have thick vibrissae (whiskerish) which they use for tactile purposes--one study we discussed showed they could differentiate at the 17mm level.

this is a sixty-year old captive manatee (fifty-nine, actually--there's a birthday celebration planned for next month). he's a local tourist attraction at the south florida museum (a thirteen-hundred pound one, at that).

another day was spent at sea world in orlando.

the dolphins are trained to weigh themselves.

training a pseudo killer whale.

oral exam.

and yet another, but this time with a mama orca and her two calves.

a betadyne prophylaxis.

operant conditioning.

they are also trained to present themselves for physical examinations.

a urine draw.

a silent observer seeking handouts.

hanging with a king penguin.

supposedly, brown pellys are endangered in most areas except for florida.

a florida sunset.