Florida grapples with plight of manatees


According to a CNN story, the Florida manatee population has recovered to the point that it could be downlisted from "endangered" status to "threatened" status. The article does say that the manatee would remain on the federal endangered list, and it doesn't specify exactly what effect the change in status would have, but the Save the Manatee folks are upset because they don't want to let the public get complacent, or lose any protections.

There are now more than 3,000 manatees in Florida waters. This about three times as many as there were thought to be in 1988, when I spent a summer working as intern labor for the US Fish & Wildlife manatee tracking lab, and I think that's pretty damn cool. But manatee boat deaths are rising in proportion with their population, and manatee calves start acquiring propeller scars when they're only a few days old. In fact, scientists and park rangers use scar patterns to identify individual manatees, sort of like extremely depressing fingerprints. It's really in the boaters' best interest to protect the manatees, who help keep inland waterways clear by eating water hyacinths and other weeds in massive quantities.

There's a more thoughtful report on manatee population here. It actually references manatee tracking data from Blue Springs that I entered into a statistical database from 10 winters' worth of park rangers' paper records. How cool is that? The rangers give the manatees names like Batman, Robin, Sweetgums, and Success, and there were all these heartbreaking little notes about who had fresh scars and who had bones sticking out of their sides and who had new chunks taken out of their tails. It's hard to take an objective view of the manatee vs. boat debate when the injuries become so personal.