People have helped the manatee population in Florida rebound from under a thousand in the 1960s to more than 7,500 six years ago—but recent die-offs are a worrying sign
Decades ago, extinction loomed for these gentle marine mammals in Florida.People helped them rebound—but recent die-offs are a worrying sign.
Fish in Crystal River swim alongside a resting manatee., introduced manatees to the world.Hartman’s story cautioned readers about the dangers manatees would face as Florida’s population grew.“Pollution has already destroyed the manatee’s food resources in several rivers,” he wrote.
“Their future rests entirely in our hands.”
By the time he was 20, Powell had come to know more about the enigmatic manatee than almost anyone else, and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) offered him a job with its new manatee research program.
He spent the next nine years painting a picture of manatees’ increasingly imperiled existence, not just in Florida but across their range in the southeastern United States.“We traveled from Alabama around to South Carolina interviewing fishermen along the entire coastline,” he says.The research team bought a small plane and hired a pilot, flying over every waterway, searching for manatees.
“We would land on remote country highways to pump fuel from the back of a pickup truck before taking off again.”
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I cant believe Twitter hasnt sanctioned me and I received zero hate messages despite the horrible and despicable albeit sometimes true things I posted last night and today I am for peace on earth, it’s great that we care about animals.Unregulated agricultural runoff, resulting algae blooms, and GOP politicians who enable the first thing are the problem.
Boy in the Box: Police reveal identity of child in decades-old Philadelphia cold casePolice have identified the boy from the 1957 ‘Boy in the Box’ case nearly 66 years after his body was found in a blanket in a box in Philadelphia’s Fox Chase neighborhood.Aww 🙁 1hairyman 😭
Jump in U.S.abortions from 2017-2020 reverses decades-long trendThe number of U.S.abortions rose annually from 2017 to 2020, led by a spike in chemical abortions, according to a recent study confirming the reversal of a decades-long decline.
Angela Ford: Family of Chicago woman murdered over 2 decades ago awaits justiceAngela Ford’s brutal murder has been unsolved for over two decades.
Alabama workers reportedly exposed to asbestos for decades with no warningSeven employees said Olin for decades exposed them to the chemical that can cause mesothelioma and other deadly cancers.Oh, please, that is in every old building in Alabama.
I have worked around it, and my husband has been exposed so much.We all should be concerned, including you.
Do you think your building has none? Corporations are sociopathic in nature.
Brown bear Mark set for better life after two decades in cageAfter more than two decades in a cage at an Albanian restaurant for diners to look at, brown bear Mark is headed towards a better life in an Austrian sanctuary Whh would someone want to look at a bear while eating.
Britain approves first new coal mine in decades despite climate targetsBritain approved its first new deep coal mine in decades on Wednesday to produce the high-polluting fuel for use in steelmaking, a decision which drew criticism from opponents who say it will hinder climate targets.When reality clashes with ideology.Based!
Torie Arrison shows off her face painting at Crystal River’s Florida Manatee Festival.to unveil new details in the case.Follow Us.Chicago .
Torie Arrison shows off her face painting at Crystal River’s Florida Manatee Festival.
“What people don’t understand,” Smith says, “is the need to help support them in waterways.Known nationally as “The Boy in the Box” and “America’s Unknown Child” police promised a forthcoming information to the 1957 killing of a child whose body was found stuffed in a box.” Above all, that means restoring seagrass beds and freshwater aquatic vegetation, the basis of their existence and of the overall health of Florida’s waters.Seagrass sequesters carbon—“blue carbon”—35 times as fast as tropical rainforests and stores twice as much per acre.
Outlaw said science and technology were instrumental in identifying the child, whose name remained unknown for nearly 66 years.
Fed by underground springs, Crystal River mostly lives up to its name.Brickell shares one of the few fond memories she has of the mother, Angela Ford, the rest is really a blur.
Its electric blue waters are laced with swamps and islands thick with trees festooned by Spanish moss.”Despite the fact that Joseph Augustus Zarelli’s entire identity and rightful claim to his own existence was taken away, he has never been forgotten.The air vibrates with the sound of cicadas and carries the sweet scent of marsh mud and salt.In one of my most vivid childhood memories, from about 1997, I’m standing waist-deep in the water with a snorkel and mask on.I am grateful to the investigators, scientists, and medical personnel who worked so tirelessly on this case.My dad has lowered me from the seawall by my wrists and is standing above me, encouraging me to put my face in the water.
A creature the size of a small car grazes peacefully a few feet away in the cloudy water.After further investigation and testing, authorities were able to identify the child’s birth father.She was sexually assaulted, beaten, strangled and left for dead.
I’m terrified, but I submerge my face anyway.I hear her teeth grinding and feel her enormous presence right beside me.
Authorities say they have suspicions about who is responsible for the boy’s death, but they will not release the information as they continue to investigate. 0:30 Fish in Crystal River swim alongside a resting manatee.“The best conservationists are the ones with the most precious childhood memories,” says Powell, who also grew up exploring Crystal River, often in a little rowboat with his father.According to police, the science and technology used in this case will be used to identify other unidentified victims of homicides in the city of Philadelphia.Only occasionally, he’d catch a glimpse of a large shadow gliding beneath the surface.
Angela Ford is one of dozens of murdered women in Chicago whose cases remain unsolved.
Not many people understood—or cared—that these ghostly swimmers were among the last surviving manatees in Florida.Anyone with information on the case is urged to contact the Philadelphia Police Department’s Homicide Division at 215-686-3334.
Powell’s lifetime fixation seems fated.In 1967, at age 13, he had the chance to assist a graduate student named Daniel Hartman, who was doing the first in-depth study of manatee natural history.
This is a developing story.Their work, described in the September 1969 issue of National Geographic , introduced manatees to the world.Hartman’s story cautioned readers about the dangers manatees would face as Florida’s population grew.DAILY NEWSLETTER All the news you need to know, every day By clicking Sign Up, I confirm that I have read and agree to the.
But we should want to scare somebody,” Robin Hood said.
“Pollution has already destroyed the manatee’s food resources in several rivers,” he wrote.“Their future rests entirely in our hands.” Manatees swarm below Save the Manatee Club researchers Wayne Hartley and Cora Berchem in the winter warmth of Blue Spring State Park, one of few natural warm-water refuges left in Florida.Last year the park had more than 800 manatees, up from 36 in 1980.Photograph by Erika Larsen Please be respectful of copyright.Hood works tirelessly to find answers from an overwhelmed Chicago Police Department.
Unauthorized use is prohibited.By the time he was 20, Powell had come to know more about the enigmatic manatee than almost anyone else, and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) offered him a job with its new manatee research program.
He spent the next nine years painting a picture of manatees’ increasingly imperiled existence, not just in Florida but across their range in the southeastern United States.“We traveled from Alabama around to South Carolina interviewing fishermen along the entire coastline,” he says.The research team bought a small plane and hired a pilot, flying over every waterway, searching for manatees.Brickell says the longer families wait for justice the more likely they start to believe their loved ones just don’t matter.
“We would land on remote country highways to pump fuel from the back of a pickup truck before taking off again.” The information Powell and his team gleaned became the basis of the Florida manatee conservation movement.The Save the Manatee Club led the way, using the manatee’s benign countenance to build an engaged fan base.Groups litigated both for increased regulations that aim to protect the animals and their habitat, and against those who oppose such measures as boating speed limits, restrictions on waterfront development, and the setting aside of areas for manatees.
News crews jostle for position in December 2021 to film ranger Jackie Gordon emptying baskets of eelgrass from Crystal River into the water to feed hungry manatees being rehabilitated at Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park.”To not answer those crimes and to not put the resources in there is really a situation I would call not getting cooperation from all the resources and people don’t trust you when you don’t solve the crimes,” Hood said.
A manatee eats about a hundred pounds of aquatic vegetation each day.Photograph by Erika Larsen Please be respectful of copyright.Unauthorized use is prohibited.
Manatees at Ellie Schiller state park chew on eelgrass collected from neighboring Crystal River by the aquatic restoration firm Sea & Shoreline.Lettuce, sometimes fed to manatees under expert human care, is a good option for providing food in the absence of the plants manatees eat in the wild.DAILY NEWSLETTER All the news you need to know, every day By clicking Sign Up, I confirm that I have read and agree to the.
Photograph by Erika Larsen Please be respectful of copyright.Unauthorized use is prohibited.
In 2011, the FWS unveiled a plan to set aside Kings Bay—the roughly 600-acre headwaters area of Crystal River—as a manatee refuge, with a year-round slow-speed rule for boaters.This prompted Steve Lamb, a prominent businessman and philanthropist, and others to form Save Crystal River—to fight back against the “manatee folks.” “When there’s an endangered species involved, the government can make up rules, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it,” Lamb says.
“They were taking little bites at a time out of our rights.” The manatee wars culminated in 2012, when the Pacific Legal Foundation petitioned FWS on behalf of Save Crystal River to downlist the animals from endangered to threatened, arguing that their numbers had rebounded.(In 2011, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission had counted 4,834 manatees in the state.) After further review, in 2017 FWS made the controversial decision to downlist manatees.It didn’t change existing protections, but manatee advocates worry that it indicates reduced urgency for a species still very much in need of concerted conservation efforts.
“The decision to downlist the manatee was based on criteria that suggested habitat protections and boat-speed rules had seemed to be effective, allowing manatee populations to rebound,” Powell says.
But “we knew there were all these environmental changes beginning to occur—red tide, increasing development in Florida and its impact on waterways, climate change.It’s these bigger environmental and landscape issues that are much more difficult to control,” he says.“They were warned.” On a chilly January morning, Will Wolfson noses our boat into Mosquito Lagoon, part of the Indian River Lagoon system.
Wolfson, a fishing guide with 10 years’ experience on these waters, knows them as if they were an extension of his body.
“This whole place is a wasteland,” he says as we skim past a trailer park and into a labyrinth of mangroves.“It’s pretty from above, but below it’s wrecked.” Critical care veterinary staff at ZooTampa at Lowry Park take x-rays of Bellissima, brought in after a hiker spotted her on land.Animal care supervisor Jaime Vaccaro says Bellissima might have been stranded while foraging during an abnormally high tide.
Photograph by Erika Larsen Please be respectful of copyright.Unauthorized use is prohibited.At ZooTampa’s Manatee Tunnel, part of the hospital for sick, injured, or orphaned manatees, visitors can appreciate their serene ease in the water.
Here, animal care supervisor Jaime Vaccaro uses an underwater vacuum to remove algae, leftover lettuce, and feces from the tank.Photograph by Erika Larsen Please be respectful of copyright.
Unauthorized use is prohibited.Indian River Lagoon’s abundant seagrass and sheltered waters have long made it an important habitat for manatees and fish alike.But between 2011 and 2019, more than half the seagrass disappeared.In some places, greater than 90 percent was gone.“Seagrass can no longer grow here,” Wolfson says.
“The water’s too murky.” In 2010, an unusually cold winter killed hundreds of manatees.In the following years, as temperatures warmed and sediment, sewage, and fertilizer runoff continued to flow into the lagoon, algae bloomed out of control, blocking sunlight from reaching plant life.This place used to be thick with seagrass, Wolfson says.
“Now I’m on my hands and knees looking for a single blade of grass.
” As seagrass disappeared, Wolfson and other fishermen began educating the public and pressuring state and federal representatives to take action.But seagrass isn’t charismatic.
“No one seemed to care until last year, when things hit critical mass, and all these manatees started floating up,” he says.“No one does anything until they hear the m-word,” he adds.
“People hear ‘manatee,’ and they start getting jazzed about environmental plight.
” The seagrass calamity in Indian River Lagoon isn’t unique: In the early 2000s, when I was a teenager spending summers at my great-grandmother’s house, algae blooms had transformed this manatee oasis into a festering wasteland.Algae grew into thick, stringy mats that would tangle boat propellers, clog up the vents of underground springs, and block sunlight, which killed any remaining aquatic vegetation.“We were worried about manatees having enough to eat,” Powell recalls.This horror benefited no one. Kayakers and powerboaters missed the clear water.
Anglers missed catching fish.
Manatee tour guides and hotel owners worried about how to make a living.Grandparents worried about their grandchildren, who wouldn’t grow up, as they had, exploring the primordial beauty of the place.Steps to reverse the damage started small.Neighbors gathered with rakes, scooping up algae by hand.
Ironically, it was Save Crystal River—the group environmentalists had opposed during their fight over the manatee’s endangered status—that spearheaded the restoration of aquatic vegetation.
In confronting the collapse of the place he loved, Steve Lamb shifted his attention toward figuring out how to fix the problem.In 2015, with funding from the state legislature, Save Crystal River hired Sea & Shoreline, an aquatic restoration firm, to remove the muck and replant the river bottom with eelgrass, which grows long, ribbonlike leaves.
The prospect of replanting the entire river was daunting.“People thought we were crazy,” says Lisa Moore, president of Save Crystal River.
But after vacuuming more than 300 million pounds of detritus and planting some 350,000 individual eelgrass pods by hand, the groups have flipped the river back to an ecosystem no longer dominated by algae.Inside the Fish Bowl—an underwater observatory at Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park—visitors watch manatees and fish swimming in the warm natural spring.Calves learn from their mothers and other manatees where to go in winter.Photograph by Jason Gulley Please be respectful of copyright.Unauthorized use is prohibited.
“For years and years, there was no food for the manatees,” Lamb says.
“Now we have an abundance of this wonderful eelgrass and clean water.They’re having a heyday, and God bless them.
This is awesome.” Instead of spending the few short winter months in Crystal River before heading back out into the Gulf of Mexico to graze, some manatees now linger here year-round, enjoying fat times and boosting the town’s tourism economy.
Aerial surveys from January 2022 revealed the highest number of manatees ever recorded in these waters—more than a thousand in Kings Bay alone.The newly restored vegetation also has allowed more animals—fish, blue crabs, snails, and others—to make their way back into Crystal River.
0:56 Tourists snorkel face-to-face with manatees in Crystal River.The government and animal welfare advocates say manatees, a protected species, should be left undisturbed.The Environmental Protection Agency calculates it will cost five billion dollars and take 20 to 30 years to reverse Indian River Lagoon’s ecological collapse.
The lagoon lies mostly within Republican-majority Brevard County, whose residents voted in 2016 to adopt a voluntary sales tax that will provide nearly $500 million over 10 years for wastewater infrastructure projects and aquatic restoration.“Anytime you get a Florida county to tax themselves purposely—and that’s a red county too—that’s a win for the environment,” says Carter Henne, lead biologist and president of Sea & Shoreline.Meanwhile, bipartisan legislation is fast-tracking state funding for manatee rescue and rehabilitation, as well as for projects to address the problems that have killed seagrass.Visitors watch manatees sheltering in the warm outflow of Florida Power & Light Company’s Riviera Beach Next Generation Clean Energy Center, in Palm Beach County.Scientists and government wildlife managers often stop here and at other warm-water refuges to assess manatee populations.
Photograph by Erika Larsen Please be respectful of copyright.
Unauthorized use is prohibited.Homeowners in some counties are supplementing money from grants with their own cash to convert leaky septic tanks to mainline sewer systems.In other counties, communities are pushing to restore seagrass and dredge rivers to remove loads of nitrogen and phosphorus trapped on the bottom.William Bunch—a Crystal River restaurant owner, community leader, and family friend—met my great-grandmother in the 1960s when he was a teenager running a landscaping business.
“I remember back then, your great-grandmother refused to let us put fertilizer on her lawn,” he says with a laugh.“Your grandmother was the same.They didn’t want any of that stuff washing out into the river.” Today homeowners and businesses are embracing Florida-Friendly Landscaping guidelines, part of an extension program to reduce water and fertilizer use.And increasingly, sugarcane, vegetable, and rice farmers—among the major contributors of nutrients that fuel algae blooms—are adopting voluntary, science-based “nutrient stewardship programs” to reduce their industry’s impact on water quality.
“We’re not the bad guys,” says Eric Hopkins, a third-generation vegetable and sugarcane grower in Palm Beach County, about 25 miles from Indian River Lagoon.
“Everybody plays a part in messing things up, and everyone can play a part in fixing things.” In 2021, Hopkins says, farmers in his area reduced phosphorus, a leading pollutant, by 59 percent—more than twice what was required by law.Adopting nutrient-stewardship techniques saves farmers money, Hopkins says.
But most important, it’s “the right thing to do.
If we don’t maintain the viability of our land, we’re just putting ourselves out of business.” In Fanning Springs, a manatee hovers with beguiling grace in a layer of warm, clear groundwater above colder tannic water from the flooded Suwannee River.Manatees look chubby because they have massive digestive tracts to process the plant matter they must eat to survive.Photograph by Jason Gulley Please be respectful of copyright.Unauthorized use is prohibited.
Betty Osceola —an educator, conservationist, and clean-water advocate who grew up in Florida’s Everglades—is a member of the Miccosukee Tribe.She says her mother and grandmother would tell stories about seeing manatees deep within the heart of the “river of grass.” Now, roads and levees block them from swimming so far inland.
“There has to be a mind shift,” Osceola says.“If you think about healing the water body, about healing the land, you’ll see much more improvement versus managing, eradicating.
” Part of the shift, she says, is for more people to understand that we’re within a living system where manatees, plant life, and all of us are interconnected.“I can’t speak for other Indigenous people, but from my upbringing, we’re always taught to look at everything around you as your relative,” she says.“You’re a part of that.We all have our place and our purpose, and we all have to help foster life for each other.” As calves, manatees learn survival skills from their mothers.
Humans aren’t so different.
When I was growing up, my parents took us to Crystal River to spend time with our grandparents, who taught us about the world we were inheriting.After dinner, we’d sit outside, watching the heat lightning flicker in the distance and listening to the music of frogs and insects drift across the water.Sometimes another sound would jolt us to attention: Pffff!— a manatee coming up for air.A boat propeller disfigured this manatee’s tail.
“Where humans have fingerprints,” says Wayne Hartley, of the Save the Manatee Club, “manatees have scar patterns.” Researchers estimate that 96 percent of Florida’s adult manatees have been struck by boats at least once in their roughly four-decade-long lives in the wild.Biologists use the scars to identify individuals.Photograph by Erika Larsen Please be respectful of copyright.
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This story appears in the January 2023 issue of National Geographic ..
