Has Snooty been subbed out? It doesn’t seem likely

Snooty isn’t just the world’s oldest manatee in captivity, he’s also the most gossiped-about.

You’ve probably heard the rumors. They intensify every year around this time: Snooty’s annual record-setting birthday.

The Snooty we see today, the rumors contend, is really Snooty 2.0. Or maybe he’s even the third or fourth Snooty.

It’s a consistently hot topic among visitors to the South Florida Museum, Snooty’s home for almost his entire life.

“We answer questions about it all the time,” said Jessica Schubick, the museum’s communications manager.

Museum officials aren’t sure how the rumor started. It may have originated, Schubick said, in the 1970s, when people figured out that SeaWorld parks all over the country had different orcas that they had named Shamu.

And, of course, it was fueled by the fact that Snooty is much, much older than manatees usually get.

So, the rumor goes, the original Snooty is long gone. When he died, and when theoretical ersatz Snootys died, the museum just went out manatee-shopping and picked up a shiny new one. Then, apparently, museum officials brought a 600-pound aquatic mammal through downtown Bradenton and carried it into the museum without anyone noticing.

Besides the logistics, there are some problems with the theory. Capturing wild manatees and keeping them (except for rehabilitation) is illegal, so the museum would have had to do something very, very bad, or done business with someone else who had, and hoped they wouldn’t get caught. Or they would have had to strike a deal with a facility that kept manatees. There are not many of those, and they’re not likely to sell their creatures. (And if they sold them, people would know about it.)

Then there’s the Guinness Book of World Records, which takes such matters very seriously. Last year, the world’s acknowledged arbiter of all things with “-est” affixed to their descriptors officially determined that Snooty was the oldest manatee in captivity.

Even if the museum tried to get a younger manatee, a substitute Snooty would be easy to detect, Schubick said. It’d be kind of like replacing one dog with another. Snooty has a lot of identifiable features. To wit:

▪ Snooty has a really big tail. Like, bigger than you’ve probably ever seen on another manatee.

“He had a big tail anyway, but manatees’ tails keep growing, because they’re made of cartilage,” Schubick said.

In fact, researchers didn’t know for sure that manatees’ tails never stop growing until they had a chance to measure Snooty’s. Because Snooty is perhaps the only 69-year-old manatee that people have ever seen, he has one of the biggest manatee tails ever.

“One of the things that Snooty has taught us about manatees is that their tails do keep growing,” Schubick said.

▪ Snooty’s got big upper-body muscles. You may have seen Snooty pull himself up from the edge of his pool to greet humans. He does that a lot. Most manatees seldom pull that move. So, Schubick said, Snooty has developed massive pecs, or the manatee equivalent. Other manatees may occasionally pull themselves out of the water to reach for food, but they don’t have reason to do it as often or for as long as Snooty, who is known to love human contact.

▪ Snooty’s got scars. A lot of wild manatee have big scars from boat propellers. Snooty has none of those, but he does have a couple of distinctive decades-old scars on his side that a subbed Snooty would also have to have.

Plus, people who know manatee scars say that they can tell these scars are very old.

“If you look at scars on manatees, even if they’re a couple of years old, they’re still white, even long after they’re healed up,” Schubick said. “Snooty’s are dark because they’re so healed.”

So even if the museum found another manatee with similar scars, it would have to be an ancient manatee.

The people at South Florida Museum have been telling people all this stuff for years. They haven’t quelled the rumors.

Snooty seems unperturbed by the accusations, and had no comment.

This story was originally published July 21, 2017 at 10:15 AM with the headline "Has Snooty been subbed out? It doesn’t seem likely."