An animal welfare official announced that the naughty manatee that was rescued two days ago from chilly Cape Cod waters was unable to make it home to Florida.

According to Chris Cutter, a spokesman for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the aquatic mammal died Sunday outside Orlando, Fl., while being transported in a climate-controlled truck to warmer waters.  

Cutter added that at 1.30 p.m. on Sunday he was announced via a text-message that Dennis, as the juvenile male manatee was dubbed, was doing fine and was expected to be in warm waters by 3 p.m. "Everything looked to be encouraging but then he just crashed and now we all feel like we had the rug pulled out from under us a little," he said.
By the end of the week, a necropsy will be performed and the cause of the marine mammal will be known.
As said by the rescuers that saved Dennis, the manatee was hypoglycemic and had a low body temperature – 24 degrees below normal. Because it was suffering the early stages of cold shock, rescuers predicted that it may have not been able to stay alive another day. And this is what really happened.

This type of marine mammal, which usually lives off Florida and the southeastern coast of the US, isn’t accustomed to living in chilly waters. If a manatee is too cold, it stop eating and sooner or later dies.

Dennis was rescued on Saturday morning by several wildlife experts who struggled approximately three hours to grasp it from Dennis’s Sesuit Harbor and lift it up into a big truck. Taking into account that Dennis weighted about 1,000 pounds, the task wasn’t easy at all.