749 Confirmed Manatee Deaths So Far In Florida; Rising Spike Will Likely Pass Prior 2018 Record
Environmental groups in Florida are warning that unusually high numbers of manatee deaths in the first five months of the year, blamed in part on resurgent algal blooms contaminating and destroying food sources, could threaten the long-term future of the species. The 749 fatalities recorded by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) to 21 May surpassed 637 from the whole of 2020, the agency said. The total is on course to exceed the high of 804, set in 2018. The dying off of substantial areas of seagrass, the favoured food source for the slow-moving aquatic mammals, has caused starvation. The situation has been exacerbated by the recurrence of inland blue-green algal blooms and phytoplankton blooms in Florida waterways.
Offshore, the recent leak and discharge of toxic wastewater into Tampa Bay from the abandoned Piney Point fertilizer plant and the return of the red tide algal menace has poisoned waters. FWC says 12 manatee deaths so far this year were from confirmed or suspected red tide blooms, but the real figure could be far higher because not every dead manatee is necropsied.
In the 150-mile Indian River Lagoon, an inland estuary that as many as a third of the estimated remaining 7,500 manatees visit each year, 58% of seagrass has disappeared since 2009, according to the St Johns river water management district.
The agency says too much nutrient run-off, specifically nitrogen and phosphorus, is either killing the seagrass outright or forming blooms that block sunlight. “The vast majority of the once 80,000 acres of seagrass within the Indian River Lagoon have been lost to a continuing series of harmful algal blooms, which have themselves been caused by decades of human nutrient pollution from wastewater and runoff that continues unabated to this day,” Bob Graham, a former Florida governor and co-founder of Save the Manatee, said in an editorial published by the Tampa Bay Times.
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/31/sharp-rise-florida-manatee-deaths-algal-blooms-food-depletion
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