(SB 198 and HB 349)

Environmental group says more manatees will die if Florida’s seagrass mitigation bill passes.

~ Ocean Conservancy

The proposed bill follows the deadliest year for manatees in Florida history.
Leaders of one of the country’s oldest marine conservation groups say a bill being considered by lawmakers would make it easier for developers to destroy seagrass that Florida’s manatees depend upon for survival.

Ocean Conservancy is urging Florida lawmakers to oppose the legislation. The bills (SB 198 and HB 349) would establish seagrass mitigation banks. That would allow a developer seeking permits for a project that would destroy seagrass to buy credits in a mitigation bank to cover the cost of seagrass restoration somewhere else. Theoretically, one acre destroyed would mean one acre built in another location.

But there are no guarantees, and seagrass restoration projects don’t have a great success rate. J.P. Brooker, Ocean Conservancy’s director of Florida conservation, said that’s especially concerning for Florida’s manatee population that depends on seagrasses for sustenance.

“Manatees are dying in record numbers in Florida, in part because we are losing so much seagrass and they are starving to death,” Brooker said. “Florida should be protecting and conserving established seagrass beds by improving water quality and planting new seagrasses.”

The House bill, sponsored by Merritt Island Republican Rep. Tyler Sirois, is nearly identical to a bill he tried to pass in 2021. That year also happened to be the deadliest year for manatees in recorded history. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission reported more than 1,000 manatees died last year. That’s double the five-year average. And most of those deaths were due to starvation from lost seagrasses.

“Seagrass mitigation banks are an unproven tool for curtailing the negative effects of development,” Brooker said. “They should not be viewed as conservation or restoration measures. They are solely an effort to offset the damage to seagrass caused by development.”

Florida has more than 2 million acres of seagrass along its coast and in its estuaries. But those numbers have been shrinking. Ocean Conservancy reports the Indian River Lagoon has lost 58% of its seagrass since 2009. Sarasota Bay has lost 18% over the last three years and Tampa Bay is down 12% since 2012. Manatees and other marine life depend on seagrass for food, and it also helps reduce erosion and improve water quality.

Brevard County Republican Rep. Randy Fine, whose district includes parts of the Indian River Lagoon, said in a December committee meeting that seagrass restoration efforts are too risky and too often fail for a mitigation bank to be counted on.

“Whether it’s a 75% failure rate as one speaker said or a 63% failure rate as another speaker said, I don’t care if it’s a 10% failure rate,” Fine said. “Because there is a 100% chance that initial acre of seagrass is going to have been destroyed. With a certainty of destruction (balanced by) a possibility of success. My county and my area, we can’t have that.”

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Manatees, Facing a Crisis:

In a first, wildlife officials have decided to provide food for the mammals, which have suffered catastrophic losses in Florida waters over the last year.

By Catrin Einhorn – Dec. 7, 2021

The starving manatees are easy enough to spot. You can see their ribs through their skin. They surface to breathe more than normal. Those most in need appear off balance, listing to one side.

As manatee deaths spike and Florida rescue centers fill up with malnourished animals, federal and state wildlife officials are trying something new in an urgent effort to help the species through the winter: They will provide food, as needed, at a key location on the state’s east coast where hundreds of manatees cluster when water temperatures drop.

“This unprecedented event is worth unprecedented actions,” said Thomas Eason, assistant executive director of Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, at a news conference on Wednesday.

The decision is a fraught one, because scientists have found that feeding wild animals can do more harm than good. But Florida’s manatees, already threatened with extinction, have suffered catastrophic losses over the last year. Statewide, more than 1,000 have died in 2021, a record. (In 2016, about 8,800 of the mammals remained in Florida waters, according to state wildlife officials.)

2021 Has Been a Bad Year for Manatees

A joint task force of state and federal officials has linked the increased deaths to the loss of sea grass in the Indian River Lagoon, a 156-mile estuary where manatees, also known as sea cows, seek warm water in winter months.

The sea grass was killed off by algae blooms fueled largely by human waste and fertilizer runoff from lawns and farms, a problem decades in the making. As more people moved to the region and wastewater infrastructure aged, more waste leaked into the estuary, said Duane De Freese, a marine biologist and the executive director of the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program.

“The manatee situation is a symptom,” Dr. De Freese said. “In 2011, it appears we hit a tipping point.”

Since then, sea grass has died off year after year, he said, and is now down by about 90 percent. As climate change brings more severe storms and sea level rise to the region, the problem is expected to worsen.

A warming trend. European scientists announced that 2021 was Earth’s fifth hottest year on record, with the seven hottest years ever recorded being the past seven. A Times analysis of temperatures in the United States showed how 2021 outpaced previous years in breaking all-time heat records.

U.S. emissions bounce back. After a record 10 percent decline in 2020, America’s greenhouse gas emissions rose 6.2 percent in 2021 as the economy began recovering from the pandemic. The uptick underscored the challenges President Biden faces to fulfill his climate agenda.

Sounding the alarm.

A report on the state of the Arctic highlights troubling and consistent trends in the region that are linked to global warming. Researchers are also growing increasingly concerned about Antarctica, where ice shelves are melting and wilder winds are altering crucial currents.

The manatee feeding will be experimental and limited, officials said, and will likely provide leafy greens such as cabbage and lettuce. That’s similar to what manatees are given to eat when taken into captivity for rehabilitation, said Patrick Rose, the executive director of Save the Manatee Club, a nonprofit group that pushed for the supplemental feeding.

“We hope they will take it,” Mr. Rose said. “There’s no guarantee.”

The effort comes with risks. Boat strikes also kill manatees, so further habituating them to vessels or people could be deadly. The feeding program is expected to include measures to prevent that from happening, and to clean up any uneaten produce so that it does not fuel further algal growth.

Wildlife officials urged the public to refrain from feeding manatees. To help the animals, they said, locals should take measures to improve water quality, such as avoiding fertilizer and pesticides on their lawns, and switching from septic systems to a municipal sewer, or upgrading septic systems if that is not possible.

Research focused on other species indicates that wildlife feeding, while well intentioned, can disrupt migration patterns, spread disease and …

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Florida is scrambling to prevent another horrific year of starvation deaths among the beloved mammals

By Lori Rozsa – Article Courtesy of: Washington Post

ORLANDO — On an unusually cold winter morning in central Florida, Corleone the manatee was awakened before dawn by wetsuited workers who slipped into his pool at SeaWorld and wrapped him in a long vinyl sling.

A crane slowly hoisted him out of the water and carefully lowered him to the rear door of an empty box truck, where other staff pushed, pulled and slid their “manatee burrito” inside. Two hopped in to keep Corleone company on his latest journey.

“He’s very chill. He’s such a good traveler,” rescue specialist Maggie Mariolis said. “He should be, because he’s done a lot of it lately.”

Saving the Manatees: Florida’s Atlantic Coast

Mariolis was part of the team that in mid-November brought Corleone some 310 miles from Hilton Head, S.C., where he’d gotten stuck in a canal near a golf course, far from his winter feeding grounds in Florida and at risk of succumbing to cold stress. Ensuring his survival was part of an increasingly urgent effort to save the manatee population, which has been dying off at alarming speeds in the past 14 months, especially along Florida’s Atlantic coast.

Last year alone, 1,110 manatees died — about 15 percent of the total population in a state where they are beloved. Most perished from starvation because the sea grass beds on which they feed have been destroyed by pollutants and toxic algae blooms worsened by climate change.

The wildlife officials and biologists trying to minimize further losses recently took the unprecedented step of setting out fresh heads of romaine and Bibb lettuce daily for hungry manatees gathering in the warmer outflow waters of a power plant near Cape Canaveral. The experiment made little progress initially, with many people fearing the animals could be in for another brutal winter. “Carcass removal” is now a state priority, one official acknowledged.

But within the past week, some three dozen sea cows were observed munching on the lettuce. Wildlife officials said the animals ate 450 pounds of produce in a day.

“It looks like that’s starting to have some success now,” said Patrick Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club, who visited the site Thursday. “I’m very optimistic.”

Florida has five manatee rehabilitation centers, which are working under emergency conditions. Manatees usually spend three or four months in care — at an average cost of $40,000 — but the rescue operations are having to move recovering mammals out as quickly as possible to make room for the malnourished ones coming in.

Saving the Manatees: All the centers are overwhelmed.

“We’re full right now. We’re trying to find more bed space, so we’re shuffling animals around,” said Craig Miller, curator of mammals at the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens. “When we have manatees that are stabilized and we’re confident they can be released, even if we’d prefer to keep them and fatten them up for another month or so, we need to release them to make room. That’s what we’re facing.”

In mid-January, SeaWorld sent four much-improved manatees to the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Ohio. Corleone’s departure on Tuesday opened up space for another creature, and his release into the wild was one of the few positive notes. It meant he was strong enough.

He’d arrived in Orlando on Nov. 17, a young adult weighing about 730 pounds. He was put in a pool at SeaWorld with two other manatees and given all the romaine he wanted. He went through daily weigh-ins and had vital signs checked by a team of veterinarians and rescue specialists. During the next two months, he ate his way through enough greens to now tip the scale at 845. His optimal adult weight is about 1,000 pounds.

In the back of the truck driving him to his new home, Corleone was content to snuffle the air a few times, blink a little at the lights and sleep, swaying with the bumps and turns as he and his escort team headed up Interstate 4 and then down country roads to Blue Spring State Park.

When they arrived, there were no cranes or pulleys to help the 14 volunteers and staff remove Corleone from the truck. They gently lowered the sling to the ground, then lifted and dragged it through the dirt and down a few wooden steps to a small beach where the St. Johns River meets Blue Spring. A park ranger had counted 538 manatees there the day before, so the new arrival would have a lot of company and food. Sea grass is plentiful in the area.

The team floated the sling into the water, and with a little nudging, Corleone swam free. “This is the best part of the job,” Mariolis said.

The only real break manatees have gotten recently is the weather. Except for a few brief cold snaps, Florida has enjoyed an unusually mild winter. When the mercury dips low, however, cooling water temperatures can prove lethal despite manatees’ blubbery protection. That’s why they traditionally gather in the state’s myriad springs, where waters may remain as warm as 72 degrees.

The feeding experiment in the Indian River Lagoon began as temperatures fell below 68 in some waterways and the animals sought out cozier feeding spots such as the area near the Florida Power & Light plant. Rose believes the pilot program there needs to be expanded.

Saving the Manatees – They are Malnourished

“For those manatees that are already malnourished that are coming into the winter in a state of starvation, they’re going to need help,” he said. “The supplemental feeding will do the job it needs to do, but we still need capacity to help the manatees that need to be rescued today. We’ve just been lucky it hasn’t been as cold.”

The federal and state agencies that oversee manatee protection continue to focus on the crisis. Twenty manatees have been rescued on the Atlantic coast in the past month. Most were significantly underweight.

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