People magazine reports that Florida wildlife officials are breathing a sigh of relief as they tout the success of an experimental feeding program that was implemented in December to try and help save starving manatees. According to AP, the program, officials visited the warm waters around Florida power plants — where the marine mammals like to rest in the colder months — to feed the manatees lettuce throughout the winter.
“They’ve eaten every scrap of food we’ve put out,” Scott Calleson of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in an interview with The Associated Press. The manatees have already consumed almost all of the 160,000 pounds of lettuce reserved for the program, according to Calleson. He added they will likely eat another 40,000 pounds before the warm summer months.
After the program concludes, the marine mammals will move to warmer climates. “As spring brings warmer air and water temps across much of the state, manatees are naturally dispersing from their winter warm-water sites,” according to a Facebook post from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
The rare conservation decision to use direct human intervention to assist a species comes after a record number of Florida manatees died in 2021. “Unified Command does have approval to move forward on a limited feeding trial,” Carly Jones of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission shared in a statement to Reuters at the time of plan’s launch in December. “Details are still being worked out.”
According to People, last year, 1,100 manatees died from starvation and about 420 manatee deaths have been confirmed this year, as of March 11, according to the AP. The loss of the animals’ seagrass habit and food supply have caused them to die off from starvation at an alarming, record-breaking rate, according to TC Palm. The majority of the 2021 manatee deaths occurred between Florida’s Brevard and Broward counties, most notably in the Indian River Lagoon, a report from the FWC noted.
Currently, manatees are considered a “vulnerable” species, according to the IUCN Red List, which last assessed the species in 2008. The FWC’s website estimates less than 7,520 wild manatees remain in Florida waters.
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