Stranded by Irma, manatees get rescued by bystanders and deputies

As coastal Florida residents discovered Sunday, one of the strangest side effects of Hurricane Irma was the way the storm drained seawaters away from shorelines, leaving huge mud flats behind where water used to be.

That wasn’t the only unusual discovery.

In the partially drained Sarasota Bay, south of Tampa, residents spotted a pair of brown lumps out in the muddy flats.

They were manatees, the peaceful, lumbering aquatic mammals that frequent Florida’s waters. They had gotten caught out of the water because of the storm.

“We had to do something about it,” Tony Faradini-Campos of Sarasota told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “We couldn’t just let those manatees die out there. We shared the pictures on social media and it just blew up.”

Two sheriff’s deputies from Manatee County — yes, that’s right — came to help.

“They put some tarps under the manatees and they kind of used that as a luge and got him back out there,” Faradini-Campos told the newspaper. “I was a little scared that the tide was going to come in. We were advised just to get out of the bay for our safety” before the storm waters came rushing back in.

Faradini-Campos wrote on Facebook that the manatees were successfully moved to deeper water.

Manatees are aquatic mammals and breathe air. Adult manatees can weigh 1,000 to 3,500 pounds.

Manatees are protected under federal and Florida law, which states that “it is unlawful for any person, at any time, intentionally or negligently, to annoy, molest, harass or disturb any manatee.” They were recently downgraded from “endangered” to “threatened” species status.

The Florida Department of Fish and Wildlife did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday evening.