The Manatee Finder project was established to develop an active sonar system that would detect, and then alert boaters, to the presence of manatees in the area. The project was strongly motived by the fact that nearly 1/3 of all manatee deaths each year are caused by interactions with boats. Given the severity of the problem, other solutions had been previously proposed which either used passive detection methods, or in one case, noise deterent methods.

This project was the first to apply active sonar principles to the manatee detection problem. Given the complicated nature of the Florida waterways with respect to the acoustic environment, the first step in the project aimed to characterize the acoustic properties of the manatee. The acoustic properties of any scatterer can be best summarized by its Target Strength which is in essence, a frequency and orientation dependent quantity which specifies the fraction of sound incident on the scatter that is reflected back to the receiver. To accomplish this first step, a group of five male manatees housed at Sea World San Diego were studied both behaviorally and acoustically to better understand the applicability of the proposed active sonar system to the manatee detection problem.