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More than 55 tons of lettuce have been fed to starving Florida manatees as part of an experimental program to help the slow-moving marine mammals since their natural food is being destroyed by water pollution, wildlife officials said Wednesday. The lettuce, funded by more than 1,000 individual donations, is offered to manatees that gather in the warm water discharge near a power plant on Florida's east coast as they typically do during cold months. Officials from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a conference call that the feeding program has made...

A record number of manatees have arrived at Blue Spring State Park (and you can watch them live) Posted By Alex Galbraith on Tue, Jan 18, 2022 at 1:26 pm It's been a catastrophically bad year for Florida's manatees, but they are still out in force at Central Florida's Blue Spring State Park right now. Webcams trained on manatee stomping grounds show massive amounts of the floating potatoes and state symbols vibing in the stable waters of the spring as winter continues. The park reported more than 600 manatees in their waters today, which Save the Manatee calls a new...

What a bad year to be a Florida manatee. For the first time on record, more than 1,000 of the sea mammals have died in a calendar year — and it’s not even December yet. That could amount to 1 in every 7 of the state’s manatees gone in less than 11 months. Many of them starved, thanks to a die-off of seagrass, a problem worsened by human-made pollution. In the short run, Florida owes it to this iconic mammal to find ways to mitigate the damage. It’s also time to put the manatees back on the endangered species list,...

Florida rescue workers and a group of residents helped save two manatees who were left stranded on Sunday after Hurricane Irma caused water to drain from the Sarasota Bay. Michael Sechler, who shared images of the beached animals on Facebook, said he noticed them suffering while he and a group of friends were driving near the bay in Manatee County.

So far there have been 91 reported manatee deaths this year from boat strikes, and officials want boaters to slow down and keep an eye out. The state says efforts to protect the watery beasts have helped: aerial counts by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission show numbers are up around the state. But in Wakulla Springs State Park, counts by boat have shown a downturn in numbers there.

An evening ritual for one Fort Lauderdale resident took a remarkable turn Friday. Bill Tudhunter, 57, was sitting on the back patio of his Fort Lauderdale home drinking a beer and enjoying the view of the Intracoastal Waterway, as he does every evening after work, when he noticed something odd in the water. A group of nine manatees had come ashore behind the home in the 2100 block of Southeast 21st Street. In what could only be described as a dogpile, they rocked with the wake, apparently mating as they floated in a few feet of water. A cluster of...

Police busted a Florida woman for an unusual crime — riding a manatee like a body board. Ana Gloria Garcia Gutierrez turned herself in Tuesday after local police released photos of her catching a ride on a manatee, an endangered species, over the weekend in Tierra Verde, Fla. “To her credit, she called us up and let us know she was the one in the pictures,” Sgt. David DiSano of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office told the Daily News.

As Southwest Florida prepares for a cold snap, farmers are bracing for potential damage to their crops. ... Sorrells says that fog, created through an intricate web of irrigation lines, should raise the temperatures in the groves an estimated 3 to 5 degrees. The water will flow all night into the early morning until the temperatures reach above freezing ... the length of time the oranges and trees remain frozen, and says four hours can damage the fruit and six hours can damage a tree

Driven by plunging temperatures, hundreds of manatees stampeded south on the Intracoastal Waterway over the past two days toward the warm water of power plant discharges in Riviera Beach and Fort Lauderdale. Cold snaps have emerged as a leading killer of manatees over the past three years, exceeding deaths by boat collisions, according to figures kept by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “Manatees are tropical animals so they start to suffer when the water temperature goes below 68 degrees,” said Kathryn Curtin, a contract biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey based at Port Everglades.

APOLLO BEACH, Fla. – People aren't the only ones in Florida who don't like cold weather. Manatees — those giant aquatic mammals with the flat, paddle-shaped tails — are swimming out of the chilly Gulf of Mexico waters and into warmer springs and power plant discharge canals. On Tuesday, more than 300 manatees floated in the outflow of Tampa Electric's Big Bend Power Station.

The New Year's cold snap devastated the state's manatee population, with more than 100 carcasses showing up in state waters in the first three weeks of 2010... Biologists report that the big chill — which brought the coldest 12-day period South Florida has seen since at least 1940 — inflicted mortal cold stress on an unprecedented scale, killing at least 77 of the 107 dead manatees found as of Jan. 23, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The number of cold stress deaths exceeded the previous single-year record of 56, set last year. The manatees join the...

More than 100 manatees have been found dead in Florida waters since the beginning of the year, mostly victims of a nearly two-week cold snap. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission says the preliminary cause of death for 77 of the endangered animals is cold stress. They were found from Jan. 1 through Jan. 23.

Having defeated the Japanese fleet and faced down the Soviets, the U.S. Navy faces a new obstacle, one that hides behind a deceptively gentle, seagrass-munching façade. Manatees may rank lower than such traditional menaces as torpedoes and air-to-sea missiles. But a proposal to protect additional habitat for them, the Navy says, could end up reducing habitat for destroyers, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service soon will make a decision on whether to expand what's called critical habitat for the manatee in Florida and southern Georgia, in response to a petition from several environmental groups.

Come on folks, get a grip! Original thread is here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2279459/posts?q=1&;page=1

MIAMI -- The Florida Marlins are looking for some footloose fat men. The National League team is creating an all-male, plus-size cheerleading squad to be dubbed the Manatees. Tryouts were scheduled for Sunday. The team hopes to recruit seven to 10 tubby men to dance, cheer and jiggle during Friday and Saturday home games this season. Real manatees, 1,200-pound mammals sometimes referred to as "sea cows," are not considered the most agile of creatures and often get caught in boat propellers.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering whether to reclassify the FL manatee as a “threatened” species instead of an “endangered” species, though more of the sea cows were killed in 2006 than in the previous 30 years. The Washington Post reports that of a total population of roughly 3,200, 416 of the marine mammals were killed last year - many in collisions with boat propellers. The planned reclassification would ease restrictions on how fast boats can go (no-wake zones), as well as on waterfront development in manatee habitats. Lobbyists for boaters and developers argue that the manatee population...

TITUSVILLE -- Sea cows call the warm waters near energy facilities home. Scientists fear that if a plant closes, those animals might not head to springs or migrate to South Florida. For manatees, the warm water that spills from power plants is addictive. The plants have long provided the sea cows with an artificial refuge beyond their natural winter habitat near springs and in warmer southern waters. Scientists estimate that six in every 10 manatees now winter near power plants that line Florida's waterways. It is a dependency that someday could have grave consequences for the manatee. State and federal...

MIAMI, Florida (Reuters) -- Florida's wildlife commission voted Wednesday to remove the manatee from the state's endangered species list, a move environmentalists fear could erode safeguards for the popular sea creature. State officials said the "downlisting" to threatened from endangered would have no impact on protections afforded the massive, lumbering marine mammal often called the sea cow. Manatees inhabit Florida's canals and coastal waters, where they are frequently killed or injured by boats. A survey this year found about 3,100 remaining manatees. State officials say manatees no longer qualify for endangered status, which is reserved for creatures that face extinction....

HELP! About an hour ago I was crossing over Sunrise on the pedestrian overpass from the Ft. Lauderdale Swap Shop. I always glance at the canal on the south side of Sunrise because it is fun to watch the fish jumping sometimes. Anyway, this time I saw something that made me stop dead in my tracks. It was something HUGE in the canal. I couldn't tell at first what it was. It could have been a seal, or a gigantic turtle, or a really large alligator. Anyway, it was making a lot of movement in the canal and I yelled...

unday April 23, 2006 A new audiotape from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden will be aired today on the Arabic news station al Jazeera, the organisation claims.More follows . .