South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Manatee death toll rises in Indian River
PORT ST. JOHN — The cruelest of Florida’s manatee killing fields can be surprisingly serene as on a recent morning thawing from a cold snap.
Breezes toyed with fickle and calm, pelicans plunged in among dolphins to feast on fish and seagulls sunbathed.
Making no disturbance at all, the remains of a young manatee decomposed on a beach and a dead baby manatee drifted mostly submerged with its right shoulder down and left flipper folded, suggesting the pose of sleeping on its side.
Both were not quite a few hundred yards from and in easy sight of Florida Power and Light Co.’s electric plant near Titusville at the Indian River. The plant anchors a manatee die-off accelerating now and pacing last year’s massacre.
Also plainly visible at the plant were 10 volunteers, interns and staffers of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Shortly before noon, they hand-dollied 20 boxes along a concrete walkway of a big docking site for power plant ships and barges. For about 10 minutes, they grabbed handfuls of lettuce from the boxes, tossing them as if they were parade confetti into the waters inside the docking area.
Manatees are emaciated because their diet of seagrass has been exterminated by a pollution disaster. Winter is finishing them off.
The state wildlife agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service partnered in an emergency response like a military campaign.
Along with retrieving dead and stricken manatees, the agencies oversee experimental feeding of up to 3,000 pounds of lettuce daily to the animals.
They gather to refuge in the warm water discharged by the electric plant. Hand feeding them there is the only solution employed to prevent hundreds from perishing. The agencies don’t know if it is succeeding.
“It’s certainly something we are wondering ourselves,” said Tom Reinert, a regional director for the state wildlife agency, which began the emergency feeding in the middle of December.
“It’s way too soon to tell and we may never know because there is a lot of confounding factors. Climatic conditions are not the same year to year so it would be very difficult to tell how much of an effect, if it’s measurable,” Reinert said.
More than 1,100 manatees died in Florida last year, double the previous record. Nearly 360 of those were in Brevard County, where the epicenter then and now is FPL’s plant in the community of Port St. John south of Titusville.
The wildlife agencies are denying media observation of the hundreds of manatees within the FPL plant’s docking area. The site is 300 feet wide and 1,000 feet long, with a 200-foot opening at its east end where manatees enter.
“It is disruptive,” said Chuck Underwood of why media is prohibited. He is a spokesman for what the agencies refer to as the Unusual Mortality Event Response Joint Unified Command.
Underwood said photos released by the unified command and online briefings run by a contractor provide a “plethora” of detail.
The docking area is cordoned off by temporary buoys set in the Indian River 100 yards from the concrete walkway used for manatee feeding.
When an Orlando Sentinel kayaker paused at a buoy, the state wildlife agency dispatched a stout, twin-engine patrol boat and two officers, powering from inside the docking site to intercept the paddle craft.
“Don’t come past the barriers,” one of the officers said, courteously overall, noting the kayak’s nose had poked into the no-entry zone by a few feet. “We’re not going to write you a ticket.”
While the wildlife agencies curtail public access and observation of the feeding site, what’s occurring outside the no-entry zone and in open waters may overwhelm the Joint Unified Command.
The command’s base of operations along Florida’s east coast, a “temporary field response station,” is at the FPL power plant.
Reinert said the unified command is attempting to haul away, examine and then dispose of all carcasses in a landfill. The death rate is two to 10 manatees daily.
“Just leaving them because of the sheer number is not ideal,” Reinert said, explaining that the rotting bodies can add to the pollution in the Indian River causing devastating blooms of algae.
Those too difficult to reach will not be recovered, Reinert said, and could be scavenged by vultures and sharks.
The Orlando Sentinel called in the two dead manatees to a hotline at 888-404-3922. They were in accessible locations a little more than a stone’s throw from where the officer earlier gave the trespassing warning.
Death statistics from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission lag behind by nearly as much as two weeks.
Through Feb. 4 this year, the agency reported 164 mortalities statewide, 110 in Brevard County and 56 hauled from the water next to the FPL power plant.