Struggle To Survive

The gentle manatee is continuing to navigate rough waters in the sea mammals’ struggle to survive and thrive.

While the situation has improved for the threatened animal since the horrific die-off of 1,100 manatees in 2021, the population is far from stable.

In 2022, deaths dropped to 800, while 555 deaths were recorded in 2023. So far in the first three months of 2024, 130 have died.

Progress? Yes. Recovery? Not so much.

The die-off was caused mainly by the decimation of seagrass beds, the favorite entrée on the manatees’ menu. In the Indian River Lagoon, a 156-mile estuary on Florida’s east coast and a crucial habitat for manatees, 95% of seagrass biomass was obliterated.

The seagrass died due to human-induced nutrient pollution entering the water and resulting in widespread algae blooms that choked the seagrass off. The sources of the nutrients include development, agriculture, runoff from highways and land infrastructure, fertilizer from people’s lawns, and failing septic systems in hundreds of thousands of homes built in areas where they can literally leach into groundwater and move into the waters of the bay, explains Patrick Rose, an aquatic biologist and executive director of the Save the Manatee Club.

The Save the Manatee Club helps with a rescue of a distressed manatee. SAVE THE MANATEE CLUB / COURTESY PHOTO

Adult manatees can range from 1,000 pounds to more than 3,500 pounds and eat 4% to 9% of their body weight per day in seagrass and aquatic vegetation, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. But the lush lagoon was more like a seagrass desert. That meant manatees starved to death.

“I will tell you, it’s been horrible to have all these decades of (manatee) watercraft injuries and mortality and so forth,” Rose said. “But when we saw a thousand or so manatees dying of starvation and malnutrition, it even took a greater toll on your psyche, if you will, because you knew that hundreds of those manatees were having so little food that they were essentially digesting their own internal organs. And it just, it was heart rendering.”

The Save the Manatee Club is petitioning to get manatees moved from being classified as a threatened species to an endangered species. SAVE THE MANATEE CLUB / COURTESY PHOTO

March is Seagrass Awareness Month, according to the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida, so it seems appropriate to spotlight the status of seagrass, the state of manatees and look at what the future may hold.

This loss of seagrass didn’t happen overnight. It was about 10 years in the making, said Rose, who was also the first federal manatee recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and went on to develop the entire state of Florida’s program before retiring in 1996.

There were a series of harmful algae blooms, starting with a “super bloom” in 2011, he said. “That was sort of the real beginning of the tragedy that was building. So that killed off thousands of acres. We had a series of blooms after that.” They were so dense that they shut the light out so the plants couldn’t continue photosynthesis, he said. So, they died.

“You know, you reach tipping points,” Rose said. When those points are reached and passed, “then it’s a cascading catastrophe,” he said.

Cora Berchem of Save the Manatee Club with a baby manatee.

Manatees are not the only animal to benefit from the lagoon. More than 2,200 species of animals, including nearly 700 fish, 68 reptiles and amphibians, 370 birds and 29 mammal species call the lagoon home, according to the foundation.

The impact on the lagoon and its wildlife also impacts tourism, the lifeblood of Florida’s economy. People don’t want to come to Florida to see dead manatees and smell decaying, dying fish, Rose said.

There were also seagrasses losses on the west coast — in Tampa Bay, 12% of seagrass has been lost in two years and Sarasota Bay has lost 30% of its seagrass since 2016.

But the Indian River Lagoon crisis prompted the state government to act.

Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a new Indian River Lagoon (IRL) Protection Program and provided $100 million in state funding “to support 21 priority water quality projects that will reduce the amount of harmful nutrients entering the IRL and help keep our waterways pristine,” according to a Dec. 18 press release. “Florida is the boating and fishing capital of the world, and local economies depend on these waterways attracting business to the area,” the release continued.

ROSE

“That sounds like a lot of money, and it is,” Rose said. “But the magnitude of what is going to be required to solve the problem ultimately” is between $5-6 billion, he said. “So, we’re a long way from, like I said, being out of the woods.”

The Save the Manatee Club is also pushing for and partnering with other groups to have the manatee uplisted from a threatened species to an endangered species. The club is party to a petition filed to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) by the Center for Biological Diversity, Harvard Animal Law & Policy Clinic, Miami Waterkeeper and Frank S. González García.

The manatee should never have been downlisted to a threatened species in 2017 in the first place, Rose said. “The information the agency received, including all the peer-review scientists, and so forth indicated that it was inappropriate, it was premature. And, of course, these things that have happened since then really have just cemented what our arguments were.”

The FWS announced in October that the petition to reclassify had merit and a final protection decision was to be announced Nov. 21. But the service missed the deadline.

The Save the Manatee Club also partnered with the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife to file a lawsuit several years ago against the FWS for failing to revise outdated critical habitat for Florida manatees, which had not been updated since 1976. A settlement was reached recently and the FWS has committed to a proposed, revised critical habitat by Sept. 12, according to Ragan Whitlock, attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Another lawsuit was filed by the same three parties, along with Earth Justice, in May 2022 against the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to protect manatees in the wake of the massive mortality event in the Indian River Lagoon. That case is pending.

The number of manatee deaths in Florida is declining, but rescue workers say watercraft collisions, red tide and a parasite are still threatening the animals. SAVE THE MANATEE CLUB / COURTESY PHOTOS

“Most of the problems manatees are facing are manmade, which means we are responsible for it,” said Cora Berchem, director of multimedia and manatee research associates of the Save the Manatee Club. “We can fix it. But we all really need to realize that and work together. It’s not something that’s going to fix itself.”

Berchem oversees all the club’s social media, creates educational videos and outreach materials. She also oversees the club’s live webcams of manatees at Blue Spring, Homosassa Springs and Silver Springs state parks ( ManaTV.org ). In the winter she assists the club’s main researcher, Wayne Hartley, with photo ID research of manatees at Blue Spring, in Volusia County, where a record 932 manatees were counted by park rangers on Jan. 21. The park is a major hot spot for manatees seeking warmth in the winter.

WALSH

“The ones at Blue Spring are doing really well. So, it’s really encouraging,” Berchem said.

She has also participated in various manatee rescues. They can pack an emotional impact.

“We’ve seen some really horrendous boat strikes,” Berchem said. She remembers one in particular from last May. It was a manatee with her newborn calf and the calf still had the umbilical cord attached.

“And the mom was just so horrifically injured that I don’t think anyone thought she would make it through the rescue, let alone through the transport or the rehab.”

“But I do remember that, you know, just looking into her eyes was kind of a mix between like, ‘Oh my goodness, what is going on?’ ‘What has happened to me?’ And as well as, ‘I’m not giving up.’ ‘I still have fight in me and I’m going to pull through this.’”

“I have to say, you know, this is something that you take home with you,” Berchem said. “And that’s something that does bring you to tears, that haunts you in your dreams. Sometimes at night when you just think about these animals and what they go through.”

A manatee with scars from an injury inflicted by a watercraft.

The mom and the calf made a full recovery and were released this January.

Save the Manatee Club does rescues on its own and works with a larger organization called the Manatee Rescue and Rehabilitation Partnership (MRP). The public-private partnership includes FWS, USGS Geological Survey, FWC, zoos and aquariums.

Michael Walsh, a veterinarian, and clinical associate professor of aquatic animal health at the University of Florida, is an expert in research, rescue and recovery of manatees. Formerly the director of veterinary services at SeaWorld, he’s involved in research projects looking at toxicology and manatees as well as proper handling and protection of the animals.

The MRP has now become more and more engaged as an overall umbrella working with all the different institutions that house manatees, Walsh said.

A manatee with injuries after getting entangled with debris. SAVE THE MANATEE CLUB / COURTESY PHOTO

Right now, the critical care centers are SeaWorld, ZooTampa and Jacksonville Zoo, he said.

New centers coming on board include Clearwater Marine Aquarium. Brevard Zoo is also building facilities, he said.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s estimate for statewide population of the manatee for the 2021-2022 period, the latest available, is 8,350– 11,730 manatees, with 3,960–5,420 on the west coast and 3,940–6,980 on the east coast.

In 2023, the top cause of death was watercraft collisions, according to the FWC.

“And so, thankfully, you know, Mother Nature is really resilient,” Rose said. “There was a substantial amount of regrowth of seagrasses.” But again, this was due to Mother Nature, not human action.

“We’ve been fortunate to have enough circumstances come together on the east coast that were not seeing these continued harmful algal blooms,” Rose said. But the causes of those algal blooms that resulted in the massive manatee mortality have not been remedied yet, he said.

However, while nutrient pollutants are a big problem, there are multiple other threats to manatees that impact mortality numbers, Walsh said.

For example, the major causes of manatee deaths on Florida’s southwest coast are red tide and watercraft.

Entanglements are a factor, as well as natural threats like cold stress, perinatal mortality and disease, he said.

In fact, the FWC says about 20% of manatee deaths in 2023 stemmed from a red tide bloom in Southwest Florida. Also, of the total 555 deaths in 2023, 114, or 20.5% were from Lee County.

“We have freshwater releases from Lake Okeechobee, which have already happened,” Rose said. “It’s only at the beginning of March, and we’re already seeing these humongous releases going on which can cause harmful algae blooms.

Red tide can get quite thick in isolated areas, but its impact to manatees is more from the actual toxins, the brevetoxin that’s created by that particular species of algae,” Rose said. “Even if it doesn’t cause any direct loss of seagrass, it can actually fall down and get in and amongst the seagrass too. And when the manatees are eating that grass, they can consume those lower levels of red tide and it can become toxic through the ingestion.”

It can also be so strong in some instances that the amount of toxin is like an aerosol, he said. “And that’s where you hear people coughing at the beaches and that sort of thing. Well, it can be at the interface between the water and the air surface where manatees breathe. It can be enough aerosol that they can actually inhale that and it can cause them to die because of increased toxicity levels.” Even when it doesn’t cause them to die directly, it can impair their nervous system to the point that they drown, or they’re not able to maintain their stability, he said.

There is substantial amount of seagrass available if you go farther south to where the Caloosahatchee makes its way to the Gulf, Rose said. “But it’s also on this terrible whipsawing between the releases from Lake Okeechobee that come through the Caloosahatchee. So, we’re watching that carefully. Of course, you know how devastating the red tides have been and likely will be going forward, because there’s nothing happening quite yet that would give us hope that we’re not going to see these cycles of very dense red tide.” Although now we’re in a period of lesser amounts of red tide, he said. “So, we’ll take it.”

Another problem on the southwest coast is trematode parasites infecting young manatees, Walsh said. The trematode is a parasitic flatworm. “It’s extremely normal for most wild animals to have parasites, but they need to ideally be able to control them with their immune system. But if you compromise that individual, the parasites can become much more of a problem,” he said. Manatees can potentially pick these up in numerous locations, “but for some reason they’re concentrated as an issue in Southwest Florida.”

“I think manatees are just such an amazing animal,” Berchem said. “Just the resiliency that they have. They’re kind of the underdog, like, people don’t know them as well as they know maybe whales or dolphins sometimes. You know, I do get comments about, oh, well, you know, they just float around,” she said. “They don’t jump through hoops like dolphins do. But their intelligence and just the things that they go through and they’re living in such close proximity to people and are still able to survive, I think that speaks for itself.”

The nutrient pollution issues impacting the seagrasses and manatees “are all part of Florida growing unsustainably because we have not been paying our fair share towards protection of the environment or the water quality as we go,” Rose said. “We’ve been building up that deficit. And my analogy is kind of like when you’re not paying your mortgage, and if you don’t pay your mortgage, you know you’re going to be foreclosed on at some point in time,” he said. “In essence, what we’ve experienced, if you take the Mother Nature analogy, she foreclosed on the Indian River lagoon and those that had been essentially mortgaged in the environmental future.”

“So, we’re so happy that some of the seagrass is slowly coming back. But we just need to keep in mind if we have one really bad algae bloom that can all go away again. I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re moving in the right direction.

“We have a chance to come out of this. But we have to learn from our failures.” ¦

The post Struggle To Survive first appeared on Charlotte County Florida Weekly .