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The WFSU Ecology Blog

  • Home
    • About
    • EcoAdventures
      • Kayak and Canoe Adventures
      • Hiking
      • Wildlife Watching
    • Observations From the Field
      • White Pelicans Visit Dr. Charles L. Evans Pond in Tallahassee
      • An April Walk at Ochlockonee River WMA
      • Nesting Raptors at Honeymoon Island State Park
    • WFSU Public Media Home
  • Documentaries
    • EcoCitizen Show | Seasons in South Tallahassee
    • Red Wolf Family Celebrates First Year at the Tallahassee Museum
    • Roaming the Red Hills
    • Oyster Doctors
    • Testing the Ecology of Fear
    • EcoShakespeare
    • Stories from the Apalachicola
    • Classic WFSU Ecology Documentaries
  • Habitats
    • Estuaries
      • Oyster Reef
        • The Effects of Predators and Fear on Oyster Reefs
        • Apalachicola Oyster Research
        • Animal Species in a North Florida Intertidal Oyster Reef
        • Oyster Reef Ecology | On the Reef
      • Salt Marsh
        • In the Grass- Salt Marsh Biodiversity Study
        • Plants and Animals of a North Florida Salt Marsh
        • Salt Marsh Ecology | In the Grass
      • Seagrass Bed
        • Predatory Snails, and Prey, of the Bay Mouth Bar Seagrass Beds
      • In the Grass, On the Reef Glossary
    • Waterways Big and Small
      • Aucilla/ Wacissa Watershed
      • Apalachicola Basin
        • Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines | Virtual Field Trip
        • The Age of Nature Screening & Discussion | The Future of the Apalachicola
        • Apalachicola River and Bay
        • Apalachicola RiverTrek | Kayaking, Camping, & Hiking the River Basin
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Conservationists are pushing Congress to pass a bill that would list Florida’s manatee as endangered

by November 15, 2021
by November 15, 2021 0 comment

Nearly 1,000 Florida manatees have died so far this year. And congressional lawmakers are hoping to bypass current regulations to get the West Indian manatee immediately relisted as endangered.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) says most of the manatees starved to death last winter when they went to warm water spots with little food. That food was lost due to nutrient pollution, which caused algal blooms that clouded sunlight, killing the plant life manatees depend on. Gil McRae directs the FWC’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.

“In past years, we lost seagrass, but we’ve had macro-algae—seaweed—available for manatees to eat. The current situation is we don’t have a large acreage of either right now,” McRae says.

Patrick Rose is an aquatic biologist and executive director of Save the Manatee Club. A catastrophic algal bloom in the Indian River Lagoon caught his attention in 2011. And Rose says the blooms have continued and are in other state waterbodies where manatees live. He believes the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wasn’t considering how widespread the blooms were when it downlisted the manatee to threatened in 2017.

“They should have paid attention from a scientific standpoint that this is something that was getting dramatically worse and was likely to get worse yet,” Rose says.

Rose says there were issues of vegetation loss in other areas manatees depended on as well. But he says the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wanted to declare a premature victory.

“The things that we were warning them about and the things we expressed concerns over essentially are happening, and they’re happening at a scale that we hoped we’d never see. The idea that large numbers of manatees were literally starving to death is not something that should have ever reached that point,” Rose says.

In a statement to WFSU, the service says it knows that a loss of food habitat threatens the manatee. And that biologists are trying to figure out why so many died last winter.

The Manatee Protection Act of 2021 would designate the West Indian Manatee, Florida’s manatee, as endangered. Sarah Gledhill is with the Florida Wildlife Federation, a non-profit conservation group.

“We realize that the manatees don’t have a lot of time, and we need to unite with our elected officials and not only apply political pressure but public pressure on the process to uplist the manatee to [the] endangered species list,” Gledhill says.

Her group is trying to get more cosponsors and public support for the Manatee Protection Act. She says normally, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is petitioned through a legal petition to examine a species’ population and current threats to its survival, or it goes through a stock assessment and five-year periodic review. But she says the manatee may not have that much time.

“So what we’re trying to do is find a middle ground where we’re not going to rely on the stock assessment to come out next year and then a five-year recovery plan to come out in a few more years. We realize that the manatee doesn’t have years,” Gledhill says.

Florida U.S. Representative Darren Soto is the original cosponsor for the bill. He says the biggest challenge will be getting a hearing.

“The nation has a lot of environmental needs, and so this will be one of them that we have to fit in there, but I believe we will soon, and we could see the administration respond even before a hearing,” Soto says.

Soto hopes the bill will get a hearing late this year or early next year. In the meantime, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it has started the five-year review. Florida’s most recent estimate shows 8,800 manatees live in Florida. According to that count, more than 11% of the population has died off so far this year.

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iNaturalist became a part of the WFSU Ecology Blog during the EcoCitizen Project in 2019.  Since then, we’ve used it to help identify the many plants and animals we see on our shoots.  And on the Backyard Blog, we show how it can be used to identify weeds and garden insects, to help figure out what’s beneficial or a possible pest.  Below is the iNaturalist profile belonging to WFSU Ecology producer Rob Diaz de Villegas.

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