Trying Everything, Even Lettuce, to Save Florida’s Beloved Manatees
INDIAN RIVER LAGOON, Fla. — At first, the manatees stayed away from the romaine lettuce.
It may not be enough. The iconic manatee remains in trouble, and with it, a piece of Florida’s identity. Along Florida’s Atlantic coast, the die-off began last year, after the Indian River Lagoon, a 156-mile estuary that had been a seasonal manatee refuge, turned into a barren underwater desert. Decades of waste from leaky septic tanks and fertilizer runoff from farms and development fueled algal blooms that blocked the sunlight and choked the sea grass that manatees used to eat.
“It likely had to do with a later start to winter,” she said of the lower preliminary death toll. “And then we had a relatively short winter. So that may have helped some manatees.” Everyone agrees on the ideal long-term solution: restoring the lagoon habitat through a variety of efforts, from growing and planting new sea grass beds to improving stormwater drainage to moving properties on septic tanks to sewer systems. But all of those projects are expensive and will take years. To critics, the feeding program was woefully insufficient — too late and far too limited, in the amount and type of food provided to the animals.
Hartley hopes something else is going on, too: Perhaps manatees that would normally seek refuge in the Indian River Lagoon are trying to adapt to sea grass loss by traveling elsewhere. “That’s Alice,” he said. “One of those where you wonder why she’s alive. Those scars down her side? Those are huge and so brutal.”
Shadix and Wanda Jones, a marine biologist, rented a pontoon boat frequently during the winter to search the lagoon’s more remote corners for manatees in distress to report to the state’s rescue hotline. Rehabilitation facilities were in such high demand this year that they sent manatees as far away as Ohio to be nursed back to health. Volunteers to staff boat rescues and lift the massive animals using trailers came from as far away as Alaska.
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