Everywhere the Manatee

The West Indian manatee was discovered in the 1500s by Spanish explorers that hunted them for their meat, hide, and oils. It has spent almost exactly 500 years as the least-mentioned animal in world literature, behind even the narwhal. Then, suddenly and in the mid-1990s, there seems to have been an explosion of interest in manatees: not from the general public (amongst whom sharks exploded in 1975, meerkats in the late 1980s) but from writers of light fiction and television serials. Bo Selecta's fake Marilyn Manson has a West Indian manatee in the pool of his Los Angeles crib; according to South Park, the punchlines for Family Guy are selected by two manatees nudging brightly coloured balls containing pop-culture references (to e.g. Gary Coleman) into a vat. Even the New Yorker was hip enough to disparage somebody's girlfriend as pretentious for 'writing short stories about the manatee'.

My question is: why the manatee? Why the manatee now?

Source for picture: www.wikipedia.org