When famous manatee Lil Joe started mouthing his flippers, Disney’s vet went to work
Lil Joe plays to fans with star power, dripping charisma, athletically buff at 1,800 pounds and flashing his quintessentially cute manatee mug.
But about that mug: LJ, as his people sometimes call him, got a toothache. The procedure for his dental distress will be shown Friday night in a National Geographic Magic of Disney’s Animal Kingdom episode streaming on Disney+.
“Joe’s weight is under where we would like it to be,” said Disney veterinarian Jen Flower, in the segment. “Yesterday, he ate about 30 heads of lettuce and normally he would eat 90.”
“Dr. Jen” then dropped a hook of narrative tension: “Lil Joe started taking both of his pectoral flippers and putting them in his mouth and kind of chewing on them.”
Gasp!
This all played out last summer. Almost certainly the Orlando Sentinel would not cover a manatee molar drama. But Lil Joe is far from ordinary, and the newspaper has followed him off and on and sometimes closely for 34 years.
Middle-aged in his mid 30s, he’s had a crazy life and may be the world’s most famous manatee. “He might be,” said Teresa Calleson, lead federal biologist for manatee care.
Here’s an abridged bio. Born somewhere in Florida, Lil Joe was rescued in 1989 from the Halifax River near Daytona Beach as a very li’l orphan at 42 pounds.
Days later, launching celebrityhood, Sentinel photographer Red Huber got shots of him at SeaWorld Orlando, and then more photos the next year.
Caretakers knew that without a mother’s care, Lil Joe would not make wise choices in the wild.
For about 20 years, he jetted around the country, growing a fan base: SeaWorld San Diego, Cincinnati Zoo and Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa.
In 2011, tipping the scales at a robust 1,900 pounds, Lil Joe was deemed capable of caring for himself. He was released into the St. Johns River. The following winter was tough. He was rescued, warmed up and put back.
In the summer of 2012, he was spotted in an unlikely and perilous place: the Little Econlockhatchee River at Jay Blanchard Park in east Orange County.
Lil Joe looked more like a sad otter than a cuddly sea cow.
With the Sentinel on hand, he was rescued where Orange County’s Iron Bridge sewage plant releases treated effluent into the Little Econ. He was skin and bones and a belly full of rope, foam and rags.
Handsome, lovable and not so bright, Lil Joe was added to the small group of manatees classified as unsuitable for the wild for a variety of reasons.
For nearly a decade, Lil Joe has lived at The Seas with Nemo & Friends aquarium, rooming with Lou, who limps with a partly amputated tail. The duo draws a big crowd from the millions who visit Epcot each year.
In particular, Lil Joe captivates audiences with barrel rolls that are so flawlessly precisely graceful they might be better characterized as aquatic pirouettes.
“This is Lil Joe,” said Keri Vickers, a Disney team member, on a loudspeaker to an audience in a celebrity introduction that included describing the mesmerizing pirouettes as stimulating his insides so that he will pass gas and poo, “then eat again.”
Eating, as Dr. Jen explained, had become painful.
Manatee teeth are all molars, between six to eight on each side, top and bottom. They wear out from grinding their native food, seagrass, which contains grit and sand.
Manatees grow new molars that slide forward like a conveyor belt to replace worn ones that, without the kind of deep roots that anchor human teeth, fall out on their own.
LJ got an X-ray that spotted a cracked tooth that should have dropped but somehow got hung up. It would prove to be not much to look at – gnarly, worn and smaller than the last digit of a pinky finger. But location mattered.
“There may be an infection there,” Dr. Jen explains in the episode. “That tooth may need to come out.”
In some ways, the procedure that followed is better for visuals than words. The viewer joins the team on the mobile floor that lifted Lil Joe above aquarium water.
The veterinarian has gone shoulder-deep into a giraffe’s mouth and throat, taken on a Puerto Rican boa and grappled intimately with a great variety of animals of the Disney archipelago.
“I wouldn’t stick my hands in just any manatee’s mouth,” she said in the episode. “But I do trust Joe.”
After much effort and grimacing: “Oop, I think I got it.”
