Katie Tripp: Manatees are dying because of dirty water. Worst ever year for Manatees
Last year went down in the manatee record books as the species’ worst-ever year in Florida. In total, 829 deaths were confirmed of an endangered species whose last known minimum count was 4,831 this past January. That’s 17 percent of the known population dead in a single year.
The previous record number of deaths, 766, was set in 2010 and regarded as an anomaly — a rare occurrence caused by extended cold temperatures, and a level of mortality not thought likely to appear again anytime soon.
Until recently, we’ve been dealing with the usual suspects that threaten manatees: water control structures, entanglement in or ingestion of marine debris, and watercraft, with some cold stress and mortality of very young calves mixed in. Red tide often loomed offshore of Southwest Florida as a potential threat. And on the rare occasion there would be the manatee that had the privilege of dying of old age — a feat most in the population don’t achieve due to the threats they face.
In the past few years, attention has been focused on bigger, more nefarious threats that no one knows how to remedy. In the southwest, red tides are finding ample food when they blow inshore, and they are persisting, killing large numbers of manatees and other marine life. For manatees, these blooms are no longer considered an unusual mortality event (UME), but an ongoing mortality event — a sign of the times. On Florida’s east coast, no one has a clue what in the environment killed 127 manatees, in an on-again, off-again UME that is now on-again, already killing several manatees this year.
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