“I was honestly just so surprised.”
Earlier this year, snorkeler Skatey Brown and her friend, Victoria, were exploring the clear waters of a Florida waterway when they had a once-in-a-lifetime kind of encounter — and it’s quite likely they weren’t the only ones experiencing something for the very first time.
It all began when Victoria, who’d brought along a selfie stick with a camera mounted to the end, let the device drop to the sandy river bottom to make a quick adjustment to her snorkel gear.
“At some point, we were fixing our goggles above water when we noticed a friend next to us, and we quickly realized a sneaky potato picked up the [camera] and started filming itself,” Brown wrote in a post.
The “sneaky potato” in the case was none other than a manatee, who, handling the selfie stick with surprising dexterity, then made a little movie:
While the manatee’s selfie video, included at the end of the clip above, is a little shaky and somewhat poorly framed, it may very well be one-of-a-kind footage.
Brown, meanwhile, was stunned to see it.
“Excuse my goofy laughing [in the video],” she wrote. “I was honestly just so surprised.”
It should be noted that manatees are a federally protected species, meaning it’s illegal to intentionally touch or disturb them — a rule that Brown makes note of herself. When it comes to how manatees choose to interact with people, however, sometimes all bets are off.
