Of all the Florida animals, none gather as much love as the manatee. These gentle giants are iconic in Florida waters, and a favorite of people to see and interact with. Yes, we love our Florida panthers, and the black bear, we even give a little love to alligators. But the manatee is special. It’s the one animal that won’t kill you and eat you.
Photo credit- Kathy Jones
But the manatees are imperiled. They are dying at an unsustainable rate. Over 1,100 died in 2021. The death toll so far in 2022 is running about the same as last year. When you start with a population somewhere just over 6,000, losing 2,000 in two years is disastrous.
Even beyond the carnage is the horrible deaths they experience. They are literarily starving to death. Every year some of the herd dies from run-ins with boats, and shock from cold waters. But in 2021 a large majority of the deaths were from starvation. The reason: the loss of their primary food supply, seagrass.
Photo credit- Phil Stasik
Pollution in their primary waterways has created algae blooms on the water surface, which blocks sunlight from reaching the bottom where the seagrasses live. Lack of sunlight causes the grasses to die off and leaves manatees without their primary food source.
Nearly all of that pollution is man-made. It comes old sewage treatment plants, fertilizer runoff from lawns and farms, leaky septic systems, and untreated stormwater runoff.
Ground zero for the manatee die off in 2021-22 is Brevard County, on Florida’s east coast. Manatees densely populate the waters of the Indian River Lagoon. The entire 156-mile stretch of the Lagoon is polluted, nowhere worse than the stretch through Brevard County.
The Marine Resource Council monitors the lagoon water and issues an annual report card on water quality. The last two years the Brevard County section of the lagoon has gotten an “F”. Most other areas of the lagoon fared about the same.
There’s a massive effort underway in Brevard County to clean up the lagoon. Funded by a special half-cent sales tax approved by voters a couple years ago, nearly a half million dollars a year is being deposited in the lagoon cleanup fund.
Using that money, and matching grants from local governments, some improvement is being made. But cleaning up lagoon waters is a slow progress job. The work so far has consisted of dredging muck off the lagoon floor (a prime source of lagoon pollution), hooking up high polluting septic systems to sewer lines and upgrading sewage treatment plants, and diverting stormwater runoff into “baffle boxes” which filter debris and pollutants out of the water before it reaches the lagoon. The county imposes a fertilizer ban during the summer rainy season, which cuts back on the nitrate flow into the lagoon waters for at least part of the year.
The work has been going on for nearly four years with tepid results. Even though Brevard still got an “F” this year, the Marine Resources Council noted some improvement. “Some improvement”, but not enough to regenerate the seagrass and feed the hungry manatees.
So where do we go from here? The Florida Fish &n Wildlife Commission dumped thousands of pounds of Romaine lettuce into the water where the manatees huddle for warmth in the winter. The cleanup will continue and hopefully show more progress. The Save The Manatee club, and other environmental groups, are calling for manatees to be upgraded from “threatened” back to “endangered”. Manatees were taken off the endangered species list a few years ago because of sizeable increases in their population. Now, with nearly a third of the herd dying off in two years, this would be a good time to rethink that.