Jacob TindallManatees
The manatee breath tracker
Jacob built a phone app that logs each breath during a health exam and sounds an alert if a manatee has not breathed in one minute.
During a manatee health assessment, the animal is out of the water for a timed exam. Someone on the team has to watch respiration the whole time. If a manatee goes too long without a breath, the crew stimulates it — often by wetting the snout — so the animal takes air again.
Jacob saw that on Belize 2025, including the last water day with Todd. When respiration paused for more than about a minute, he helped wet the snout to cue a breath. The one-minute mark is easy to miss when several people are sampling, tagging, and keeping the animal wet at once.
He built a phone app so that timer is not only in someone’s head.
Tap when the manatee breathes. The app records the time of each breath and an average breaths-per-minute rate for that exam. If a full minute passes without a tap, it sounds an alert so the team can cue a breath right away. That is the point of the tool: keep the watch continuous, and make the dangerous pause impossible to ignore.
He field-tested it on May 25, 2026, during Belize 2026 assessments out of Placencia. That morning started with dolphins near the boat. The team then completed exams on two males. Jacob ran the tracker through a live capture, logging timestamps while the rest of the exam went on around him.
He planned to keep adjusting it at home for aquariums and conservationists. This site does not claim the app is listed in an app store.
The 2025 trip that showed him the problem is Belize 2025. The 2026 season where he tested the fix is Belize 2026.