Inside the Fight to Save Endangered Manatees and Dugongs

This serene, slow-moving, and strange-looking animal is a manatee. And this handsome fellow is its close relative, the dugong. They're air-breathing herbivores, the only aquatic mammals that exclusively eat plants. And both of them are endangered species. Dugongs cling to survival in a few isolated corners of the globe. And with only a few thousand Florida manatees remaining in the wild, the clock is ticking in efforts to save these amazing creatures from extinction. In central Florida, a diverse group of biologists and wildlife officials capture manatees for health exams, census counts, and genetic testing. But safely securing a wild animal that can weigh more than a ton can be a challenge. With some recent conservation success and a baby boom of sorts, manatees are being considered for delisting from the Endangered Species Act. But would the controversial move be far too premature? Like many iconic species, manatees and dugongs have unlikely advocates. Eco-tourists, many of them children. Manatees and dugongs' closest relatives are elephants. With thick leathery hides and coarse hair, they are essentially aquatic pachyderms, with matching appetites. Their spindle-shaped bodies slim down to enormous tails. The main difference between the two species are that dugongs' tails are fluke-shaped, like a whale or dolphin, and manatees are round and paddle-shaped. They are indeed some of nature's more eccentric creations. These are Florida manatees, a distinct subspecies of the West Indian manatee. They are intensely curious, don't move very fast, and, for better or for worse, habituated to the presence of people. You can't go far in the Crystal River region of central Florida without seeing a reference to manatees. They're even featured on license plates. But even though manatees are iconic animals, they're gravely threatened by a decades-long boom in wetland development and dramatic increases in human population. Each year, hundreds of manatees are killed in U.S. waters, mostly from boat strikes. Disease and cold weather also take a toll. 2006 was the worst year on record for manatee deaths. At least 416 perished. But things are looking up for manatees. The past few years has seen a baby boom. New births have helped to offset high mortality rates. We really want to have a balance, and we certainly want to have more calves born every year than animals are killed each year. And as long as we have that positive growth, then we're going to see the rewards associated with that in the population overall over time. It's when you get more manatees killed in one year or you have births that you present a problem. Today, biologist Dr. Bob Bondi is leading a massive effort to capture, examine, and release wild manatees. Animal health assessments are initiatives to help protect endangered manatees. And you need a lot of people to haul a 2,000-pound wild animal from the water. Representatives from local, state, and federal agencies are all on hand to help and to learn. So we're going to basically go over some of the ground rules. We have a lot of people here. We have a lot of activity that's going to be going on. Hopefully we're going to have a lot of manatees. So why are we doing this? Why do we torment manatees and catch them? Well, this is a research project. USGS is instructed to come in and learn as much as we can about the health of the manatees in the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge. Fish and Wildlife Service mandates this, so it's good for recovery purposes to know how well manatees are doing. Manatees' preferred winter habitat is central Florida. And a lot of people live here. And many have boats. In Florida, when it gets cold, manatees look for warm water sites. And so the warmer the water, the better for these tropical manatees that are found in Florida and southeastern United States, the northern limit of their range. With all these people moving down into Florida and bringing their boats, there's a greater, greater burden on the manatees that use the same waterways the boats do. And so it's only a matter of time before a manatee gets scarred. It's not just the swirling propeller that causes the problems. In fact, only in 40% of the implicated deaths are associated with watercraft mortality. In the other 60%, it's impact trauma. So you actually have boats that are going so fast through the water that they just come in and hit and cause damage to manatees. It's often lethal. In nearby Crystal River Wildlife Refuge, the team prepares their equipment and clears the beach of rocks and debris. We're going to be supplying medical support and health support for the animals that are brought up. Which means we'll be looking at their respiratory rates. We'll be looking at their heart rates. We'll be taking blood samples. We'll be checking areas of the blood that will help us determine whether that animal is not getting enough oxygen. For those participants who've never experienced a manatee capture, it's a thrilling introduction to one of Florida's most revered species. We're looking for single animals so we don't set on too many. And so the manatee goes into the net as it's swimming out. You can see the footprint in the water right here as it goes into the middle of the net. We can use that boat to deploy the net and a horseshoe around the manatee and then basically draw the manatee to shore. The net has a lead line and a float line. The lead line kind of digs up the bottom and the float line stays on top and we bag the animal up and pull it to shore. The hull design is a malt skiff design. The old malt fishermen in Florida used to use. And we've modified it to our own needs by having a removable transom and we took out a bulkhead. So now we're able to totally set a net all the way around a manatee. Once the net is set, all hands are needed on the beach to wrangle the animal to shore. Stop with the float. Bring the floats this way. You're okay. Just let that stay down. Okay, step back with the float. Open it up a little bit. Yeah, that's fine. That's good. Slow down on the float. Float slowly. Float slowly. Bag it. Bag it. That corner right there. Bag it. Right bag? Yep. Bring the head towards the beach. The head's going up. Ready? Head side pulling. One, two, three. We're going to push this up a little more. You ready? One, two, three. Alright, beautiful. It is a team effort because we're manhandling an elephant-sized animal. It takes a lot of people to pick up an elephant and tote it around. Now an elephant you can train to walk over here and plop down and take your blood sample. A manatee's taken out of the water, it's got to be carried. So it takes a bunch of us. Just a little weight on the palm. That's it. Your hand's on the animal though. Okay, we're going to roll the animal to its, on its right side. We're going to tuck the net and tuck the stretcher. Okay? Alright, everybody ready? We're going right onto the foam. One, two, three. That's good. Hands on the animal. That's all yours. Thanks. Good job. Once again, good job. The first animal caught had distinct scarring from a boat strike. What are you doing there, Bob? Well, we're just documenting the scar pattern. So you can see that the skeg mark is on the bottom half of this animal. And the propeller as it swirled ended up hitting the back and caused this really distinct scar. So what this enables us to do is keep an identity for this individual so we can follow it over time and we'll be able to monitor its survival from one year to the next. The first manatee capture was a success and a valuable learning experience. But it took too long. The team will have to speed up the process. It's a huge task to organize so many people and resources. It takes time and they have just two days to complete their work. The animals are generally not happy to be captured in nets and hauled on shore. And some protest a little more strongly than others. Most of the manatees put up quite a struggle. And light as a feather, they're not. They're heavy and they get bigger. These guys have been in the bigger range but they can definitely tip the scales even heavier. We rescued one back in March of 2007 in Daytona Beach. It was 2,700 pounds and that was a large animal to catch. That's why you can see out here today it takes a lot of people, a lot of coordinated efforts to get these guys safely caught on shore, worked up and then back in the water. This big male has never been captured and is unknown to the team. I'm not sure he's in the catalog so this will be a new cataloged animal. There's just mild scarring on his back. He has remnants of barnacle scars on his body which means he's been out in the saltwater a good portion of the season. So this may be a transient male that's moving through the area which is unique and genetically will be very interesting for us to look at. Right now we're keeping an eye on the tail area. It's probably the most dangerous part of the animal. They have a lot of strength in their paddle. And so if the animal starts to roll or something, we want to make sure we can get weight on it really quickly. Okay, now we're going to feed this underneath the head and out in front of the head. We're going to look at blood values and we're going to see how healthy the animal is. We're going to look at the immunology. We want to know what the stress levels are in the animals. We want to try to make a composite picture of what's happened to this animal in the more recent history but even over the long term. It's one giant puzzle with a bunch of different pieces that's going to put together the status and health and welfare of these animals that are out there. I forgot to tell you, the first thing you always want to do is scan the animal. A challenge facing Andy Garrett and the rest of the team is to positively identify each manatee and find out if the animal was previously captured. One of the key tools in their arsenal is a tiny electronic ID device called a pit tag. We insert microchips in case we ever catch the animal again. We know we've handled it before. In case it comes in rescued or dead, we know where we've handled it before. The manatees are first checked for existing pit tags. If none are found, the animal is prepared for a minor surgical procedure to insert the device. The microchip itself is no larger than a grain of rice and is implanted with a modified syringe. The pit tag is then registered in a database. On shore, the manatees instinctively hold their breath. But under stress, their CO2 levels can rise dangerously high. The animals are induced to breathe by simply dousing them with water. We want to encourage him to take breaths and we want to give him oxygen. So we literally have an oxygen valve that we put right in front of his nose and as he inhales, he takes up some of that oxygen and it helps to keep that CO2 and oxygen balance pretty even. Blood work is perhaps the most valuable part of the health exam. Like humans, manatee blood analysis reveals vital information about the animal's well-being. Core samples are sent out to various labs for testing and cataloging. But with a new high-tech device, much of the work can be done on site. We call it an ISTAT machine. It measures blood gas. And what that means is we can get a blood sample from the animal and it gives us the pH and it tells us their CO2 level, their oxygen level. It also tells us their lactate. It just literally takes a few drops. A small tissue sample is cut from the tail for DNA analysis. In this Crystal River greater population, we've collected over 700 cookie samples from manatees. So we have a really good representation genetically of the stock population. A necessary and unenviable task is to collect urine and fecal samples. You can tell a lot about a manatee from what comes out of a manatee. What we've got here is a fecal sample from the first male manatee that just got brought up on the shore. And my professor at UF uses these to look for hormone concentrations and sex steroids in the manatees. You can tell a lot from a fecal sample, apparently. Right now we're doing the measurements. Straight line, curvilinear, total length. And then we'll do some girths. 252 for straight line. And then ISGA, curvilinear. Nearly all of the manatees captured and examined were exceptionally healthy. But one of the last animals to be caught appeared to have suffered serious trauma. It did not struggle in the nets. At all. It was either injured, weak, or very sick. A boat strike likely caused severe scarring and internal injuries. Fresh, deep wounds were not a good sign. The team must now decide whether to evacuate the animal to a medical facility or to release it. So we want to get his weight. We want to see if this injury is serious enough to have caused debilitation. And then we probably want to sample a couple of these little lesions on the body. Well, this manatee was actually hit by a boat very recently. And in this area right here, we were actually noticing that there was some swelling. And we're concerned that there might be some deep tissue swelling and also some bone involvement. So by putting an ultrasound probe on here, we're able to very quickly assess that there actually is deep tissue swelling here and possibly some bone involvement on the edge. Nothing that's so drastic that we might want to think that he immediately needs to go into rehabilitation. But it's something that we would want to monitor out in the wild over time. One of the last orders of business in the manatee health exams was to weigh the animals. One, two, three, up. Clear. Call it. Someone back there, call it. 16, 10, 15, 25. Coming down. After two days of intense work, the last of the manatees was examined and released. It was a very successful endeavor. And the team learned a great deal about Crystal River's wild manatee population. But why do we do this? You know, why do we care that manatees are around? And I think it is real important. I think that I've been blessed with the opportunity to learn from manatees and to get out there in my research career to do this. I would love to pass it on to other researchers, but I'd also like to pass it on to my kids and their generation. One, two, three. You know, when I started 30 years ago, we were just writing the books about manatee biology. And though we've written some really interesting works, we've learned a lot about manatees. But there's new things right on the horizon. You know, these animals don't cease to amaze me. Some rescued manatees are too severely injured to be released back into the wild. But how do you care for a really big aquatic animal with an even bigger appetite? If a manatee survives a boat strike or is incapacitated by disease or cold stress, Florida has a number of facilities which care for sick or injured animals. Homo Sasa Springs Wildlife State Park is one of a handful of centers in Florida that rehabilitates manatees and provides some of them with permanent homes. In captivity, the animals need intensive care and a lot of food. Homo Sasa Springs Wildlife State Park is sort of an animal sanctuary. What we have are injured animals, animals that have nowhere else to go, and animals that have actually been confiscated in some cases. The manatees that are here, they probably couldn't survive on their own. Volunteers and park staff get into the water each day with resident manatees. A mostly sedentary lifestyle and a rich diet has helped to push the manatees' weights a bit towards the hefty side. These guys being captive animals, most of them have been captive animals, are brought in for rehab for a number of years. So they're not going through that annual migratory amount of effort they have to put in. They're also not going through just having to look for your food on a daily basis. Of course, in the wild, they're not going to be eating a lot of sweet potatoes. But we need something that's a little bit of bribery, basically, to get them in and make sure we can get a good look at them every morning. No eating rope. No rope. This is Amanda, actually. Amanda's one of the injury cases that came in. As you can see here, she's got some really deep crop cuts. And those actually go all the way down along her side. Now, Amanda got caught in a lock system. And she got locked in with a boat as they drained the water down. She was basically pinned up against the boat, bounced off of it, and into the side of the propeller. And this is Rosie. This is actually the largest animal. And you can see the scar on her head. That's the reason she's here. She took a direct strike across the top of her head. Last year, of course, was a real bad year for boat strikes. The propellers actually caused a lot of damage. The boat strikes themselves caused a lot of the deaths. All this tissue up here is lung. So when manatees are hit by a boat, you're cutting into the lungs, a chest full of water on a person, a manatee, any kind of mammal. It's a drowning. So we've got only female manatees, just because we don't allow captive breeding. Actually, captive breeding is not allowed anywhere. And the reason is, female manatees spend several years raising their calves, teaching them pretty much where to go to get food, where to go to get water temperature, and also where to go to get fresh water. And that's not something we can teach them here. Manatee's closest land relative, or closest genetic relative, is the elephant. There may be some similarities. They do have that prehensile upper lip, which is basically just a shrunken down, modified version of an elephant's trunk. They also have the same toenails that elephants have. So you've got those rounded off. Not much good for digging or clawing, but they do have toenails on there. And they also nurse their young in the same place, which would be in the armpit area or the flipper pit area on a manatee. So there are quite a few similarities between the two. At the park, rescued animals have many friends. They're personable, they're gentle. They can be demanding.