Workers at a zoo in Venezuela are managing to keep their manatees fed — in a country where many people are going without food. 

It was more than 20 years ago when workers at the Botanical Zoo Bararida learned that local fishermen had captured two West Indian manatees, the largest surviving member of the aquatic mammal order Serenia. Workers made arrangements to bring the manatees to the zoo in the Venezuelan city of Barquisimeto, and named them Chicho and Fernanda. The zoo has been their home ever since. 

Chicho was just a few months old. He was raised by zoo workers who fed him for three years on a diet of goat milk. Fernanda was already six years old, and refused to eat anything the workers offered her. They knew manatees grow up grazing on sea grass beds, and they experimented with various kinds of food to feed her in captivity until they discovered she loved lettuce. In their natural habitat, West Indian manatees can eat up to 20 percent of their weight each day. The local government provides 150 kilos of lettuce and 12 kilos of carrots, plus bananas and broccoli for the manatees each day. 

The West Indian manatee is considered an endangered species in Venezuela, where its numbers have dropped dramatically due to poaching and destruction of habitat.  The staff at Bararida Zoo have developed a reproduction program that's helped Chicho and Fernanda produce offspring. They have successfully managed to breed four manatees in captivity.

Now a family of six, Chicho and Fernanda and their offspring swim in an aquarium just 60 centimeters deep. Venezuela is in the midst of an economic crisis, and the zoo says it does not have the funds to repair broken glass in a deeper aquarium that workers say would make a better temporary home for them.  Workers say even better than fixing the glass in the broken aquarium, would be an opportunity to release these manatees to swim in their natural habitat, in Venezuela's freshwater rivers and estuaries, and in the coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.