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Q&A – How Much Do Manatees Need to Eat?
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Today’s Entry: Hi Brian! I was glad to hear the “lettuce” program to feed the manatees is starting to work. How much do they need? Since they’re veg heads and huge, I’d think that would be a lot of lettuce!
Bottom Line: Yeah, it is a lot of lettuce that’s needed for each manatee every day. First, to catch others up to speed if they may have missed the update earlier this week... In an effort to combat the record manatee deaths due to starvation, FWC started a lettuce feeding initiative aimed at combating the starvation crisis. The purpose of the program is two-fold. Directly feeding manatees addresses the needs of the lettuce eating manatees, but it also reduces demand on the remaining seagrass in Florida’s estuaries. FWC began the program at FPL’s Clean Energy plant in Cocoa Beach, which is a popular winter gathering ground for manatees. After initial reporting that the manatees were reluctant to feast on the lettuce, they’ve since been taking to it with as many as 175 manatees monitored eating on Friday. So, what’s suddenly changed now that its working? They found manatees are discriminating.
Manatees have taken to romaine and butter leaf lettuce specifically. Early on in the program, other types which were generally cheaper, were being used. Cabbage, in particular, was found to be objectionable by manatees. So now that FWC has found the right mix, how much is needed to sustain each manatee? According to a University of Florida study Manatees need to eat a tenth of their body weight each day. The average adult West Indian manatee, Florida’s manatees, weigh 990 pounds. That means the average manatee needs 99 pounds of food per day! That’s a lot of lettuce. That’s also obviously a huge amount of seagrass. The current program is doling out 3,000 pounds of the preferred lettuce per day. While that sounds like a lot of lettuce, that’s only enough to feed 30 manatees per day.
This helps illustrate the extent of the challenge in front of us. With approximately 90% of sea grass in the Indian River Lagoon, previously the largest and most important in the state for manatees, having been lost due to the impact of Lake O’ discharges over the past decade... The effort to sustain the population through artificial means barely scratches the surface of mitigating the bigger problem. The exact size of the manatee population isn’t known but FWC estimates the record 1,101 manatee deaths last year represented about a sixth of the population. That would leave Florida with around 5,500 remaining manatees. That means the daily demand for food to feed the manatees is 545,000 pounds – or greater than 180 times what the FWC program is currently doing.
The FWC program has been educational and revealing. No doubt it's helpful at the margins but it’s clear that without the restoration of the manatee's natural habitat, we’re not going to be able to sustain the population at typical levels. It’s one of many reasons its critical to end all east-west discharges out of Lake Okeechobee. And its also not just about the manatees. They’re the largest example of issues associated with the ecological collapse of our estuaries due to the discharges, but they’re far from the only ones. This is why it’s critical that funding comes through for the reservoirs for runoff water from Lake O’ as adopted by the state’s Everglades Restoration plan. It is also critical to continue to put pressure on the Army Corps of Engineers to adopt plans sending water south through the Everglades as well. Those two areas currently remain challenges.
As Governor DeSantis, Senator Rubio and Representative Mast recently pointed out, the Biden administration's funds for Everglades restoration didn’t provide for any of the funding needed for the reservoirs. Likewise, the Army Corps of Engineers adopted a new discharge plan to begin next year, upon the completion of the Lake O’ Dike restoration, which reduces but doesn’t end the east-west discharges. These are here and now problems we need to deal with and that are bigger than we can account for with lettuce.