Claim: “West Point fishermen caught a sea cow.”
Verdict: Misleading
Full Text: On July 9, 2024, a Facebook page named “Duport Road Girls Them Chairlady,” posted in another private group called “Sekou Kalasco Damaro” that a fisherman in the township of Westpoint had caught a sea cow in the Atlantic Ocean.
Sekou Kaasco Damaro has 73.3k followers. The post that announced the creature’s discovery had 111 counter and supportive comments in addition to 60 reactions.
West Point is a township outside the capital of Liberia, situated between the Mesurado and Saint Paul Rivers on a 0.53 km2 peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean. It is one of the slums in Monrovia with the densest population.
Fishermen inhabited the informal village in the 1940s and 1950s. There was an unsuccessful attempt to relocate residents from West Point in the 1970s and again in 2016. Being among the communities that were hardly affected by the 2014 ebola outbreak, it was under an 18-day cordon sanitaire.
Verification: A genus of aquatic mammals known as “sea cows” includes several species, including manatees and dugongs.
The term “Sierenia” refers to this group of marine animals. It’s interesting to note that they were given the name “Sirens” because sailors thought they were mermaids when they found them.
Information about this creature can also be found here, here, here, and here. We found that neither sea cows were discovered nor existed in Liberia.
We further found that the image as posted was taken from this YouTube site with the inscription in Indonesian, “Keanehan binatang yang ada di dunia semakin kontras, singa laut berkepala sapi betul betul mengagetkan semua warga yang melihatnya.”
We translated the inscription, “The strangeness of the animals in the world is increasingly contrasting; the cow-headed sea lion surprises everyone who sees it.”
Conclusion: No, the image of the sea cow is not from West Liberia.
