100+ OF COLD MANATEES ENJOY WARM FPL WATERS
RIVIERA BEACH — More than 100 manatees were drawn to the warm waters flowing from Florida Power & Light Co.’s Riviera Beach power plant Thursday morning, as hundreds of bundled-up visitors seized the chilly morning for a firsthand look at the large gray marine mammals.
Manatees cannot tolerate prolonged exposure to temperatures below 68 degrees, biologists say. The water near the outflow was 76 degrees Thursday, said FPL spokeswoman Sarah Marmion. That’s about 10 degrees warmer than in the Intracoastal Waterway.
Among the manatees lolling in the lagoon was Van Halen, a manatee rescued in South Carolina last year after he failed to head south during a cold snap, said Aarin Allen, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission marine mammal biologist based in Tequesta.
Van Halen, who was released last year at Port St. Joe, was easy to spot because of a white buoy with a satellite-linked radio tag attached to his tail.
Allen and two other FWC employees were gathering data and photographing manatees at FPL’s lagoon next to
its 16,000-square-foot Eco-Discovery Center at the Riviera Beach-West Palm Beach border.
“We use photo identification and identify them based on their scar patterns,” Allen said. The agency partners
with the U.S. Geological Survey and shares a database that allows researchers to study the creatures’ movements, behavior and more.
How do the manatees know how to find refuges such as the one at the FPL plant? Allen said it’s believed that calves learn where to migrate from their mothers.
In addition to swimming to power plant outflows, they also warm up in springs such as those on Florida’s west coast, and in shallow canals.
As manatees continued to enter the lagoon Thursday, locals, tourists and groups of students enjoyed watching them, despite the murky water that limited visibility.
“Manatees are so cool. We look for them all the time,” said Bill Lowther, of Ocean Ridge and Kennett Square, Pa.
At the Palm Beach Zoo & Conservation Society in West Palm Beach, preparations began Wednesday to safe- guard species that are vulner- able to cold. Spokeswoman Naki Carter said more than 70 heat lamps were brought in, and many animals, such as Mahatma, a Burmese python, were moved into more protected areas such as their night houses.
Cold-sensitive animals such as Fiona, a jaguar from Panama, were provided a bed of hay for extra comfort.
“Reptiles are most sen- sitive since they are coldblooded and can’t regulate body heat. Our small parrots are also very sensitive to cold-weather drops and moved indoors first,” Car- ter said.
Some animals, such as the black bear brothers Lewis and Clark, love the cold weather and are more active, Carter said.
At Busch Wildlife Sanc- tuary in Jupiter, cold-sensitive animals 4 feet long and under such as reptiles, alligators, crocodiles and tortoises were placed in kennels and moved into the administration building Wednesday, said Executive Director Amy Kight.
“We also bring in our parrots. It gets quite noisy,” Kight said.
The animals are moved back outside when the temperature reaches 55 degrees, Kight said.
Animals remaining in their enclosures are given extra blankets, towels, hay or wood shavings to snuggle or nest in. The habitats of a large crocodile and a large alliga- tor were warmed with a con- tinuous flow of warm water.
The impact of cold temperatures Thursday and today on exotic species roaming South Florida, such as iguanas and pythons, isn’t known yet.
Bill Kern, an associate professor at the University of Florida’s Fort Lauder- dale Research and Education Center, said that during the extended cold snap in January 2010, iguanas were very susceptible to the prolonged chill, even though it did not freeze.
Kern said Thursday that it could be days before any iguanas die. If they do, the cause could likely be infections rather than the cold itself. Often it is opportunistic bacterial infections that kill tropical species because the cold weakens their immunity defenses.
“The daytime temps are warm enough for them to thermoregulate,” Kern said. “Nighttime lows did not persist long enough. We will just need to wait and see.”
Pythons will probably survive also. The sunny daytime conditions allow them to bask and warm up, then they retreat to locations protected from rapid heat loss, Kern said.
Exotic species that live close to or within human structures, such as anoles, Cuban tree frogs and geckos, usually survive well. Burrowing species such as spinytailed iguanas and curlytailed lizards are usually protected well enough from the cold to survive, Kern said.
“Usually this kind of weather has a significant impact on tropical fish, especially blue tilapia, suckermouth armored catfish, peacock bass and others,” Kern said.