Snooty
manatee born and held in captivity in Florida, US
Snooty (July 21, 1948 – July 23, 2017) was a male Florida manatee that resided at the South Florida Museum's Parker Manatee Aquarium in Bradenton, Florida. He was one of the first recorded captive manatee births, and at age 69, he was the oldest manatee in captivity, and possibly the oldest manatee in the world. Due to his hand rearing from birth, Snooty was never released into the wild and was the only manatee at the museum's aquarium that had regular human interaction.
Life history
During 1948, Samuel J. Stout, owner of the Miami Aquarium and Tackle Company, acquired a permit from the State of Florida to own a single manatee, a female he had named Lady. On July 21, 1948, Lady gave birth to a male calf Stout named "Baby". Due to his permit allowing him to keep only a single manatee, he had to find a new home for the calf. Around the same time, the city of Bradenton in Manatee County wished to acquire a manatee for their 1949 De Soto Heritage Festival, and learned of the birth of Baby at the Miami Aquarium and Tackle Company.
After De Soto Celebration Association member Walter Hardin acquired a permit for a manatee exhibition, the city built a tank on the municipal pier and arranged for Stout to bring Baby from Miami to Bradenton for the festival. Afterwards, Stout returned with the manatee to Miami, but Stout was still only legally allowed to keep a single manatee.
In April 1949, arrangements were made to allow Baby to become a permanent resident of Bradenton's South Florida Museum, where a new 3,000-U.S.-gallon (11,000 L) round tank was completed in May for Baby.
“Snooty” enters the record as manatee born and held in captivity in Florida, US. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Snooty, manatee and born can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7548035. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1948, 2017 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Snooty” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.