Vocalizations of wild West Indian manatee vary across subspecies and geographic location.

Geographic variation in the vocal behavior of manatees has been reported but is largely unexplored. Vocalizations of wild West Indian manatees (Trichechus manatus) were recorded with hydrophones in Florida from Florida manatees (Trichechus manatus latirostris), and in Belize and Panama from Antillean manatees (Trichechus manatus manatus) to determine if calls varied between subspecies and geographic regions. Calls were visually classified into five categories: squeaks, high squeaks, squeals, squeak-squeals, and chirps.

Detection and identification of manatee individual vocalizations in Panamanian wetlands using spectrogram clustering.

This work presents a methodology to automatically detect and identify manatee vocalizations in continuous passive acoustic underwater recordings. Given that vocalizations of each manatee present a slightly different frequency content, it is possible to identify individuals using a non-invasive acoustic approach. The recordings are processed in four stages, including detection, denoising, classification, and manatee counting and identification by vocalization clustering.