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Florida wants to lower status of manatees
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WHEN Brandy Pounds swam in central Florida’s Crystal River earlier this month, she came so close to an endangered manatee that she could feel the sea cow’s breath tickling her toes.
“And then I turned around and we were face-to-face,” said the 41-year-old therapist from Texas.
“We made eye contact. It was pretty cool.”
Languid, whiskered and weighing as much as 545 kilograms, the bulbous Florida manatees — a subspecies of the West Indian manatees — were among the first creatures to be named by the United States as a federally endangered species in 1967, alongside the iconic bald eagle and American alligator.
For decades, manatees have been celebrated and protected by environmentalists and celebrities alike, earning the title of the official state marine mammal of Florida and the admiration of celebrities.
But times may be changing for these slow-moving seagrass eaters.
A controversial proposal by the US Fish and Wildlife Service calls for downgrading them from “endangered” to “threatened,” based on their ballooning population size.
In Florida alone, the agency said the manatee population has grown to a record 6,350 as of February.
Early estimates of their population are hard to come by, but the first aerial surveys flown over Florida in 1991 counted 1,267 manatees.
A final decision, expected sometime in 2017, would apply to all West Indian manatees in the region, from Florida to the Caribbean and northern South America.
“I believe this is just a first step of celebrating a success story,” Ivan Vicente, visitor services specialist at the Fish and Wildlife Service Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge Complex, said.
“It’s only a very minor difference,” he said of the change in terminology.
“It just means that the species is not as vulnerable to extinction as it once was, but still vulnerable. So the level of protection does not change.”
Opponents say a host of threats remain, including diseases, loss of habitat, cold stress and collisions with watercraft.
“We really think it is premature,” said the Save the Manatee Club’s director of science and conservation, Katie Tripp.
She said the change could amount to less money for manatee protection, and doesn’t take account of future risks the manatees will face.
Threats remain
Among them, the expected loss of winter refuge they get from clustering around power plants that discharge warm water.
As those plants are gradually made more environmentally friendly, as many as 4,000 manatees — which are creatures of habit — could die from the cold, she said.
For Tripp, it doesn’t matter that five times more manatees exist today than 25 years ago. “We are not at all focused on a number and we don’t want the agency focused on a number either. It is just about the habitat,” she said.
In the winter, hundreds of Florida manatees converge in the natural warm water springs near Crystal River, where boat captain and Mike Dunn, co-owner of Manatees in Paradise, says manatees have shaped the local way of life.
Dunn leads small tours of six tourists at a time into Three Sisters Springs and the surrounding canals.
Snorkelers must watch a video first that explains how to avoid harassing manatees — no chasing, no poking, no hugging allowed.
Boating groups have led the charge to reclassify the manatee as “threatened,” based on Fish and Wildlife’s own findings in 2007.
More than 1,100 comments have already been posted on the Fish and Wildlife Service’s website.
Many worry what the change of status would mean, and have spoken out in favor of keeping the manatees listed as endangered.
Fish and Wildlife spokesman Chuck Underwood said if a change is announced, “the public would see no differences in our conservation and protection efforts.”
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