boats. Gerstein faded from prominence.

Now he's back, trumpeting an invention dubbed the "Manatee Alerting Device," or MAD for short. Attached below a boat's water line, the MAD is supposed to blare out a "low intensity, highly directional narrow band of sound" to warn manatees to scatter, according to a press release sent out last month by his employer, Florida Atlantic University.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Epilogue: Snooty, 69, a breed apart from other manatees (w/video)

He figures that when it's commercially available, the MAD will cost $120. And with 900,000 boats in Florida, he said in an interview that "it'd be great to have one on every boat."

When he heard the news, Alan Huff had this reaction:

"Ohhhh, not that again."

Huff was the state employee who discovered that Gerstein had faked a degree.He said the tens of thousands spent on Gerstein's research was "a waste of money."

And other scientists still don't buy Gerstein's theory.

• • •

Gerstein, 62, grew up in New Jersey. After college in Colorado, he landed a job at SeaWorld as an animal trainer, working with dolphins and whales. Then another marine mammal caught his eye.

"Like everyone I was concerned about manatees, because they were being hit by boats," he said. He wondered if "they weren't getting the information fast enough" to get out of the way.

His initial experiments with Snooty, the beloved manatee who recently died at the South Florida Museum in Bradenton, proved that manatees can be trained to perform certain tasks. Starting in 1991, he focused his efforts on two manatees named Stormy and Dundee