Florida’s Manatees Have an Okay Year

It’s been a rough few years for the Florida manatee, which has suffered shocking population decline along the Sunshine State’s Atlantic coast, due mostly to poor malnutrition. But 2023 showed a modest but encouraging improvement in both the mortality rate and the health of the seagrass on which these gentle creatures feed.

As of December 8, manatee deaths for the year had totaled 518, after a record high of 1,100 fatalities in 2021, followed by 800 dead in 2022. The number of manatees statewide is less than 10,000, so losing upwards of ten percent of the population annually was clearly not sustainable.

“The numbers are better,” Ragan Whitlock of the Center for Biological Diversity tells the Wall Street Journal, “but it is still an unsustainable loss.” The center is among the environmental groups exhorting the US Fish and Wildlife Service to relist the manatee as “endangered,” a designation the agency had downgraded to “threatened” in 2017.

The main threat endangering the manatee is the depletion of its favorite food, seagrass, which dies off when the water quality goes south, as when wastewater and fertilizer runoffs fuel the algae blooms that kill it. The food situation was so bad wildlife officials supplemented the paltry seagrass supply with lettuce and cabbage. With mortality down and seagrass cover improving, the supplemental feeding has been suspended – for now.

While the overall status of the manatees is cause for (modest) optimism, the year ends with a particularly happy story for two elderly sea cows named Romeo and Juliet, who have just started a new life at Zoo Tampa. The pair had been living in squalor at Miami Seaquarium for over 60 years (!), with little space and no interaction with other manatees. They’ll get plenty of both in their new digs at Zoo Tampa’s manatee sanctuary.

Good – not great – news all around for the manatees. We’ll take it.