State: Manatee status gets questioned

DELAND -- Florida's manatee population has rebounded to the point where state and federal officials are talking about what it would take to downgrade the aquatic mammal from "endangered" to a "threatened" classification.

"There's more manatees out there than there were in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s," David Arnold told his bosses from the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission on Wednesday. "The manatees have begun to do better and better and better."

While acknowledging that some areas of the state have more manatees than ever, environmental advocates contend that the species as a whole remains too close to oblivion in Florida to even think about changing its status.

"We're still of the mind that the numbers that look like they're increasing are really just reflecting better survey methods," said Patti Thompson of the Save the Manatee Club, part of a coalition of environmental groups that sued state and federal agencies this year to make them do more to protect the manatee from speedboats and new marinas.

Manatees have been on the endangered species list since the list began in 1973, and changing their status to threatened would be largely symbolic, since the lumbering sirenians still would be legally protected. But Arnold said it would mark an important milestone in the creature's recovery.

It would change the way people have long thought about one of the state's most popular wildlife species. For nearly 30 years, entertainers, environmentalists and politicians have invoked the specter of the manatee's imminent extinction. Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Graham helped start the Save the Manatee Club, and Republican Gov. Jeb Bush recently called the manatee "my favorite mammal" as he vowed they would not disappear from Florida's waters while he is in office.

Some early estimates said there might be a few hundred manatees around Florida, but since the 1990s biologists have generally put the number at between 2,000 and 3,000. The most they have counted was 2,600 four years ago.

These days, Arnold said, the manatee seems to be doing better than anyone thought possible a few years ago, judging not only by the size of the population but also by such criteria as the percentage of females with calves. Manatee populations appear to be on the upswing in the area from Crystal River north, as well as along the St. Johns River, Arnold said.

Manatees appear to be holding their own along the Atlantic coast, he said, although Thompson contended that "the best-case scenario is that they're stable, but it's more likely they're decreasing."

The one area where state officials have no idea whether manatees are doing well is in Southwest Florida, including the Tampa Bay area, he said. Biologists are finishing a decade-long study of Tampa Bay's manatees that may yield some answers.

One state wildlife commissioner, Jamie Adams, said he was seeing so many manatees these days that he believed they must be swimming in "from Cuba or somewhere -- it's just a phenomenon!"

Actually, Arnold said, the real phenomenon is the state's power plants. During cold weather, manatees congregate around the pipes that dump warm water from the plants into the state's bays and rivers. Having those warm places in which to hole up has lured manatees into areas they historically did not frequent for part of the year, he said.

Despite the rosier picture of the manatee's future that is emerging from studies, government officials still are grappling with boat collisions, which account for a quarter of all manatee deaths.

"The manatee management actions taken so far haven't come to grips with that problem," said David Laist of the federal Marine Mammal Commission. "If boat mortalities equal a decline in the total population, then it would be unwise to downlist them" from endangered to threatened.

This spring, manatees were dying in record numbers from being hit by boaters, prompting the state to announce stepped-up enforcement of boat speed laws. Since then the numbers have dipped, Arnold said.

The lawsuit filed by environmental groups in January charged that the state wasn't enforcing the speed zones to protect manatees enough, and that federal agencies were not doing enough to protect the manatees' habitat. Last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it is considering establishing a series of sanctuaries and refuges around the state.

A sanctuary would bar any human entry, while a refuge would limit human activities such as motorboat riding and diving. One of the seven existing sanctuaries around Kings Bay near Crystal River in Citrus County, is at Three Sisters Spring. It was established in 1997 because people were harassing the manatees to the point of jumping on top of them to pose for pictures.

- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story.

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