MIAMI — Manatees are wintering in Florida in record numbers, according to an annual survey by state biologists released recently.
The count, conducted over two weeks in February, tallied 6,063 manatees statewide, about a thousand more than the previous high set in 2010, said Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spokesman Brandon Basino.
The news is a welcome relief from 2013, when 828 manatee deaths marked a new low for the endangered mammal, officials said.
“Counting this many manatees is wonderful news,” commission Chairman Richard Corbett said in a statement. “The high count this year shows that our long-term conservation efforts are working.”
The count comes as federal officials weigh changing protections for the West Indian manatee and reclassifying it from endangered to threatened after a boating group and the Pacific Legal Fund filed a petition arguing that manatees are rebounding.
The change would represent a big shift. Florida first protected manatees in 1893. The federal government made them one of the 78 original species listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1967.
Biologists suspect weather conditions –specifically warm weather between two cold fronts — aided counters by bringing the slow-moving, portly mammals to the surface to absorb the warming sun.
They also warn that the survey isn’t a population count. Biologists have no way of saying definitively whether numbers are up or down because they have no way of knowing how many manatees they missed in any given year.
Biologists started the count in 1991 using aerial surveys by plane. But weather prevented counts during the last two years, Basino said. Biologists try to cover much of the state in just a few days to avoid double counting. This year, a team of 20 from 11 organizations counted 3,333 manatees on Florida’s east coast and 2,730 on the west coast of the state during the third week of February, Basino said.
Manatees can grow to 9 feet, weigh a thousand pounds, live to about 60 and have no natural enemies. Indians and early pioneers hunted manatees for their meat, fat and hides. The English first set up hunting restrictions when they declared Florida a manatee sanctuary in the late 19th century, but poaching continued. In recent decades, collisions with boats and loss of habitat have become a far greater threat. Since 1974, when records were started, about 41 percent of deaths were linked to human activity with more than a third tied directly to boat collisions.
