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 was a unprecedented experiment in dire instances: people dumping pallets of leafy greens to feed Florida’s beloved manatees within the heat waters of the Indian River Lagoon, the place a long time of air pollution have destroyed their delicate sea grass eating regimen.

Ultimately, a pair of daring manatees approached. With their prehensile lips — they’re distantly associated to elephants — they grabbed the lettuce and nibbled. Extra adopted. On the coldest days, a whole lot got here, and over the three-month feeding interval, the hungry mammals ate each scrap of the 202,000 kilos of lettuce hurled from above.

Floridians cherish manatees, rotund and mild giants which have lengthy captured the human creativeness, however individuals have didn’t take care of the animals’ setting, placing the species’ survival in danger. Now, as manatees are disappearing in giant numbers, people try disaster rescue measures in determined makes an attempt to maintain them alive.

It will not be sufficient. The long-lasting manatee stays in bother, and with it, a chunk of Florida’s id.

For greater than a century, the state has had a contradictory relationship with nature. The Florida way of life is synonymous with out of doors pursuits — but in addition with sprawling growth that broken the pure plumbing of Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, threatened the consuming water provide and left the state gravely weak to local weather change.

Manatees had been one thing of a hit story, their standing upgraded to threatened from endangered in 2017 after years of teaching boaters to keep away from lethal strikes. Hunger has as soon as once more put them in peril.

Alongside Florida’s Atlantic coast, the die-off started final yr, after the Indian River Lagoon, a 156-mile estuary that had been a seasonal manatee refuge, became a barren underwater desert. Many years of waste from leaky septic tanks and fertilizer runoff from farms and growth fueled algal blooms that blocked the daylight and choked the ocean grass that manatees used to eat.

The feeding experiment, conceived and executed by federal and state wildlife officers and fueled by $116,000 in public donations, was a raffle. Between Jan. 1 and April 1, the variety of confirmed deaths fell to 479, down from 612 in 2021. In 2020, that determine was 205.

In all of final yr, 1,100 Florida manatees died, a report. About 7,500 are thought to stay within the wild.

The dip in confirmed deaths doesn’t essentially imply that hunger has eased and feeding has helped. Scientists will spend the summer season reviewing environmental situations, necropsy outcomes and different information to make a extra full evaluation, mentioned Dr. Martine de Wit, a veterinarian with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Fee at its Marine Mammal Pathobiology Lab in St. Petersburg.

“It probably needed to do with a later begin to winter,” she mentioned of the decrease preliminary demise toll. “After which we had a comparatively brief winter. So which will have helped some manatees.”

Floridians share a particular affection for manatees. Threatened with extinction, manatees are “adopted” by individuals who make charitable donations to help their safety. “Save the Manatee” is among the state’s hottest specialty license plates. Properties show manatee mailboxes.

Small cities like Orange Metropolis, residence to Blue Spring State Park, maintain manatee festivals that draw vacationers to locations that don’t in any other case get many guests. Essentially the most well-known is probably Crystal River, on Florida’s gulf coast, the place individuals can swim with manatees.

However neither fondness nor financial curiosity has stopped people from posing a lethal menace — first from boat strikes, which have lengthy triggered manatee deaths, and now from air pollution, which has destroyed a lot of their meals provide.

Everybody agrees on the best long-term answer: restoring the lagoon habitat by means of a wide range of efforts, from rising and planting new sea grass beds to enhancing storm water drainage to shifting properties on septic tanks to sewer techniques. However all of these initiatives are costly and can take years. To critics, the feeding program was woefully inadequate — too late and much too restricted, each within the quantity and sort of meals supplied to the animals.

The outlook just isn’t uniformly bleak. Some fortunate manatees spent the winter 70 miles northeast of the Indian River Lagoon. The animals had swum to the gem-toned Blue Spring, about midway between Orlando and Daytona Seaside, the place they may escape the chilly water and be close to the plentiful foliage of the St. Johns River.

In January, throughout Orange Metropolis’s annual manatee pageant, meals vehicles hawked soft-shell crab and alligator sausage. Artisans bought manatee-themed wall clocks and cleaning soap dishes. Linda Younger of Casselberry wore a manatee beanie to maintain heat. “MANATEES ARE AWESOME,” her T-shirt declared.

“Everybody in my life, they know me because the manatee woman,” mentioned Ms. Younger, 45.

The following day at Blue Spring, Wayne Hartley, a jolly 78-year-old manatee specialist with the Save the Manatee Membership, got down to rely the animals, as he has carried out since 1980. When he began, 36 manatees wintered on the spring. This yr, the season excessive was 871, a report — and a testomony to how some preservation efforts have labored.

Mr. Hartley hopes one thing else is occurring, too: Maybe manatees that may usually search refuge within the Indian River Lagoon try to adapt to sea grass loss by touring elsewhere.

“They return to the East Coast and so they’re like, ‘This place is rotten — I’m going again to Blue Spring,’” he mentioned.

Clutching a small pocket book, he paddled his canoe alongside the crystalline spring waters. Every time he noticed a manatee, he marked its presence in black felt-tip pen. Typically, he greeted the ocean cows by identify.

“Monica!”

“Phyllis.”

“Oh, it’s Treasured. Huge feminine. Blue Spring 140,” he mentioned, figuring out her by her official quantity, which he knew from reminiscence.

Some manatees frolicked round his canoe, circling in a type of dance. He retains a pocket book for every winter recording census counts. He went by means of a Harry Potter naming section (“Weasley”) and, as a historical past main, one for English kings (“Egbert”).

With a second’s look as he paddled, he recognized manatees by the distinctive scars on their backs and tails left by boat propeller strikes.

“That’s Alice,” he mentioned. “A kind of the place you marvel why she’s alive. These scars down her aspect? These are enormous and so brutal.”

Park regulars go to on chilly, misty days, understanding that’s when probably the most manatees search the spring’s heat. Even on a Monday morning, a protracted line of automobiles snaked down the road to enter the park.

“Have you ever seen Annie or Moo Shoo?” a lady requested Mr. Hartley from one of many statement decks inside. (No, however he had seen Lucille.)

“Floyd and Lenny?” a person needed to know. (Simply Whiskers and Nick.)

Within the Indian River Lagoon, the turbid brown waters are a lot much less hospitable. The lagoon’s arid backside, now made up of little greater than sand and horseshoe crabs, is a sobering sight.

“I keep in mind when the water was crystal clear, and you possibly can see pastures of sea grass,” mentioned Katrina Shadix, an environmental activist who fished within the lagoon a long time in the past. “This was probably the most wonderful, stunning estuary. The ecosystem has collapsed.”

Ms. Shadix and Wanda Jones, a marine biologist, rented a pontoon boat continuously throughout the winter to go looking the lagoon’s extra distant corners for manatees in misery to report back to the state’s rescue hotline. Rehabilitation services have been in such excessive demand this yr that they despatched manatees as far-off as Ohio to be nursed again to well being. Volunteers to workers boat rescues and carry the large animals utilizing trailers got here from as far-off as Alaska.

Ms. Shadix and Dr. Jones have urged state wildlife officers to take extra dramatic motion to avoid wasting the manatees, together with trucking in hydrilla and water hyacinth, invasive aquatic crops that develop in extra alongside many Florida waterways, and vastly increasing the feeding efforts. (Federal regulation prohibits unauthorized individuals from feeding manatees and different wild marine mammals.)

Officers counter that may be too tough logistically — the restricted feeding trial was already an enormous enterprise — and will introduce undesirable new organisms into the lagoon.

On considered one of their journeys in early March, Dr. Jones steered the boat to a secluded cove on Merritt Island. “That is the manatee graveyard,” Ms. Shadix mentioned.

Manatee carcasses had rotted away there, dumped by officers in 2021 as deaths turned overwhelming. The air nonetheless smelled putrid. Bones — ribs, vertebrae, some enamel — tufted with inexperienced algae remained seen by means of the shallow water.

This yr, most carcasses went to landfills.

For Mr. Hartley in Blue Spring, the toughest days are when state wildlife officers name a couple of lifeless manatee and ask him to establish it. This yr, that has occurred as soon as, in February. He recognized the feminine as Tirma, Blue Spring 775. He had not seen her since 2014.

In 2020, he recalled, he drove to a marina the place a person with a tractor hauled a carcass. Mr. Hartley acknowledged it instantly. Amber. Daughter of Ann. Pregnant. Reason for demise unknown.

“Amber was a twin with Amanda, and Amber acquired deserted,” he mentioned. “So there was a protracted historical past.”

He cried after figuring out her. His voice caught once more when speaking about that day.

“Perhaps it was simply too many instances,” he mentioned, “going out and seeing them lifeless like that.”