We are loving manatees to extinction

By HELEN SPIVEY

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 12, 2001

I am sure you have heard it said again and again: Manatees are the gentle giants that have no enemies except man. Lately some add "and their toys."

A record number of the creatures were killed by boat hits in 1999, and 2000 may be a record as well. More than 90 percent of the 300 to 400 manatees that visit Crystal River in the winter have scars from propeller cuts. We even name manatees scientifically by their propeller scars.

"Hi! What's your name?"

"Oh, two dorsal scars from a boat skeg and three crossways prop cuts. What's yours?"

Fossilized manatee bones show that the mammals lived here 45-million years ago. Once killed for food by American Indians, explorers and early settlers, manatees are so loved by Floridians today that they have become the official state mammal. Within the continental United States, Florida is the only state whose climate and natural resources can support manatees year-round. Visitors from colder climates spend time with us in Florida to enjoy our beaches and waters. Manatees must do that -- well, not visit the beaches, but the warm waters -- to survive in winter.

A few adventurous manatees have gone as far west as Texas and north to the Carolinas in the summer. One even trekked to New England one summer. But they can only survive here, in areas of Florida that have warm water in the winter. Unfortunately, most people in Florida want to live on those same waters and want to boat and fish and fill wetlands to the shoreline. They build docks that shade aquatic grasses and seawalls where emerging shoreline vegetation grows. They direct their runoff into the rivers and bays and turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to what they are doing.

Yet we do love manatees. We crowd to see them, touch them, even as we destroy the very ecosystem that manatees need to survive. Manatees are often called the "miner's canary" because their demise indicates that we may not be far behind. For those who don't know this phrase, miners carried canaries in cages down into the mines where they worked to warn them if the air filled with deadly gases. If your canary keeled over, it was time to dash from the mine to fresh air.

Coastal and riverine wetlands that surround the waters where manatees roam launder the runoffs from overdeveloped land. Once wetlands are filled to make room for new houses, they no longer do the laundry. Pollutants build in the waterways. Some over-fertilize aquatic plants. The nutrient-laden plant overgrowth suddenly interferes with boat propellers and fishing, although manatees love it. Herbicides are brought in to kill the aquatic plants that feed manatees and entangle boat propellers. It is sort of ironic: killing manatee food to free the propellers that kill them.

Another irony is loving manatees to death. Remaining wild is a requirement for survival of an endangered species. Getting accustomed to being petted and gentling to touch makes for a good workhorse but can be fatal to a wild manatee. Fondness of people for food, fresh water or petting only brings the animal into harm's way, whether by attracting it closer to boats and propellers or by causing it to depend on something other than its own animal instincts to find food. People even disturb manatees' life cycle of sleeping, eating and mating. Wildlife biologists agree that for an endangered species to survive, it must remain wild. We must allow manatees to do that.

Mankind's development of manatee habitat in most of South Florida has forced these mammals further north, where they have found heated power plant cooling effluent and warm water springs such as Crystal River to give them winter warmth. But Florida is on an accelerated pace to fill everything that is wet and wild. One thousand people a day move in, and our visitors who don't stay year-round trailer more than 350,000 boats with them to ply Florida's waters.

I was born in Orlando in the late '20s (the same time as Mickey Mouse, but he moved to Orlando much later). We had a summer home in New Smyrna Beach on the Atlantic Ocean. We lived in one of the two homes that were then on the beach, both built behind 30-foot-high dunes. Nobody built in front of the dunes then.

There was an old smokehouse next to a bridge near Sebastian Inlet, and my brother and I would hike there at least once a week with our nickel apiece allowance to buy smoked mullets wrapped in newspapers. We'd crawl down the bank into the shade of the bridge, sit and eat our mullet and watch the angled sunlight streaming into the waters rising and falling in front of us with the ground swells from the ocean. The sunlight shone through on thousands upon thousands of sea horses. You couldn't have tossed a dime in the water and not hit one. When was the last time you saw a sea horse in the wild? Where did they go?

A best guess is that lots went to aquariums, many died in shrimpers nets, many died in bait nets, and many lay dead in the spoil dirt pumped from their habitat to make waterfront property out of coastal wetlands. The dunes I sat atop to watch whale spouts out in the ocean are bulldozed flat on top of the sea horse's estuarine range.

Why mention the loss of tiny sea horses? Probably there were not many people who had an opportunity to see the thousands that I saw, so they aren't missed. Like fireflies at night. When was the last time that you saw your yard full of fireflies? Did you miss them before I mentioned them?

But manatees are big, as big as a sofa. The last count was 2,222 in the wild. More than 2,000 overstuffed couches slowly lumbering around the coast and its bays and rivers and canals, munching on sea grasses, mating and sleeping. That sort of gets your attention. You'd notice if they disappeared, wouldn't you? I would hope so.

Yet back in the 1800s there lived a rather large pigeon called the passenger pigeon. There were billions of them in the eastern United States and Canada -- so many that when they migrated, their flocks would blacken the sky, shutting out the sunlight. Once the sky was reportedly blackened by them for three days.

Never seen one? There were billions and billions of them. What happened? They got into trouble because they developed a penchant for farmer's grains, were tasty, were easy to kill, and made a lousy nest in the trees. The trains came, trains that could quickly get the fresh-killed pigeons to the major-city markets. Some records claim 35,000 pigeons a day. But there were billions, you say. That's true, but as their numbers declined because of the killing, their flocks became smaller and further apart and harder to hunt profitably. The hunters went for other things, but for some reason, the passenger pigeon population continued to decline. It crashed and never recovered.

The last carrier pigeon -- her name was Martha -- died in a zoo in Cincinnati in 1914. She was from a species so plentiful that they shut out the sunlight when they flew overhead. Aldo Leopold in the Sand County Almanac comments, "There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all."

"Birds, fishes, sea horses, animals and mammals, including us, are individuals who have a value independent of our usefulness to others. We cannot destroy where any one of us lives without losing something, and someday that something lost may be too much and take us with it. The herbicides brought in to free Crystal River of noxious weed growth for boaters and fishing killed almost all the aquatic vegetation except a native blue-green algae called lyngbya. It took over, and there is nothing that kills it. It billows black, all over the bottom of the bay and belches up and floats on the surface in ugly black, bubbly mats.

Nothing kills it. That's why it was the only survivor of the war of herbicides. We have been unable to control it in our waters, and it covers most manatee food, blocking the sunlight.

Looking out for manatees is another way of looking out for oneself. The beauty that was Crystal River has changed with the lyngbya algae infestation. Had manatees' habitat been given stronger consideration in the "weed war," we might have been able to foresee that the one thing no herbicide can kill, lyngbya algae, would naturally take over the waters loved by us all, man and manatee.

Manatees are working very hard to earn a living in an ecosystem that has been altered daily by an avalanche of people-population growth. How much are we willing to give up to save a manatee? Slow our boats though it takes longer to get there. Passively observe though the urge to reach out and touch is almost overwhelming. Give manatees space despite those who lecture that swimming with them leads to our education.

There will always be manatees in books, videos of them swimming by, pictures of a mother nourishing her calf. But these are only memories. The real thing needs to be out there barrel-rolling freely through the grasses, sleeping upside down on the bottom of the bay or on the surface with the sunlight warming its back or munching on manatee grass.

Extinction is forever, no matter whom it is for.

- Helen Spivey is a former member of the state House of Representatives and the Crystal River City Council. She is co-chairwoman of the Save the Manatee Club and the manatee issues chairwoman for the Sierra Club.

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