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Manatees endangered no more?

The state’s fish and wildlife commission is poised to take the sea mammal off the endangered species list next week.

By CRAIG PITTMAN
Published May 30, 2006

For five years, boating advocates angry about restrictions on their hobby have pushed state officials to take manatees off the endangered species list.

Next week, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is poised to do just that. But the commission’s executive director said Tuesday it will not lead to a rollback of boating restrictions.

Boating advocates expecting fewer regulations “are going to be disappointed by the end result,’’ executive director Ken Haddad warned during a meeting with the St. Petersburg Times editorial board. “It doesn’t mean we go in and start removing speed zones.’’

But environmental advocates worry that state legislators will weaken manatee protections “using the theory that they’re doing so much better that we don’t need to protect them so much,’’ said Pat Rose of the Save the Manatee Club.

An estimated 3,000 manatees swim in Florida’s waterways. Computer models have found no chance that the species will go extinct in the next century but the population could decline by at least 50 percent over the next 45 years.

That doesn’t qualify the manatee as endangered under new criteria that state wildlife officials adopted recently. Instead, it fits the “threatened” designation.

Haddad and his staff are meeting with newspaper editorial writers around Florida this week as part of an unusual  publicity campaign by the agency to deal with the expected controversy over reclassifying the manatee, a license-plate icon that Gov. Jeb Bush once declared “my favorite mammal.’’

Yet no matter what the commission decides, Haddad’s staff predicts that speeding boats will continue to cause a quarter of all documented manatee deaths each year.

“It’s always been 25 percent, and we assume it will continue to be 25 percent,’’ said Elsa Haubold, leader of the agency’s species conservation planning section.

To boating activists like Tom McGill of Citizens for Florida’s Waterways, that means manatee regulations aren’t working and ought to be changed.

“If they really want to be reasonable,’’ he said, “they ought to take a lot of these slow speed zones and put a higher speed channel in the middle of it.’’

 Manatees were placed on the earliest endangered species list in 1967. Federal officials are reassessing the manatee’s endangered status and hope to finish later this year.

Boat hulls and keels crack their skulls and ribs, while the propellers slice their skin. Meanwhile, waterfront homes and marinas line the estuaries, rivers and springs where they once found refuge.

Boat ownership has continued to boom in Florida, hitting an all-time high in 2004 of more than 980,000 registered watercraft.

Last year, 80 of the 396 manatees that died were killed by boats and an estimated two-thirds of all adult manatees carry scars from boats.

Six years ago a coalition of environmental and animal welfare groups sued the state and federal governments, arguing both had violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to protect manatees from boats. Settling the lawsuits resulted in extensive new restrictions on boating and development, which led to a political backlash

“We’re getting people that hate the manatee now,’’ Haddad said. “That was unheard of 15 years ago.’’ He compared it to “a kind of a little disease that starts to spread. … Then the politicians get involved.’’

When aerial surveys counted the most manatees in 30 years, boating activists petitioned the commission to reclassify manatees.

 “There are a lot of people who feel there are way too many manatees,” state wildlife commissioner Richard Corbett, a Tampa mall developer, said in 2004.

The commission is currently chaired by Rodney Barreto, a Miami lobbyist whose firm once represented a condo developer fighting manatee rules that prevented him from building a dock.

Besides downgrading manatees, Haddad is also recommending that the commission vote to upgrade gopher tortoises from a “species of special concern’’ to a “threatened’’ species. However, he could not say exactly how his agency will step up protection of the tortoise. Currently developers can simply pave over their burrows after writing a check to the state.

“We’re realists. We know you just can’t stop development,’’ Haddad said.

“If we just said you can’t touch gopher tortoises from here on out, then virtually all the developable land in Florida would be off-limits.’’

[Last modified May 30, 2006, 23:11:22]