Some vignettes are shown How human activity impacts wildlife beyond what you can see at the Florida Power & Light factory in Cape Canaveral. Hundreds of manatees bask in the intake canal at the southeast end. These manatees are hungry. Pollution is reducing Indian River Lagoon’s regular menu of seaweed. In 2021 he has 1,101 dead in Florida, and as of December 2022, official estimates put him at nearly 800 dead. So along the canal, members of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are throwing lettuce at them.
Rachel Silverstein, executive director of environmental nonprofit Miami Waterkeeper, said: “It’s pretty extreme that wild animals have to be artificially fed because their ecosystems have been destroyed and they can’t find food for themselves.”
The supplemental feeding program will begin in early 2022 and resume this winter. This is due to the continuing phenomenon of what marine mammal experts call “unusual death events.” “The manatee probably stayed alive,” says Silverstein of the feeding program.
A permanent solution will require a long process of environmental restoration, some of which is ongoing, but this is a major challenge and has created conflicts between local environmental advocates and state and federal policy makers. causing it. And it’s a complicated one, thanks to the peculiarity of Florida’s coast and the sea cows so beloved by its inhabitants.
Like most Floridians, manatees are sensitive to water temperatures. Simply because you have less body fat. Aarin-Conrad Allen, a marine biologist and doctoral candidate at Florida International University, said: They aren’t well insulated, so when the water drops below about 68 degrees Fahrenheit they meander to warmer areas. That’s why so many people flock to the Indian River Lagoon, which is about 160 miles down the Space Coast of the United States.
But over the past 50 years, the population of Brevard County, home to the Indian River, has nearly tripled. Human activity has also expanded agriculture in the area, led to an increase in boating accidents injuring manatees (96% of manatees have at least one propeller scar), and dried out Florida’s historic Everglades. , flooded its waterways with pollutants. Because Florida sits on a porous bedrock (“basically the Swiss cheese of the rock,” says Silverstein), water and contaminants easily migrate to the groundwater. “Everything that happens on the surface is happening underground,” she says.
That is, agricultural waste and sewage leaks are raising the levels of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen in nearby water bodies. This excess fertilizer encourages microalgae growth and blocks sunlight from reaching the seaweed. Dead seaweed can further fertilize the flowers. This cascade of pollution has destabilized Florida’s plant and herbivore ecosystem. Scientists estimate that about 95% of the seagrass has died in parts of the Indian River Lagoon. Without them, manatees are also dead.
