Hello,
I read you comment with interest , my DW and I feel passionately about Manatees and their rightful place on this planet.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation actually downgraded the risk level last year from endangered to threatened even though they are still at a high risk of extinction.
Please read this quotatiom from the website
http://www.savethemanatee.org/ below and check out the website as well.
If you love them as much as we do perhaps you may consider adopting one, this helps to look after injured Manatees and maintain the fight to help them survive
Manatee Protection Efforts
More Important Now than Ever!
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=5 width="95%" border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=470>For more information please contact:
Janice Nearing
Director of Public Relations
Phone: (407) 539-0990
E-mail:
jnearing@savethemanatee.org
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Manatees had a lot of people watching their backs recently during Operation Mermaid. Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, together with officers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), patrolled 11 Florida counties to educate the boating community about ways they can help protect the endangered marine mammals. Officers talked to thousands of boaters and hundreds were given boating citations or warnings, and some were charged. Leadership at Save the Manatee Club had praise for the FWCs expert coordination and initiative of the awareness campaign.
Efforts such as this are especially critical now following the deadliest year ever documented for manatees. In 2006, 416 manatees died, with at least 86 deaths as a result of boat strikes, tying the second highest year on record. Last years high mortality only reinforces the overall trend weve been seeing in recent years, said Patrick Rose, Executive Director of Save the Manatee Club.
The question is whether such great efforts to protect the manatee population will continue at this level. The FWCs recently released draft of their Manatee Management Plan, which is the final step in lowering the manatees classification on the states imperiled species list, allows a 30% decline in the population over 3 generations. Such a catastrophic loss is effectively being sanctioned by the state and will be absolutely unacceptable to Floridians and people around the world who care about these unique and defenseless animals, said Rose. And since the plan is geared toward avoiding greater than a 30% loss rather than attaining an optimum sustainable population, it will be impossible to hold the state accountable for protecting manatees from escalating human-related threats such as watercraft strikes, loss of warm-water habitat, and destruction of habitat associated with development and climate change. Conservationists argue that such a drastic loss in the population will be viewed by the FWC as progress toward species recovery as their Management Plan states so it follows that the agency can significantly roll back protective regulations and still be able to declare success by simply avoiding a greater than 30% population loss.
In the last 10 years, over 3,100 manatees have died from all causes, with over 760 of those animals killed by boats. Although Save the Manatee Club praises law enforcement initiatives such as Operation Mermaid and encourages the public to support additional funding for enforcement on the water, the concern remains about future plans to protect Floridas manatees. The population cant possibly continue to sustain mortality of this kind, explained Rose. The FWC should give manatees the highest level of state protection, and certainly now is not the time to be lowering the manatees imperiled status to Threatened. Contrary to the Manatee Management Plan and recent statements made by the chairman of the FWC, Rodney Barreto, who would have you believe erroneously that manatees are doing better than ever, the big question is, if a 30% population decline is acceptable to the FWC, what will be their motivation to reduce the present level of mortality?
The Club encourages the public to contact Governor Crist and, in light of the record-setting manatee mortality and a management plan that is critically deficient, urge him to use his influence to get the FWC to revisit the manatees reclassification to a lesser imperiled status. His e-mail address is
charlie.crist@myflorida.com or he can be reached by phone at 850-488-7146.
thats good news
