Tag Archives: manatee kids

New Manatees

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Lovely blue spring water with adorable pudgy wrinkly faces and warm Florida rainbow sunlight? Sign me up! That’s what one who loves manatees dreams about! We are lucky to still have opportunities to experience these charismatic sirens on their own terms.

I’m updating my site with recent manatee photographs from the last two fall/winter seasons: 2016/2017 and 2017/2018. There’s over twenty new images already with more to come. Manatee photography has always been an adventure and a challenge, but I relish the challenge. I’m just glad there are still some opportunities to chronicle the manatee’s antics in pretty conditions.

Here’s a partial screenshot of my Oceangrant.com site (Portfolio Site link in menu above). If you click on New Images you will see new additions over the next few weeks. All from the last two seasons:

I’ll tell you a story about one of the new images.
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Wrinkles the Birthday Manatee

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Believe it or not, “I want more Wrinkles for my Birthday” said the 50-something year old lady. That’s me and that was my wish!? I have a tradition of setting out to observe manatees on my birthdays. This past February 11th I wondered what adventure awaited? Little did I know a very fat little male manatee calf with deep wrinkly folds that jiggled as he swam, was also in search of adventure! We met that day and here is his story in pictures and video:

I Have Seen Many Manatee Calves Underwater But “Wrinkles” Is Definitely One Of The Fattest! His Mom Feeds Him Well! Here He Is With Mom, Look At Those Fat Folds Of Wrinkles! Feb. 11th, 2016.manatee,Florida,calf,wrinkles,©CGrant

To celebrate my foray into Instagram, this photo and short video is the first thing I’m going to post @carolgrantinsta. Here’s the HD version of the video on Vimeo. Look at those precious deep fat wrinkly folds! Now that is a healthy male manatee calf – Well Done Mom! Continue reading →

Top 10 Cute Manatee Kids!

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Manatees are curious, gentle, charismatic, and appealing marine mammals, and manatee kids are ten-times so! Whether it’s investigating everything around and about, learning the art of flipper-turning, demonstrating new buoyancy and swimming skills, fine-tuning snout rubbing, meeting other manatees, exploring or just being the subject of its mother’s pride, manatee kid’s antics are just plan cute!

Here are my Top 10 Cute Manatee Kids (all linked from my new Oceangrant.com website that includes many additional photographs of manatee calf cuteness):

#10 – Mother Manatee with Calf Behind – How cute is this? Not only are this mother manatee and her male calf floating peacefully with beautiful reflections in the calm waters, but junior has his snout touching mom’s behind. Awwwww!Florida manatee, Trichechus manatus latirostris, a subspecies of the West Indian manatee, endangered. A calf nudges its mother while both float in warm blue spring water. A peaceful and tranquil touching scene with reflections. Horizontal orientation with beautiful light rays. Three Sisters Springs, Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge, Kings Bay, Crystal River, Citrus County, Florida USA. (Carol Grant)

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New Oceangrant Website!

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Ahhhh new beginnings, the hopeful feeling carries over into my new underwater photography website and blog that I’ve been working on — very diligently. Manatees, manatees and more manatees, the new Oceangrant site starts off with nearly 700 quality photographs, the vast majority focused on our charismatic sirenian the Florida manatee. And I have more manatee photographs to add! I believe this is the largest and best quality collection of diverse and rare images of the Florida manatee around.

PhotoShelter is the service I was interested in using for my redesigned site, and then came the release of their new cutting-edge BEAM templates. I was impressed and chose the new Shuffle design as the best way to display my varied collection of manatee images. Each of the new BEAM templates are cool in their own right, but Shuffle fascinated me with the Portfolio page that can be focused on your website visitor’s needs and interests. I have my Portfolio page divided into five categories that draw from five photo galleries out of my 14+ galleries. It’s intuitive and the structure can be picked up by playing around with it.

Here is how my new manatee portfolio page is set up: First, load time on oceangrant.com (or manatees.photoshelter.com if one finds their web address for my site) is very fast for so many photos, sized for whatever device is being used. Next, clicking on ALL pulls images from each of my featured manatee galleries. It loads them in sequence, e.g., one image from first gallery featured, one image from second, and on and on. ALL quickly displays the most diverse collection, beautifully, on any screen. Note: BEAM is still in beta so I’ve notice some bugs, especially on iPhones, but those are being worked on and the issues are disappearing systematically. Here’s a computer desktop screen shot and one from my iPad of my ALL selection. (Carol Grant) (Carol Grant)

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