Letters

Florida’s manatees are at a crossroads. Well, actually, the agencies that protect manatees are at a crossroads, and manatees themselves are in the crosshairs.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is busy working behind closed doors deciding whether to downlist manatees from endangered to threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. The agency appears fixated on the fact that there are more manatees than there used to be.
This winter’s count showed a new high of over 6,000. I have read the federal Endangered Species Act many times. What I wonder is if the folks at FWS have read it, because the criteria for listing status is based on a number of things — but a minimum population estimate isn’t among them.
One key factor the agency is supposed to consider is whether current and future threats to the species and its habitat are under control.
Manatees remain frequent victims of mutilating and — too often — deadly vessel strikes.
Sixty percent of them are reliant upon artificial sources of warm water that are likely to disappear in the future due to lawsuits or changes in how Florida delivers power to its residents. In recent years when temperatures dropped too low for too long, some artificial refuges proved insufficient to protect manatees from death.
Red tide is a frequent and fatal visitor to our Gulf coast, and there’s the mysterious Unusual Mortality Event in the Indian River Lagoon that killed over 100 manatees in 2013. Many of our springs, rivers, and coastal waters continue to suffer from degraded water quality and our increasing population promises to claim more of these water sources for human use.
Instead of trying to claim some artificial victory for manatees, FWS should do what is needed to safeguard the future for manatees so that a legitimate downlisting could be feasible in a few years. Citizens have invested too much in this species over the years to see recovery unraveled by a misguided push to look the other way.
We’d like to be able to work with FWS to create a better future for manatees. So FWS, we’ll either see you in the meeting room or the courtroom. The choice is yours.
— Katie Tripp

Editor’s Note: Tripp has been Save the Manatee Club’s director of science and conservation since May 2008. For more information, go to www.savethemanatee.org.