Inside Rescue's 1000th Manatee Release: How 825-Pound Owa Went from Tank to Truck to Florida Waterway (Exclusive)

It's the kind of call most people don't expect to get during the holidays — an apparently injured manatee seen swimming in an Alabama canal system.

Nicholas Ricci, a senior animal care specialist on SeaWorld Orlando's rescue team, knows that these sorts of calls happen frequently, but rarely around Christmas time.

"Seeing manatees in that area, at that time of year, is rare," Ricci tells PEOPLE. "It's too chilly."

SeaWorld's external partners — who work with the organization to assist in the rescue of injured, orphaned, or stranded marine animals — fielded the call, which came from an area resident, and a team of biologists went to the site to monitor the manatee themselves.

"They spent about three days tracking the animal and it didn't seem to be moving," Ricci explains. "Typically, an animal would move out of that region during the winter months and go someplace else. Ideally, if they migrate themselves, it's a whole lot better for everyone, but it became very clear to those biologists up there, he was not leaving. But there's only so much leeway that we can give to the manatee before it becomes critical."

So Ricci — along with SeaWorld Orlando's curator of rescue Brant Gabriel and SeaWorld rescue team member Kelly Cluckey — made the decision to travel from Orlando, Fla., to Magnolia Springs, Ala., to rescue the manatee on New Year's Day.

"Kelly, Brant and myself just said, 'You know what? We're willing to forgo our plans on New Year's Eve for this trip,' " Ricci says.

So the team packed up the SeaWorld Rescue boat (a flat-bottomed boat specifically designed for manatee rescue), hitched it to a truck and made the eight-hour drive to Alabama.

One day prior to the rescue, on New Year's Day, the trio opted to take a break at a nearby amusement park.

"We ended up getting a hotel right next to an amusement park called OWA," Ricci says. "It was New Year's Eve, we figured we'd have some fun the day before the rescue, so we rode a rollercoaster."

And then, they had an idea: Since the journey, and the theme park itself, was such a unique part of the rescue, why not use that to name the soon-to-be-rescued manatee? The manatee, they decided, would be called Owa.

But first, they had to find him.

"We had a general idea where the manatee was, based on the earlier sightings, but the water there is very dark — you're looking for his little tiny nose, or any ripples in the water," Ricci says of the rescue effort on Jan. 1, 2025.

Together with volunteer groups from Alabama's Dauphin Island Sea Lab, the trio scoured the area for hours — working as quietly as possible so as not to scare the animal into hiding even further.

"We had people positioned up and down the waterway," Ricci explains. "We don't use special equipment or sonar. You just have to be observant. And you have to work very carefully — were using a net, and we don't have the ability to discriminate and accidentally catch something else. We knew that we pretty much had one shot to find him."

Some eight hours later, they finally did.

"We could tell that he had definitely experienced some cold stress, so he was probably tired," Ricci says, explaining that the condition refers to animals that have been in temperatures below 68 degrees for a significant period of time. Similar to hypothermia in humans, cold stress can lead to skin decay, infection and even organ failure in manatees.

After catching the manatee in a net, the team loaded him onto their boat, and then into a truck, where a veterinarian assessed the animal for any immediate needs. Then, he began his eight-hour road trip to SeaWorld Orlando.

Once at SeaWorld Orlando, Owa was attended to by a team of biologists and veterinarians, and placed in water that was slowly warmed so his body temperature would rise. Like the other rescued manatees at Sea World, Owa was also given antibiotics and fed hearty meals of hydroponically-grown lettuce. The facility has a partnership with 4Roots Farms, which supplies it with some 1,000 pounds of nutrient-dense lettuce, grown specifically for the rescued manatees, each week.

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Exactly three months later, Owa was ready to return to the wild.

On April 1, after being medically cleared, Owa was weighed and measured (825 lbs. and 273 cm. long) before being loaded into SeaWorld's Rescue vehicle by crane and driven for nearly two hours (alongside this PEOPLE staffer, who got to pet him as he was observed and doused with water to keep him comfortable throughout the ride) to Florida's Crystal River.

Then, a team of SeaWorld, Florida Fish and Wildlife and Dauphin staffers and volunteers took him from the truck and into the water, where he swam away to applause from those who nursed him back to health.

Owa's successful return to the wild marked a significant milestone in SeaWorld's 50-year-history of rescuing and rehabilitating the animals.

"Owa was actually our 1,000th manatee rescue since 1976," Ricci says. "And I think a lot of people obviously equate SeaWorld with the entertainment aspect. They don't realize we've been doing this for so long."

The facility also counts other rescued animals among its residents — sea turtles and walruses among them — but it is the manatees, which face significant threats to their survival like habitat loss, boat collisions and starvation — that have arguably come the farthest.

"So much of what we see is the negative side," Ruth Carmichael, a senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, who was on hand at Owa's release, tells PEOPLE. "We see a lot of death and we see a lot of animals that — even if they're alive, their prognosis is too poor to survive. But to see the recovery is really exciting for us. We work so hard throughout the year to try to make the stars sort of line up just right — to allow us to get an animal when it's still healthy enough to survive, and initiate a recovery with our partners like SeaWorld and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission."

She continues: "Once an animal is at the facility, all of a sudden the prognosis is so much better. They survive, right? We just have to get them there."

Owa's recovery was quick, especially considering the time and care required to attend to other manatees, like the mother-daughter duo Reckless and Churro, who were rescued after a large boat strike.

"Churro's mom was struck by a really giant vessel that took off her entire shoulder," Ricci says. "Churro had just been born a week before that happened. So she came in with mom, was basically raised [at Sea World]. They got released, she left her mom as she should, but then this winter she looked a little skinny, so she was rescued again."

The same day Owa was released, Churro was undergoing her pre-release physical, a sign that she would soon be released a second time.

Following their rescue and rehabilitation, the animals are monitored. In rare cases, like Churro's, they might be rescued a second time, but for the most part, the manatees go on to live healthy lives in the wild.

Marine life rescue is so important to SeaWorld that it's become part of the attraction itself. All of the manatees on view at SeaWorld's Manatee Rehabilitation Area exhibit are, in fact, rescues. The exhibit is a testament both to the hard work of the team — and how far manatees, as a species, have come.

"Considering when we started, there were just over 1,000 manatees in Florida ... it's incredible," Ricci says with a smile. "And it's all come as a result of by these individual rescue cases, one by one. I can't tell you how amazing that feels."