Florida is scrambling to prevent another horrific year of starvation deaths among the beloved mammals
Maggie Mariolis chaperones Corleone as the manatee is transported to Florida’s Blue Spring State Park after being restored to health at the SeaWorld Rescue Center in Orlando. (Zack Wittman for The Washington Post)
By Lori Rozsa Washington Post
ORLANDO — On an unusually cold winter morning in central Florida, Corleone the manatee was awakened before dawn by wetsuited workers who slipped into his pool at SeaWorld and wrapped him in a long vinyl sling.
A crane slowly hoisted him out of the water and carefully lowered him to the rear door of an empty box truck, where other staff pushed, pulled, and slid their “manatee burrito” inside. Two hopped in to keep Corleone company on his latest journey.
“He’s very chill. He’s such a good traveler,” rescue specialist Maggie Mariolis said. “He should be because he’s done a lot of it lately.”
Mariolis was part of the team that in mid-November brought Corleone some 310 miles from Hilton Head, S.C., where he’d gotten stuck in a canal near a golf course, far from his winter feeding grounds in Florida and at risk of succumbing to cold stress. Ensuring his survival was part of an increasingly urgent effort to save the manatee population, which has been dying off at alarming speeds in the past 14 months, especially along Florida’s Atlantic coast.
Last year alone, 1,110 manatees died — about 15 percent of the total population in a state where they are beloved. Most perished from starvation because the seagrass beds on which they feed have been destroyed by pollutants and toxic algae bloom worsened by climate change.
The wildlife officials and biologists trying to minimize further losses recently took the unprecedented step of setting out fresh heads of romaine and Bibb lettuce daily for hungry manatees gathering in the warmer outflow waters of a power plant near Cape Canaveral. The experiment made little progress initially, with many people fearing the animals could be in for another brutal winter. “Carcass removal” is now a state priority, one official acknowledged.
But within the past week, some three dozen sea cows were observed munching on the lettuce. Wildlife officials said the animals ate 450 pounds of produce in a day.
“It looks like that’s starting to have some success now,” said Patrick Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club, who visited the site Thursday. “I’m very optimistic.”
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