While residents are bundling up to cope with lower temperatures this winter, manatees are finding warm refuge of their own.
Biologists at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission recently reported a count of about 4,800 manatees in warm areas along the east and west coasts of the state, according to a news release.
Gil McRae, director of the FWC’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, said it’s the third highest count the organization has recorded.
The survey is useful for tracking the minimum population count, but it can’t indicate whether the population is increasing or decreasing.
“All we can say is that the count increased, and that’s reflective that the weather got cold pretty quickly, and more manatees sought out warmer water,” McRae said.
The FWC could not conduct the survey for the past two years because the temperature did not decrease enough to push the majority of the manatees from the colder ocean waters into the warmer natural springs and man-made power plants, said Holly Edwards, a manatee biologist for the FWC. To accurately count the manatees, the conditions must be right. The FWC looks for a series of cold fronts followed by a warm, sunny day.
“Some years we get that, and other years we don’t,” Edwards said.
When the water drops to less than 68 degrees Fahrenheit, manatees migrate toward the springs and power plants, said Robert Bonde, a research biologist for the Southeast Ecological Science Center in Gainesville.
“These are wild, free-ranging animals the size of an elephant that literally choose to come and swim in your backyard,” Bonde said.
Rhett Barker, a 20-year-old UF wildlife ecology and conservation sophomore, swam with the manatees at Crystal River Preserve State Park about a week ago. He said there were about 700 manatees in the series of springs where he was swimming.
“It was amazing,” Barker said. “It’s like swimming with a friendly truck.”
Barker, who films videos of wildlife underwater, said he appreciated the animals’ friendliness.
With most animals, he said, “The problem is that they try to get away from you. But with manatees, I have the problem that they are so friendly most of the time that I have to constantly swim backward or all I’ll film is this gray square of manatee skin.”
[A version of this story ran on page 9 on 2/11/2014 under the headline "Thousands of manatees seek refuge from weather off coasts"]
