Saving Starving Manatees Will Mean Saving This Crucial Lagoon Habitat

This story was produced in partnership with WMFE in Orlando and Nationwide Public Radio. 

SATELLITE BEACH, Fla.—Not way back, seagrass spanned the 156-mile Indian River Lagoon like an enormous underwater meadow nourished by daylight that reached by means of the crystalline water.

The lagoon, an estuary on Florida’s east coast, is among the many most biodiverse on the continent, and has been a vital habitat for manatees. However right this moment its underwater meadow is gone. 

A long time of nutrient air pollution flowing from fast-growing communities and farm lands alongside the lagoon’s shores have left the water cloudy with dangerous algal blooms, which may forestall daylight from reaching the seagrass under. In elements of the lagoon, as a lot as 96 % of the seagrass has been misplaced, resulting in a document die-off of some 1,100 manatees in Florida final yr.

However a fast boat journey from town of Satellite tv for pc Seashore, in a spot the place the lagoon water laps on the thick mangroves of a tiny island, a small however important effort is underway to regrow the seagrass. 

From an idling pontoon, Nicholas Frank Sanzone, town’s environmental applications coordinator, stated that some 13,500 seagrass plugs have been planted final yr inside this one-acre web site, together with oysters and clams to function pure water filters. The trouble was profitable, till an animal—maybe a manatee, he stated—swept in and ate all of the seagrass.

”If we will get seagrass to develop right here,” Sanzone stated, “the chances are that we will get it to develop in comparable areas all through the lagoon.”

Florida’s staggering manatee die-off now could be projected to final for years, and wildlife companies are bracing for the worst by increasing their rescue and rehabilitation program. They’ve resorted to offering supplemental lettuce for ravenous manatees. Already this yr, some 420 manatees have died in Florida, a quantity that tracks carefully with this time final yr.

However the wildlife companies say they haven’t any means of measuring how efficient the lettuce has been at stopping extra deaths and so they acknowledge that the manatees want much more than lettuce. Saving the federally protected manatees, they are saying, means saving this habitat, a monumental effort. The Indian River Lagoon Nationwide Estuary Program, administered by the U.S. Environmental Safety Company, estimates {that a} complete restoration of the lagoon would value $5 billion and take 20 to 30 years to finish.

“No one has achieved this scale of restoration, from a system this impacted,” stated Virginia Barker, director of Brevard County’s Pure Sources Administration Division.

Some 70 % of the Indian River Lagoon is located in Brevard County, residence to the Kennedy House Middle. Of the six counties the place the lagoon flows, Brevard has provided up probably the most cash for restoration, $542 million, funded by a half-cent gross sales tax voters accredited after a widespread fish kill in 2016. 

The restoration entails wastewater remedy plant upgrades; septic-to-sewer conversions; a whole bunch of stormwater remedy tasks; and dredging from the lagoon’s backside huge quantities of muck representing many years of collected particles related to fish and seagrass die-offs. Barker stated the trouble is displaying promise, however it was developed at a time when seagrass nonetheless was current in massive swaths of the lagoon.

“The quantity of nutrient discount that’s wanted to flip that system again to a seagrass-dominated, oligotrophic system could also be rather more than what the prior modelling had indicated,” she stated, referring to an ecosystem that’s extra pristine, with little to no nutrient air pollution. “We have now a mud bowl underwater. So how do you restore tens of hundreds of acres of seagrass to an underwater mud bowl, the place there’s nothing to carry these sediments nonetheless?”

There are additionally fears that the dangerous algal blooms may worsen as water temperatures heat with local weather change.

The Florida Legislature has budgeted hundreds of thousands of {dollars} for manatee habitat restoration. The funding will go towards a collection of tasks, a number of of them involving regrowing seagrass within the Indian River Lagoon, together with at Satellite tv for pc Seashore. The lagoon additionally will get funding from federal and state companies, together with the EPA, the Florida Division of Environmental Safety, the St. Johns River Water Administration District and the South Florida Water Administration District. 

The infrastructure measure President Biden signed into legislation in November contains cash for an Everglades restoration challenge geared toward enhancing flows into the southern a part of the lagoon. However the prices related to wastewater remedy plant upgrades and septic-to-sewer conversions are huge, and with out devoted funding for that, actual change will likely be troublesome, Barker stated. Even merely creating such a long-term plan for restoration is a problem.

“Why would you’re taking the restricted {dollars} that you must try this design and allowing in case you have no thought whether or not you’re going to have the ability to give you the development funds three to 5 years down the street, if you’re prepared for that stage of the method,” she stated.

The Save the Manatee Membership, the Middle for Organic Range and Defenders of Wildlife have sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in federal court docket over the manatees’ habitat. The teams need the federal company to replace and strengthen habitat protections beneath the Endangered Species Act that they are saying haven’t been revised since 1976. They’ve additionally filed a discover of intent to sue the EPA over water air pollution, primarily within the Indian River Lagoon. 

Pat Rose is government director of the Save the Manatee Membership and an aquatic biologist who has spent 40 years attempting to assist the marine mammals. He says the Indian River Lagoon’s wants are pressing as a result of the widespread lack of seagrass additionally impacts many different species, together with sea turtles and even dolphins, which have fewer fish to eat.

“It is a state of affairs we thought by no means would occur,” he stated, “and it actually by no means ought to have occurred.”