Swimming With Manatees in Florida: Crystal River, the Rules, and the Facts

Swimming with manatees in Crystal River

By William Drumm, underwater photographer and ocean ambassador

A manatee is a 1,000 pound animal with no defences, no speed, no aggression and no natural predators, which has survived by being too gentle to bother anyone. It has also, in the last century, been run over by boats in such numbers that researchers identify individuals by the propeller scars on their backs.

Every winter they come into Florida’s freshwater springs to stay warm, and one small stretch of the Gulf coast is the only place in the United States where you are legally allowed to get in the water with them. I photograph them there. This is everything worth knowing before you go.

Where Can You Swim With Manatees?

Crystal River, on Florida’s Gulf coast. It is the only place in the United States where getting in the water with wild manatees is legal.

The animals gather in Kings Bay and the spring runs that feed it, inside the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge, and the whole operation is regulated. Everywhere else in Florida, manatee watching means from a boardwalk, a kayak or a boat. Not in the water.

Three Sisters Springs

The famous one, and rightly so. A shallow, clear, spring fed pool inside the refuge where dozens of manatees pack in on the coldest mornings. Access is controlled and often in water access is closed when manatee numbers are high, which is exactly as it should be. When it is closed you can still see them from the boardwalk, and honestly the boardwalk view on a cold January morning is one of the great wildlife sights in North America.

Homosassa

Twenty minutes south, quieter, and a genuinely good alternative when Crystal River is busy. Same species, same season, fewer people.

Blue Spring State Park

On the other side of the state, near Orange City. This is viewing only and there is no swimming, but it is spectacular, and the park posts a daily manatee count through the winter. On the coldest days that count runs into the hundreds. If you want to see a lot of manatees without getting wet, this is the place.

Go with a guide who takes the rules seriously. I have worked with Bird’s Underwater in Crystal River, who have been running manatee tours for decades and who brief properly on passive observation before anyone gets in the water. The difference between a good operator and a bad one here is not comfort. It is whether the animals are left alone.

When Is Manatee Season in Florida?

Roughly 15 November to 31 March, and it is driven entirely by cold.

Manatees look built for cold water and are the opposite. They have very little fat for their size and a slow metabolism, and in water below about 68F they start to suffer cold stress, which damages the gut and the skin and eventually kills them. When the Gulf drops, they need somewhere warm.

A Florida spring pumps out water at a constant 72F every day of the year. It is not warm, but it is warm enough, and that difference is the whole story. The colder the snap, the more manatees crowd into the springs. Which produces the counter intuitive rule for planning a trip: go on the coldest, most miserable morning you can find. A warm week in January is a bad week for manatees.

Can You Touch a Manatee?

No. And this is the part worth reading properly, because it is the thing most people get wrong and the thing the animals actually need from you.

Crystal River runs on a principle called passive observation. It means you float on the surface, you keep your hands to yourself, and you let the manatee decide what happens next.

• Do not touch, chase, ride, poke, or grab. Not even gently. Not even once.
• Do not dive down to them. Stay on the surface, horizontal and still.
• Do not block their route to the surface, to the spring, or out of it. A manatee that cannot get to air or warmth is in real trouble.
• Do not separate a calf from its mother. Ever.
• Do not feed them or give them water. It teaches them to approach boats, which is how they get killed.
• Do not enter a posted sanctuary. Those roped off areas are the only places manatees can go to be left alone.

If a manatee swims over and puts itself against you, that is its choice and you have done nothing wrong. Stay still and let it. What you must not do is reach out first.

People push back on this, and the argument is always the same: the manatee came to me, it clearly liked it, where is the harm. The harm is that a manatee that learns humans are a source of contact and food is a manatee that approaches boats. And boats are what kill them.

Manatee Facts

How long can a manatee hold its breath?

Up to about 20 minutes when it is resting on the bottom. An active manatee surfaces every three to five minutes. It is one of the reasons they are such an easy animal to be around: a relaxed manatee will simply lie on the sand and come up for air occasionally, and if you are quiet it will do that a few feet from you.

How fast can a manatee swim?

A cruising manatee moves at about 3 to 5 mph. In a short burst it can hit roughly 15 mph, which genuinely surprises people who have only ever seen one grazing.

It is not fast enough. Not against a boat.

How big do manatees get?

Adults commonly run 9 to 10 feet and 800 to 1,200 pounds. The biggest recorded animals reach about 13 feet and 3,500 pounds. Females are generally larger than males.

What do manatees eat?

Plants, and an enormous quantity of them. Seagrass, freshwater vegetation, algae, whatever is green and reachable. An adult eats around a tenth of its body weight a day, which for a big animal means well over a hundred pounds of vegetation. They are grazers in the most literal sense, and they spend most of their waking lives doing it. Which is exactly why a seagrass collapse is a death sentence.

How long do manatees live?

Sixty years or more in the wild, and the oldest known individuals have passed 65. They breed slowly, with a single calf every two to five years after a gestation of about a year, and the calf stays with its mother for up to two years. A population that loses adults does not replace them quickly.

Do manatees have any predators?

Effectively none. Alligators share the water with them and ignore them. Sharks do not bother. There is no animal in Florida that hunts a manatee.

Which makes what happens to them entirely our doing. Boat strikes are the leading cause of manatee death that is not cold or starvation. Look at the back of almost any adult and you will find a pattern of pale propeller scars. Researchers use those scars to identify individuals, which is a grim way to run a photo ID catalogue.

Manatee vs Dugong

They get confused constantly, and the tail settles it in one glance.

• Tail. A manatee has a broad, rounded, paddle shaped tail. A dugong has a fluked, whale like tail with two points.
• Snout. A manatee’s is blunt and points forward. A dugong’s angles sharply down, because it feeds almost entirely on seagrass off the bottom.
• Where. Manatees live in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Amazon and West Africa, and they tolerate fresh water. Dugongs live in the Indo Pacific and stay in the sea.
• Teeth. Manatees replace their molars throughout life, conveyor belt style, because sand grinds them down. Dugongs do not.

Both are sirenians, and here is the fact that reliably stops people: their closest living relative is not the whale or the seal. It is the elephant. Look at the face and the flexible prehensile lip and you can see it.

Why Are They Called Sea Cows?

Because that is precisely what they are. Enormous, slow, entirely herbivorous grazers who spend the day cropping vegetation and getting on with nobody.

The other name is better. In January 1493, Christopher Columbus recorded seeing three mermaids off the coast of Hispaniola, and noted, with what reads as real disappointment, that they were not as beautiful as they are painted. He was looking at manatees. Every mermaid legend in the Atlantic probably starts here, with a tired sailor, poor visibility and a very large vegetarian.

The Crisis That Nearly Broke Them

Manatees are federally listed as threatened, not endangered. They were downlisted from endangered in 2017, and that decision remains contested, for a reason that became very obvious very quickly.

Starting in December 2020, manatees on Florida’s Atlantic coast began starving to death. Nutrient pollution in the Indian River Lagoon had triggered algal blooms that blocked the light, and the light is what the seagrass needs. The seagrass died. Tens of thousands of acres of it. And the animals whose entire existence is eating seagrass had nothing to eat.

Florida declared an Unusual Mortality Event. In 2021 alone, more than a thousand manatees died. Wildlife agencies ended up doing something that had never been done: hand feeding wild manatees, dumping tons of romaine lettuce into the water at Cape Canaveral, because the alternative was watching them starve.

The UME was officially closed on 14 March 2025, after body condition and death rates came back to normal levels. That is genuinely good news and it should be said clearly.

It is also not the end of it. Seagrass recovery in the lagoon is patchy and uneven, and the water quality problem that killed it has not been solved. The manatees stopped dying because the emergency passed, not because the cause did.

Photographing Manatees

They are, technically, one of the easier large animals to photograph, and one of the harder ones to photograph well.

Easy, because they do not run. A manatee that is comfortable will hang in the water column and let you compose. Hard, because the water in a spring run is often a soup of suspended silt kicked up by everybody else in it, and because a grey animal in green water is not, on its own, a photograph.

What works:

• Get there at first light. The water is at its clearest before the crowds stir up the bottom. This matters more than anything else on the list.
• Get low and shoot upward. Put the surface, the light and the tree line behind them. A manatee shot from above against a silty bottom is a grey blob. The same animal from below, against the sun, is a portrait.
• Shoot the over-under. Half in, half out, with the cypress and the sky above. It is the frame that says Florida spring more than any other.
• Wait. Do not swim at them. Settle, be boring, and let the curious ones come and look at you, which they will.

More on the craft in how to become an underwater photographer. If you want other Florida freshwater, there is the gar, which shares those same springs and is a great deal stranger. Prints are in the shop, and a portion of every sale supports marine conservation.

Related Images

Ghost in the Ripples – Bull Shark Over Sandy BottomFrom $45.00Bubbles and Brawn – Humpback Whale Heat RunFrom $45.00The Long Drift – Sea Turtle Gliding Over the SeafloorFrom $45.00

Browse all prints

Frequently Asked Questions About Manatees

Where can you swim with manatees in Florida?

Crystal River, on Florida’s Gulf coast. It is the only place in the United States where you are legally permitted to get in the water with wild manatees. The animals gather in Kings Bay and the spring runs that feed it, including Three Sisters Springs, and the whole thing is regulated by the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge. Everywhere else in Florida you may watch from land or a boat, not swim.

When is manatee season in Florida?

Roughly 15 November through 31 March, and the cold is what drives it. Manatees cannot tolerate water below about 68F for long, so when the Gulf drops they crowd into the springs, which hold a steady 72F all year. The coldest weeks produce the biggest aggregations. January and early February are usually the peak.

Why do manatees go to the springs?

Heat. A Florida spring runs at about 72F every day of the year, regardless of the weather above it. That is not warm, but it is warm enough. A manatee in water below roughly 68F starts to suffer cold stress, which damages the gut and the skin and can kill it. The springs are not a preference. They are a refuge.

Are manatees endangered?

They are federally listed as threatened, not endangered. They were downlisted from endangered in 2017, which remains contested. Between December 2020 and 2025 Florida ran an Unusual Mortality Event driven by starvation, after pollution wiped out the seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon on the Atlantic side. It was officially closed on 14 March 2025 after body condition and death rates returned to normal, but the seagrass recovery is uneven and the underlying water quality problem is not solved.

What do manatees eat?

Plants, and a lot of them. Seagrass, freshwater vegetation, algae, and anything green they can reach. An adult eats in the region of a tenth of its body weight every day, which for a big animal means well over a hundred pounds of vegetation. They are grazers, and they spend most of their waking life doing it.

How long can a manatee hold its breath?

Up to about 20 minutes when resting on the bottom. When active they surface every three to five minutes. It is one of the reasons they are so easy to be around: a manatee that is happy will simply lie there and breathe occasionally.

How big do manatees get?

Adults commonly run 9 to 10 feet and 800 to 1,200 pounds. The largest recorded animals reach around 13 feet and 3,500 pounds. Females are generally larger than males.

How fast can a manatee swim?

Slowly, most of the time. A cruising manatee moves at around 3 to 5 mph. In a short burst they can reach roughly 15 mph, which surprises people who have only seen them grazing. It is not fast enough to get out of the way of a boat.

Do manatees have any natural predators?

Essentially none. Alligators and sharks share the water with them and leave them alone. Almost every manatee that dies from something other than cold or starvation is killed by us, and the single biggest cause is boat strikes. Look at the back of almost any adult manatee and you will find propeller scars. Researchers use those scar patterns to identify individuals.

Is it legal to touch a manatee?

No, and it matters. Crystal River runs on passive observation: you float, you keep your hands to yourself, and you let the animal decide. No chasing, no touching, no feeding, no diving down, no blocking their route to the surface or to the spring. If a manatee chooses to come and investigate you, that is fine. Reaching out to it is not.

What is the difference between a manatee and a dugong?

The tail is the quickest tell. A manatee has a broad, rounded, paddle shaped tail. A dugong has a fluked, whale like tail. They also live in different oceans: manatees in the Atlantic, the Caribbean and the rivers of Florida and West Africa, dugongs in the Indo Pacific. Both are sirenians, and their closest living relative is not a whale but the elephant.

Why are manatees called sea cows?

Because that is what they do. They are large, slow, entirely herbivorous grazers who spend their days cropping vegetation. The mermaid connection is real too: Columbus recorded seeing three mermaids in 1493 and noted, with some disappointment, that they were not as beautiful as they are painted. He was looking at manatees.