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Q&A of the Day – Are Florida’s Manatees Native?
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
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Today’s entry: Love your show. My issue is the damage the Manatees do to the seagrasses in eating them. West Indian so they are non-native? Save money to send them back to where they can thrive vs feeding them. Also have seen them eat freshwater plants (some non-native). Why give them lettuce when we are in a food crisis?
Bottom Line: I wanted to address this question for a couple of reasons. The first is about the manatees. The other is to potentially address what may be other potential misperceptions based on the names of animals. It’s understandable that when one hears the name “West Indian”, one might assume they’re native to Asia. They’re not. In fact, there aren’t manatees in Asian waters at all. Manatees are native to the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, the Amazon and West Africa. Each is a subspecies of the Trichechus family. These are the survivors of the original manatee species (one is already extinct). The four species are the Amazonian manatee – which as you’d expect are the ones in the Amazon. The Antillean manatees – these are Caribbean manatees, The West African manatee, which as you’d expect is the West African manatee and the West Indian manatee – which happens to be the Florida manatee. The name can be entirely deceptive from a perception standpoint. And as for how all of this came to be? There’s something else that’s in play that contributes not just to an understanding of manatees but of other native species which potentially may be confused. Florida’s original geography.
Once upon a time, approximately 200 million years ago, Florida was part of Africa during the age of the supercontinent Pangea. So too was Central and South America. A series of earthquakes eventually broke up the supercontinent and plate tectonics sent us to our current location. For much of this period, Florida was completely underwater. Florida only arrived in its current alignment about 2.6 million years ago and only took the current form we understand approximately 11,700 years ago, as most of the peninsula emerged from having been mostly submerged during the ice age. Anyway, it’s this type of transformation which helps explain why manatees are found in western Africa, the Caribbean and the Amazon. We were once all connected. For this reason, there are numerous species which are native to the Americas but are also subspecies of those in Africa. This is especially prevalent within avian species. It's often thought that birds which are native to the Americas have been imported and populated here from Africa.
As for Florida’s manatees and just how native they actually are? The West Indian, the Florida manatee, has fossil records found within Florida bedrock which have been carbon dated up to 50 million years ago. By way of comparison, the oldest human remains discovered anywhere in Florida date back to approximately 14,500 years (near what is now Tallahassee) ago. Manatees are not only native to Florida, but scientifically, they’re the oldest native mammal in the state. As a passionate conservationist, there’s also another dynamic which I think is instructive in this regard.
The manatee crisis is entirely of our own making. The discharging of fresh and commonly algal ridden water into our waterways has destroyed their native habitats. While the focus centers on the manatees, as they’re already a protected species which are a very large and obvious sign of distress (when record recorded numbers are dying due to starvation), there’s another story which needs to be considered. If our destructive actions are threatening the viability of our state’s oldest mammal which has survived massive tectonic shifts in geography, an ICE Age, etc., imagine the impact on so many other much smaller and less adapted species in our waters. Incidentally, corals and as we’re talking about Florida’s waters, our corals specifically – are one of the biggest tells of all. Healthy corals project healthy waters. White corals, pretty as they are, represent death. There’s a lot of that around here. There’s much more than meets the eye, and the names of certain species as the case may be, when it comes to Florida’s waterways.