Few mammals saved under the Endangered Species Act are as iconic, beloved or bickered about than the Florida manatee. Now the petitioners and lawyers are lining up yet again to save the starving sea cow.
Decades of pride and millions of dollars are at stake riding on the species salvation.
A paucity of seagrass, the animal’s main food source, has led to manatees dying in droves, to the extent that for the past two winters wildlife officials had to toss them lettuce to survive in the wild.
At one time, speeding boats striking manatees was one of the leading causes of death of the lumbering sea cow, typically accounting for a quarter of their deaths.
Lawsuits decades ago led to statewide arrays of go-slow boating zones, in hopes that would save them. But pollution that fuels excess algae kept killing them, anyway. In the latest test of the Endangered Species Act’s “teeth,” environmentalists are suing Florida, this time to stop the pollution that boating groups long had warned was a much bigger risk to the species than their boats.
Meanwhile, after mass starvation of manatees in the past few years, the federal government will decide within a year whether to restore the sea cow’s status to “endangered,” just six years after having “down-listed” them to the less serious “threatened” status.
Previously: Florida gears up to feed manatees again this winter
“Why was it downlisted?” said Lesley Blackner, a Palm Beach attorney representing a nonprofit suing to force Florida to improve manatee protections. “We don’t err on the side of protection, we let it rip … There’s only 3,000 of them left. We have that many people moving to Florida every week.”
Bear Warriors United Inc. filed their suit last year in the Middle District of Florida in Orlando against the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, accusing the agency of failing to protect manatees under the Endangered Species Act.
The group, which usually acts on behalf of black bears, fighting to end hunts, has taken up the manatee cause, accusing the agency of failing to enforce clean water regulations by allowing too many septic tanks and sewage spills to foul and kill the sea cow’s staple seagrass diet.
A hard-fought recovery goes bad
Sea cows stood as a testament to the merits of the Endangered Species Act.
Fossils show they’ve long called Florida home. Manatee remains turn up in Native American rubbish heaps statewide that pre-date the arrival of early Spanish explorers. Colonists described how natives hunted manatees and appreciated the species’ intrinsic value.
But by the 1970s, biologists believed that because of all the decades of hunting and boat strikes, only a few hundred manatees remained. So the federal government listed them as an “endangered” species in 1973.
The late Jimmy Buffett threw his considerable celebrity weight behind saving the manatee, convincing then Gov. Bob Graham in the early 1980s to create a task force focused on the animal.
Hunting bans, widespread boating slow zones and other protections would bring them back. By 2017, state officials counted a record 6,620 manatees, triple their counts from 20 years earlier. And after statewide surveys consistently counted about double the manatees of just a few decades prior, boaters and marine industry successfully lobbied to reclassify manatees as “threatened” in 2017.
The nonprofit Save the Manatee Club warned it was too early to “downlist” sea cows, and that threats from red tides and other harmful algal blooms might still do them in. Then only four years later, the club’s warnings came true: Algae blooms killed off most of the seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon, resulting in a record 1,100 manatees dying statewide in 2021, most from starvation. About a third of the deaths occurred in Brevard County.
That year, sun-bleached skulls, scattered ribs and the decaying husks of dozens of manatees sullied the smooth tan sand on a handful of mangrove islands north of what’s called Manatee Cove Park in Brevard County. Emaciated manatee remains, reported by waterfront residents or spotted by boaters in Brevard, were collected and dumped on the sandy outcroppings by state wildlife officers, turning idyllic tropical settings into sea cow mass graveyards.
COVID-19 limited how many field and lab examinations state wildlife officials could do.
The manatee death toll got so bad that by March 2021, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had declared the die-off an Unusual Mortality Event. Then, in a first-of-its-kind pilot project to try to stave off further starvation, state and federal biologists fed manatees at the Florida Power & Light power plant last winter and through the end of March 2022. Manatees over the years have congregated in the area to take advantage of the plant’s warm-water output.
As the carcasses stacked up, petitions to restore the manatees’ endangered status followed. In October, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it had completed two 90-day findings on Endangered Species Act petitions to “uplist” the West Indian manatee and the Puerto Rican population of the Antillean manatee to “endangered.” So far, the feds agree. Based on the reviews, “both petitions present substantial scientific or commercial information indicating that the petitioned actions may be warranted.”
The agency found the petition presented “substantial information that seagrass loss may be a threat to the species.”
Friend or foe?
Few Florida species raise as much money or animosity as the manatee.
For environmental champions, the lumbering sea cow is an icon for the Sunshine State, drawing tourists and inspiring people to get involved in marine conservation. The license plate that dons their image, boat registration fees, donations and other sources garner more than $4 million a year into a state trust fund to help them.
But to detractors and many boating enthusiasts, the animal also limits how docks get built, as well as when, where and how people can boat.
Boaters object to the speed and other restrictions, saying that by focusing almost exclusively on boating activities, conservationists missed the larger environmental issues challenging the sea cow, and what impacts a rebounding population might have on their food supply.
Some boaters contend the increasing number of animals have have eaten themselves into a crisis.
Previously: Brevard accounted for half of manatee deaths in 2022
Is culling a solution?: Brevard County Commissioner argues Florida should kill manatees to save them
Pat Rose disagrees. He says too many humans are the problem, not too many sea cows. He had been hoping to step down from his role as executive director of Save the Manatee Club, before the die-off in recent years.
The 2021 sea cow famine made him rethink what needs to be done to save the marine mammal from extinction and restore its federal “endangered” status.
“Since Florida has eviscerated much of its growth management protections while eliminating the Department of Community Affairs and numerous comprehensive planning regulations, we are going to have to depend on federal laws like the Endangered Species Act provisions to become the basic backstops to further endangerment before we see more species pass the point of no return,” Rose said.
But to one of Rose’s main rivals, Bob Atkins, the head of one of Florida’s largest boating groups, what’s “endangered” is the traditional pastimes like water skiing and being able to open up your boat on the water — cherished ways of Old Florida life.
“Unfortunately, because of over-regulation and political agenda, those agencies have become more bureaucratic than scientific,” said Atkins, president of Citizens for Florida’s Waterways.
Almost 500 manatees have died this year through the end of October. That adds to 800 deaths last year.
How much more Florida does to save more manatees could hinge on the outcome of Bear Warriors’ suit.
Their suit seeks, among other things, an injunction requiring DEP to stop permitting discharge of nitrogen from septic tanks and sewer plants into the northern Indian River Lagoon or approving septic tanks or sewer plant hookups for new construction in that area.
Nitrogen from human waste is thought to be one on the causes of algae blooms that have smothered the seagrass in the lagoon.
Gregory Lee Roy Pflug, a Florida native and Bear Warriors member who lives in Geneva, wrote in an affidavit for the suit to make them “endangered” again.
“I never thought I would see starving manatees and their extinction from the Indian River Lagoon, but that is what’s happening now,”
Jim Waymer is an environment reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Waymer at 321-261-5903 or [email protected]. Or find him on X (formerly Twitter): @JWayEnviro.