The closest living relatives of manatees, the sluggish, gentle “cows of the sea,” are not seals or walruses, but elephants. Manatees are just as bizarre as their cousins, if not more so. They are the only vegetarian marine mammals. Like elephants, they have teeth that grow in horizontally from the back of the jaw to the front where they eventually fall out. Manatees may even have a kind of “sixth sense.” They are covered in stiff hairs, like whiskers all over their bodies, which they use to sense vibrations in the water. Research indicates that these hairs tell them where nearby objects are and which direction those objects are moving in, giving manatees a kind of 3D mental map of their surroundings.
