From:

http://flaglerlive.com/5502/hanging-...natees-tristam


Hanging With Manatees

Pierre Tristam | June 3, 2010


Other than the one time I saw one in a controlled tank at Epcot, I’d
never seen manatees in their own environment, up close. That changed
yesterday.

I was on a dock on the Intracoastal at around 5 p.m., across the inlet
to Mirror Lake. And there they were. Three, four, five, maybe six of
them, including a baby nuzzling up to its mother. They were snorting,
rolling, ambling around and below the dock like primitive but oddly
flexible submarines. They’d disappear. The water would look its muddy
indifferent self. Then swirls would form, the sign of hugeness lurking
beneath, and one of them would surface, snort, twirl, and go back under
in that natural slow motion that could stop Big Ben from ticking. They
look almost as big as Big Ben, too, these animals that weigh 1,000
pounds or more and live long enough to qualify for Social Security.


They sort of do. They’re listed as one of Florida’s 40 endangered
animals, though there’s some debate over whether they should be. The
2005-2006 Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission‘s Florida Manatee
Biological Review Panel recommended that the Florida manatee be listed
as Threatened–still not all that reassuring, if you’re a manatee (or a
lover of manatees). But what that would mean is that the likelihood of
your extinction, as a manatee, would be considered low, at least over
the next few decades.

The numbers don’t suggest anything like fruitfulness. An authoritative
manatee census put their number in all of Florida at 2,310 adult animals
a few years ago. That’s not a lot of manatees no matter how big they
are. And last year was particularly deadly: 429 recorded manatee deaths
in Florida, 97 by watercraft, just 37 from natural causes.

Every manatee matters, or should. They may not be endangered to the
point of extinction. But that shouldn’t be the only criteria by which
they’re protected. Assuming there were 10,000 manatees, would be less
objectionable every time one of them was slashed to death by a propeller
blade? Listening to those who make the argument against the sort of
manatee protection that translates to speed limits and no-wake zones on
the Intracoastal, that’s what the argument comes down to: if they’re not
in danger of extinction, why bother burdening boaters with slower speeds?

Evidence of the argument’s stupidity was in front of my eyes. I took a
lot of pictures. At least two manatees showed the sort of damage, on
their back and on their tail, that looked alarmingly like the slashes of
propeller blades.

I wasn’t going to rely on my instant, useless analysis. This morning I
shipped the pictures you see here to the Fish and Wildlife Commission,
where Karen Parker passed them on to a biologist who works in the
agency’s imperiled species section in Tallahassee.

The biologist’s conclusion: The series of white markings in two spots
you see on the manatee to the left “looks like two healed prop scar
patterns,� the biologist wrote back. I’d missed one of the patterns, the
one lower down, but if you look carefully you’ll notice the symmetrical
pattern of prop marks across the back, quite different than the ones
higher up: two separate strikes, in other words.

The marks on the tail in the picture further up: “Looks like resolving
prop injuries, cold stress lesions, or a combination of both.� I can
hear objections now: those are just guesses. The manatees are alive and
twirling. There’s risk everywhere. All true. But there’s a difference,
talking about these animals in the abstract, and seeing them, and their
injuries, up close. They’re not impressions on a license plate anymore.
They’re not ideological marking grounds in a public meeting drier than
freon. They’re living, audibly breathing remnants of an age predating
everything about us. They couldn’t harm an amoeba. But we’re harming them.

In Flagler County, not much: Of the six manatee deaths recorded last
year, just one is directly attributable to a watercraft. Same story the
previous year. The numbers are higher in Volusia, where there’s more
boats, and more congregating manatees. But Flagler’s waterfronts are
slowly beginning to sprawl with docks, and if they’re not, the
Intracoastal continues to transform into I-95′s hydro echo, with
Flagler’s portion as a speedster’s paradise.

Fish and Wildlife is proposing a rule that may bring speed limits to the
Intracoastal. Local boaters and “users� of the Intracoastal, as they’re
called, are mobilizing against the idea. They’ve stacked a local rules
committee, required by law (the committee is, the stacking isn’t) to
advise Fish and Wildlife, hoping to make it seem as if Flagler is
enthusiastically opposed to any such rules, as if this were the sort of
thing that should be decided by a popularity contest. The biggest
counterweight to manatee advocates on the committee is none other than
Jon Netts, the Palm Coast mayor, who somehow managed to get himself
appointed to the rules committee and now chairs it: talk about literally
throwing your weight around. So the rules committee is a bit of a sham.
But its reach is merely advisory. And it still has its uses as a window
into the brackish brawn of local politics and boating interests.

Those propeller marks on manatees are its signature.