Until The Manatees Come Home

by Marcus Simons


What are Manatees?

http://rollingharbour.com/2012/01/27/west-
indian-manatees-and-the-bahamas-the-facts/

Generally weighing in at about half a ton and growing to be around 9 feet long, Manatees are the largest of the Sirenia order of aquatic mammals. Eating just about any aquatic vegetation they can find, it’s no wonder why these animals got the nickname, “sea cows." The West Indian manatees are broken into two sub species of Antillean (Central/South American) and Floridian (lower coast of North America). Manatees live in both salt and fresh water but develop immune and metabolic problems when confined to cold water. Overly cold conditions are the leading cause of natural death in manatees, which drives migration trends to revolve around a constant search for residing in warmer waters. This, typically, means they seek out rivers and inland pools during the winter months.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/cold
-contributes-to-mass-die-off-of-manatees/nLzYz/

Human Impact:

Dangers

Manatees have always had a, physically, close relationship with humans. Since Europeans first came to the West Indies, Manatee populations have declined and dispersed significantly due to the ease of capturing such a calm animal and the value there was in manatee leather and meat. However, as of lately, human consumption has been less of an issue in manatee deaths while incidental injury and deaths by watercraft strikes have skyrocketed.

Proximity

http://www.namepajr.net/manatees/

Manatees tend to live near shallow coastal regions with warm water, which incidentally is where you will find many large human populations. Over the past couple centuries manatee populations have began to see humans as less of a predator and more as a co-habitual partner. Some populations have been known to go against their need to migrate south to warmer waters during the winter and stay near human-populated coasts that have large industrial plants that release thousands of gallons of warm water into the surrounding areas as a byproduct of their manufacturing. It isn’t known to full the full extent but this change in migratory pattern could very much have direct or indirect impacts on the ecology that the manatees are apart of. 

The main problem isn’t that humans are trying to harm these creatures deliberately. The problem is that manatees are re-adjusting their behaviors to be less weary of humans. This, in turn, leads to more unintentional deaths as a side effect of being around humans so often like falling victim to bycatch or boats strikes.

Counteraction:

Policy Measures

https://sites.google.com/site/westindi
anmanateehm2014/endangered-species

West Indian Manatees were listed as endangered in 1967. Large measures began to take place to restore manatee populations back in 1973 with the establishment of protection areas in the US Endangered Species Act and the US marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972. And as of last year, manatees have been officially down-listed from an endangered species to threatened.

Action Measures

Education is an effective way to communicate to the public the small actions people can take to cut down on manatee deaths and injuries. Captivity research amongst manatees has been very rewarding seeing as manatees in captivity can live much longer than if they were in the wild.