The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is under fire for failing to adequately protect Florida’s manatees, according to a lawsuit filed by three conservation organizations on Feb. 1.
The suit, brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife and Save the Manatee Club and filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., claims that USFWS failed to revise outdated critical manatee habitat areas that were originally designated in 1976, leading to record starvation. It seeks to push the wildlife service to issue a revised critical habitat designation based on updated scientific data to inform protection efforts at the federal, state, local and private levels.
More than 1,100 manatees died in 2021 in a record mortality event for the species. A large number of these deaths were due directly to starvation or related consequences as nutrient pollution and algae blooms contributed to significant loss of seagrass and other forage in critical manatee habitats.
“The carnage from 2021 should remove any doubt that Florida’s waters are in crisis,” said the Center for Biological Diversity’s Jaclyn Lopez. “The Biden administration needs to act fast to protect manatee habitat from further destruction.”
Falling water temperatures during Florida’s winter months restrict manatees’ ability to venture further from concentrated warm-water sites and year-round foraging habitat, such as the critical Indian River Lagoon on Florida’s Atlantic coast. According to the suit, more than half of Florida’s manatees seek refuge in the warm-water discharges from power plant cooling water structures. Together with stable freshwater springs, these areas make up the 14 “major” warm-water sites in Florida – sites with at least one winter count of more than 50 manatees.
The suit indicates concern that as power companies phase out plant discharges and human impacts continue to threaten springs and thermal basins, 2021’s unprecedented deaths could become an annual occurrence, even as experts begin pilot supplemental feeding programs.
The original 1976 critical habitat designation issued by USFWS lists only waterways known to be concentration areas for manatees at the time, without describing specific physical or biological features like seagrass and warm water springs that would come to be known as critical conservation needs for manatees in the past 45 years.
Back in 2008, the three plaintiff organizations together petitioned USFWS to revise and update the 1976 designation.
In a decision released in 2010, the service found that revision was warranted. “The USFWS announced today that revising critical habitat for the Florida manatee is needed, but the revision process is precluded by higher priority listing-related actions and funding constraints,” said the January 2010 statement. “Today’s decision follows a comprehensive review of all available scientific and commercial information relevant to the revision of existing critical habitat for the Florida manatee.”
More than 11 years later, a revision is nowhere to be found.
“In less than one year, after many decades of conservation progress, we lost over 10% of the Florida manatee population,” said Elizabeth Fleming of Defenders of Wildlife. “The USFWS must stop these preventable deaths before recovery of the species is set back even further.”
“The service’s failure to protect the manatees’ critical habitat … left imperiled manatees to suffer the deadly consequences of agonizing, yet preventable, mass starvation,” said Patrick Rose, Save the Manatee Club’s executive director. “There can be no justification for further delays.”
Keys Weekly contacted USFWS spokesman Chuck Underwood for comment, but was informed that the agency could not comment on ongoing litigation.
