Carter gets official White House ornament
WASHINGTON – Former President Jimmy Carter has another distinction to his name.
The 99-year-old is the first of the U.S. presidents to be honored with an official White House Christmas ornament while still living. The ornament was unveiled Wednesday and is the latest in an annual series that the nonprofit White House Historical Association began issuing in 1981, the year Carter left office.
Carter's ornament is shaped like an anchor in a nod to his Navy service. Other aspects of the former Georgia peanut farmer's four-year term are represented by doves, a globe, a sub
that manatee populations could decline by at least 30% over the coming century, largely because of the loss of cold-weather refuges.
Rose said manatees generally need water temperatures of 68 degrees or warmer to survive, although healthy adult animals can withstand cooler temperatures for brief periods of time.
Manatees, while rotund, don’t have a complete blubber layer like whales, Rose said. When water temperatures cool, they stop digesting food, living off fat reserves instead.
Periods of prolonged cold or an extreme cold shock causes their organs to shut down and, eventually, they die of cold stress.
“About 60% of the manatee population is depending on the warm water sources from power plants, so we have to find a way to wean them off the artificial warm water while securing the springs and aquifers that the other 40% are depending on,” Rose said. “There is no simple solution to it.”
Cleaner energy cuts artificial refuges
According to unpublished data from the state’s Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute that is referenced in the plan, warm-water springs are better winter refuges for manatees than power plants. Winter temperatures in springs range from 70 to 73 degrees, while power plant discharges can drop to 68 degrees or lower during the coldest months.
Statewide, there are 67 primary and secondary warm-water sites that manatees use, including 10 power plants.
It was in the 1950s that power plants began to grow along Florida’s soft outer fringes, using coastal waters to cool their facilities and unwittingly providing new habitat for manatees.
Older plants have since shut down, and a push toward cleaner and alternative energies has led to the repowering of others.
Florida Power and Light’s Riviera Beach facility underwent a $1.3 billion modernization in 2014, allowing it to use natural gas. It replaced a 1960s-era oil-fired plant that was demolished in 2011.
FPL has also repowered Cape Canaveral Energy Center and the Port Everglades Energy Center.
The new plants offer a “short-term level of security” that warm-water discharges will be available for years to come, but the more efficient plants produce a lesser volume of warm water, shrinking the warm-water refuges by as much as 25%, the state manatee plan said.
The state estimates there are approximately 8,300 to 11,700 manatees in Florida waters. They were downgraded by the federal government in 2017 from endangered to threatened, which reduced their protections. Although an October decision to reconsider the downgrade has boosted optimism among environmentalists, manatees have suffered greatly in the past six years.
A loss of seagrasses caused by chronic pollution in the Indian River Lagoon triggered a rise in starvation beginning in 2020 that left scores of manatee corpses littering spill islands.
A total of 1,100 manatees died in 2021 with another 800 in 2022. In comparison, between 2017 and 2020, the average number of manatee deaths each year was 650.
Wildlife officials began a supplemental feeding program in 2021. That ended in December when enough seagrasses grew back to sustain the manatees through the winter.
Making more warm water
Efforts to keep enough warm-water habitats include maintaining current natural springs and thermal basins used by manatees in winter and undoing the damage caused to those that can no longer be used.
“We’re not opposed to creating new habitat, but there are existing springs that could be restored to support them,” said Amanda Prieto, senior program director for Miami Waterkeeper.
In 2015, a joint federal and state project created a warm-water habitat in the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park near Everglades City. It consisted of a U-shaped inlet off a canal that connected to three deep water pools. The deeper pools help manatees get closer to warm ground water in the winter months.