Florida is Fighting to Feed Starving Manatees This Winter

upstart writes:

Florida is fighting to feed starving manatees this winter:

Few vignettes show how much human activity has affected wildlife more than the scene at Florida Power & Light's plant in Cape Canaveral. Hundreds of manatees bask in an intake canal on its southeast edge, drawn by the warm waters. These manatees are hungry. Pollution has decimated their usual menu of seagrasses in the Indian River Lagoon. Many have starved: 1,101 died in Florida in 2021, and as of December, 2022's official estimate was nearly 800 deaths. So along the canal, members of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are tossing them lettuce.

"It's just emblematic of how dire the situation is," says Rachel Silverstein, the executive director of environmental nonprofit Miami Waterkeeper. "The point where we would need to artificially feed a wild animal because their ecosystem is so destroyed that they cannot find food for themselves is pretty extreme."

[...] A lasting fix will require a long process of environmental restoration, which is partly underway-but it's a big task, one that has put local environmental advocates at odds with state and federal policymakers. And it's a complex one, thanks to the peculiarities of the Florida coast and of the sea cows beloved by its human inhabitants.

[...] Scientists hope that restoring Florida's Everglades will help protect natural habitats. Comprehensive restoration, overseen by federal agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of the Interior, plus Florida's state government, began in 2000. Its associated projects aim to restore the flow of water from the central Lake Okeechobee to South Florida after a century of diversion that parched the wetland. But that project will run through 2050, at least, and environmental advocates believe that more can be done in the meantime at the government level.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.