MAD about Manatees

As the winter sun set on the Gulf Coast on Dec. 2, 2002, a chill wind rippled across the Caloosahatchee River and swirled through the streets of downtown Fort Myers. Just after 6 p.m., about 3,000 people surged through the doors of the city's riverfront convention center. Some waved signs: "Don't Tread on Me!'' "Don't Give Up the Ship!'' "Save Our Jobs!'' One man, dressed in red, white and blue, toted a large white cross labeled "Property Rights.''

There were skinny teenagers and white-haired retirees, scruffy sailors in tattered jeans, businessmen in sharply creased khakis, a woman in black leather pants and stiletto heels. What brought them together on this cool evening was white-hot anger. They were upset about new rules that they believed would hamper their livelihoods and lifestyles, all to protect a shy and homely marine mammal. One protester wore a T-shirt that summed it up per-fectly: "Stop the Manatee Insanity!''

For four years, Florida has been convulsed by a bitter conflict over the gentle manatee, and at this public hearing the conflict hit its emotional peak.

The fight started in court. In 2000, environmental activists from the Save the Manatee Club joined forces with animal welfare groups such as the Humane Society to file a pair of lawsuits against state and federal officials. The suits accused the government of doing little to stop speeding boats from killing manatees, while permitting waterfront development to wipe out the places where the manatees live.

Rather than fight, state and federal officials settled out of court. The settlements led to new restrictions on boating and development, two activities crucial to Florida's economy. That generated tremendous resentment among many of the nearly 1 million

boaters as well as marina owners, dock-builders and boat brokers, not to mention the powerful real estate industry. The resulting clash between determined environmental groups and impassioned boaters created what the New York Times declared "one of the fiercest fights over an endangered species since loggers in the Pacific Northwest strung mock spotted owls on the grills of their trucks.''

Southwest Florida has been the front line for much of the battle. Nearly half the state's manatee population lives along a stretch of the Gulf Coast that runs from Tampa Bay down to the Ten Thousand Islands. Over the past decade Sarasota, Charlotte, Lee and Collier counties have seen a tremendous boom in human population, with an accompanying increase in the number of boats zooming through coastal waterways.

Scientists say the manatee population in other parts of the state is at least stable and may even be increasing. But they believe the Southwest Florida manatee population is in decline, because every year more manatees here die than are born.

So, as a result of the settlements, federal wildlife officials had proposed restricting the building of docks throughout Southwest Florida. They theorized that more docks equal more boats, which would mean more manatee deaths. They said they would probably turn down 37 percent of new dock permits over the next five years, inflicting a multimillion-dollar impact on the region's economy.

They scheduled a series of public hearings, the first of which would take place by the Caloosahatchee, the river where over the past 30 years more manatees have died than in any other waterway in Florida. The first speaker was one of Florida's most powerful state legislators, Lindsay Harrington, a bluff and folksy politician who once compared environmentalists to watermelons: "Green on the outside, red on the inside!''

Harrington, a real estate agent and former Punta Gorda mayor, opened the hearing with a bang. "Many of us,'' he roared, "believe this goes too damn far!'' The crowd cheered.

Another popular speaker was Jim Kalvin, a burly dock-builder from Naples whose shaggy blond hair and beard made him look more like a Viking than the founder of Florida's fastest-growing boating rights group, Standing Watch. A onetime marina owner, Kalvin had managed to meld an effective organization out of groups that sometimes don't get along: yachtsmen, live-aboard sailors, personal watercraft enthusiasts and recreational boaters.

At the hearing, Kalvin urged federal officials to toss out the entire settlement with the Save the Manatee Club. Invoking the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Kalvin spoke about "the freedoms we all hold dear'' and then said, "We're dealing with a plaintiff organization that goes to court to circumvent those freedoms!'' Later, when a handful of environmental activists spoke in favor of the restrictions, they were booed and told to go hug a tree.

Opposition to the proposed dock rules reached the highest levels of government. Gov. Jeb Bush met with U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton to complain. Ultimately federal officials dropped the proposed restrictions-but not, they said, because of their unpopularity. They said they dropped the dock rules because turning down 37 percent of all permits would still not do enough to protect Southwest Florida's manatees.

Manatees might seem an unlikely cause for so much political friction. Slow-moving creatures with a Mr. Magoo squint, manatees have a body like a dumpling and a spoon-shaped tail. Their vaguely feminine shape led ancient sailors to identify them as mermaids, but the modern eye sees a less alluring creature. One writer described them as "a giant yam with flippers.''

They tend to be solitary animals, except when a dozen or so congregate for breeding or when cold weather forces scores of them to huddle together in a warm spring or near a power plant's discharge pipe to stay alive. Like dolphins and whales, they are warm-blooded creatures that nurse their young. They spend their lives in the water, but when they are awake they stick their gray snouts out about every five minutes to breathe. That's when they are easiest for humans to spot-or to hit with a boat.

They have no enemies but us. Native Americans and early settlers used to kill them for their succulent meat. By the 1880s nature writers were warning of the animal's imminent extinction. In 1893 one of Miami's founding fathers, real estate mogul Frederick Morse, pushed a measure through the Legislature that banned the killing of manatees without a permit. Still, poaching remained common until at least the 1940s because of lax enforcement.

In 1967, when federal wildlife biologists included the manatee on their first-ever list of endangered species, they acknowledged that they had no idea how many were left, "due to the fact that it is one of the most difficult totally aquatic mammals to observe in the wild." Nevertheless, they said, it should still be considered endangered because the species, which once ranged from the Carolinas to Texas, now appeared to persist primarily in "heavily used boating areas" in Florida.

When Congress passed the Endang-ered Species Act in 1973, Florida's manatees were supposed to be protected from being killed, maimed or harassed. Yet in 30 years federal authorities have prosecuted only one case. In 1984, a fishing-boat captain from the Stuart area was caught with a hunk of butchered manatee meat, and bragged about how good it tasted. He was tossed in the slammer for six months.

Overall, the law has done little to stem the number of manatee deaths due to boating. Between 1976 and 2003, more than 4,000 manatees have turned up dead in Florida. Some were killed by red tide, cold stress or other causes. But state officials say about a quarter were run over by boats, making them the leading cause of death.

The number of registered boats in Florida is nearly 1 million, and tourists bring in thousands more every year. Manatees are killed by speedboats, fishing boats, tugs, barges, even cruise ships, all of which can move faster than a manatee.

Nearly all dead manatees are brought to a small beige building in St. Petersburg where a team of state scientists dissect them to determine the cause of death. Call it the CSI of sea cows. The biologist in charge is Tom Pitchford, who met his wife while they were pulling a dying manatee from a creek bank in Sarasota. Last year Pitchford and his colleagues handled 380 carcasses. Boats killed 73, down from 2002's record high of 95.

Pitchford has seen manatees that died from cracked skulls and punctured lungs, the result of being clobbered by a speeding boat. Sometimes the spinning boat propeller and the skeg below it slice through the animal's thick hide, leaving deep wounds.

Not all boat strikes are fatal. Scientists figure about two-thirds of the manatees swimming around Florida's bays, rivers, springs and canals have been hit by boats and survived. Many carry multiple scars from repeat collisions. Pitchford tells of one that had scars from being hit by boats 49 times. The 50th proved fatal.

Their injuries have become part of their identity. To the human eye, manatees tend to look identical. In 1949, as boating became a popular form of recreation, an Everglades National Park biologist named Joe Moore discovered that he could tell one manatee from another by studying their propeller scars. The scar patterns are nearly as distinctive as fingerprints, if fingerprints were carved out with a buzz saw.

Moore's method of identification remains the standard. In a tiny U.S. Geological Survey office in Gaines-ville, homemade wooden bookshelves hold rows of binders containing pictures of about 2,000 manatees that have been identified by their scars.