State: Manatee status under siege

CRYSTAL RIVER -- Nine-year-old Lacey Gilley shouted when she spotted a gray shape gliding past the pontoon boat. "There's one!" A half-dozen passengers rushed to the port rail, craning their necks and pointing their cameras at the manatee.

Thousands of people like them stood in line for up to two hours on a recent chilly weekend for a $3 boat ride to view dozens of manatees, one of the prime attractions of the annual Manatee Festival.

On Thursday, thousands of people are expected to show up in Fort Myers for a different kind of manatee event. It's likely to be wilder than the Crystal River show.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is scheduled to discuss dropping the manatee from the state's endangered species list.

The move would be more than symbolic. Boaters and builders want manatees off the list so they won't face so many regulations designed to protect the animal. The next step would likely be a push to take it off the federal list of endangered species, which would take away the legal status that has allowed environmental advocates to file a series of lawsuits seeking tightened restrictions.

Environmentalists are upset the state would take such a step when a record 95 manatees were killed by boats last year. They are threatening legal action if manatees are removed from the endangered list.

Meanwhile, the state's biggest boating rights group, Standing Watch, has urged members to commit "acts of civil disobedience" at the meeting because federal officials are going in the opposite direction of the state.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is pursuing tighter restrictions on boating, dock construction and waterfront development to protect the animal, which has been on the federal endangered list since its inception in 1967.

When federal wildlife officials held a public hearing on the proposals in Fort Myers last month, about 3,000 boaters, dock-builders and waterfront property owners showed up waving signs and banners, and wearing T-shirts that said, "Stop the Manatee Insanity."

Getting manatees off the state's endangered list is their first step in fighting back.

If manatees are no longer considered endangered, the government has less justification for curtailing the boaters' enjoyment of the water, said Ted Forsgren of the Coastal Conservation Association of Florida, which requested the change. Forsgren may get a sympathetic hearing: Until recently, his board included Edwin Roberts, the wildlife commission's chairman.

If Roberts and his fellow commissioners decide the manatee is not endangered, the pressure will be on for federal officials to follow suit.

Federal officials last week launched their own re-evaluation of the manatee's status, said Dave Hankla of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"If what we hear and read is true and the state changes its classification," Hankla said, "my guess is that we will also be petitioned to do the same."

Ken Haddad, the wildlife commission's director, wants commissioners to take testimony but postpone the vote because the debate has become so polarized. It's unclear what the commissioners will do.

To the folks aboard the Manatee Festival boat, knocking manatees off the endangered list because anglers don't want to slow down is "kind of dumb," said Margie Sayre, 35, of Lake Panasoffkee. "Recreation is great, but the manatees were here first."

Man vs. manatee

Floridians have fretted about manatees for more than a century. A writer in 1884 decried their "wanton destruction" by hunters. In 1893 the state Legislature prohibited killing them.

Much of the appeal is their vulnerability: Manatees have no enemies but man.

The most popular exhibit at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo is the tank where injured manatees recuperate. The Save the Manatee license plate is the state's second best-selling specialty tag. It's the governor's "favorite mammal."

"There's an endangered species that's close to being extinct in Florida waters, and I don't want to be part of that," Gov. Jeb Bush said in 1999.

But even the governor balks at the federal plan proposed in November. While manatees may be doing better in much of the state, the population in Southwest Florida -- nearly half of all manatees -- appears to be dwindling, partly because of boat strikes, federal officials say.

So the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to limit new docks from Pasco County south to Cape Sable in Monroe County over the next five years. Federal officials say that would likely result in the rejection of 37 percent of dock permits, with an estimated economic impact of up to $43-million a year.

That would have "a disastrous effect on the economy of Southwest Florida," Bush wrote Hankla. He proposed meeting Interior Secretary Gale Norton "to discuss alternative strategies." They meet Friday.

Bush has previously urged federal officials to let the state take the lead in protecting manatees, a position popular with boaters.

But if the state drops the manatee from its endangered list, the opposite will occur, predicted Eric Glitzenstein, the Save the Manatee Club's attorney.

"If the state starts moving in that direction, then the only thing that could possibly happen would be increased federal protection," Glitzenstein said. The boaters who want less federal involvement, he said, "are shooting themselves in the foot with this."

The numbers game

The first manatee bearing scars from a boat propeller was spotted in 1946, around the time motorboats started becoming popular. These days nearly 1-million boats are registered in Florida, and another 40,000 are brought in by tourists.

The number of manatees is elusive. Counting them is difficult because they tend to stay underwater, rising occasionally to breathe. Biologist Daniel Hartman made the first try at a census in 1971. Flying across the state, he guesstimated there were 1,000.

Since 1991, similar aerial counts have yielded widely varying results depending on the conditions, usually between 1,500 and 2,500 manatees.

Biologists said those were merely the minimum number of manatees, not the total population. Still, environmentalists cited those flawed aerial counts for years as if they were gospel, said biologist James "Buddy" Powell, who started as Hartman's assistant.

In January 2001, with perfect conditions, biologists counted a record: 3,276. Boaters used that number to argue that manatees are no longer endangered.

"That's the problem with numbers," Powell said. "They'll use them however they want to use them."

Numbers didn't put manatees on the endangered list in 1967. Instead, federal documents show, they were listed because the species once ranged from the Carolinas to Texas but now persisted only in "heavily used boating areas" in Florida.

Manatees will not disappear in the next century, concluded a report last month by the Florida Marine Research Institute. But it projected a "population decline of at least 50 percent over the next 45 years."

That's enough to qualify as threatened, not endangered, according to criteria that the state wildlife commission adopted in 1999. Environmentalists complain that not even Florida panthers -- which number about 100 -- would qualify as endangered under those criteria. Federal officials also have expressed serious concerns about the state's listing process.

State wildlife commissioners have agreed to review the criteria later this year -- after they deal with the manatee.

-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story.

If you go

On Thursday, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission will discuss taking manatees off the state endangered species list. The meeting is at 8:30 a.m. at the old Lee County Courthouse, 2120 Main St. in Fort Myers. For a copy of the agenda and a map, see http://floridaconservation.-org/commission/2003/jan/index.htm.

Back to State news

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright

Special Links

Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk