When the temporary manatee feeding program wraps up in a few weeks official estimate that they will have provided nearly 200-thousand pounds of lettuce to sea grass starved manatees in the warm waters near power plant discharges in the Indian River Lagoon.
“This trial effort was really designed as a winter intervention to help get the animals get through the winter," said U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Scott Calleson. "We knew they would be aggregating at those known warm water sites and there was very little food around those sites to get them through the winter. Now with the weather warming and the animals being more capable of fanning out, we want them to do that fanning out so they can find hopefully vegetation in other areas.”
Hopefully indeed since sea grass, their most important source of food, has become increasing scarce in the lagoon. As of March 11 of this year 420 manatee deaths have been reported.
“All the data we collect this winter will be reviewed," said Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Administrator and biologist and Andy Garrett. "My anticipation is that a majority of these carcasses’ are going to come in as UME.” UME, 'Unusual Mortality Event' that is the category into which probable starvation cases are placed.
“We did learn a bit how to efficiently put out the food," said Calleson. "When we had large numbers of animals in there we kinda worked out ways to distribute that feeding and time the feeding, so that the animals were not all in the same place at the exact same time to reduce competition."
The program will probably wrap up within the next two weeks, said Calleson. "We’ll see if we can improve better if we do this again next winter.” Until then the manatees will resume foraging for themselves and officials say they’ll keep a close eye on how their doing.