Manatees, long considered among Florida\u2019s most beloved and enchanting inhabitants, are not native at all, and only came to the Sunshine state for warm temperatures and clear blue waters like any other visitor, researchers have found.<\/p>\n
The surprise revelation by scientists at the University of South Florida (USF) and George Washington University (GWU) upends decades of thinking about the origins of the threatened species, once plentiful around the Florida peninsula, the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean.<\/p>\n
The finding could also offer a pathway to survival of the creatures known as sea cows, of which fewer than 9,000 are believed to inhabit Florida\u2019s waterways.<\/p>\n
Thomas Pluckhahn, professor of anthropology at USF, pointed to a remarkable rebound in numbers of bowhead whales, conservation efforts fuelled at least in part by a better understanding of the history and geography of that species.<\/p>\n
\u201cBiologists often try to set targets for management based on historical baselines, but a lot of times those are just assumed rather than demonstrated. They often put a large priority on native species,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHistorical records could be useful for manatees\u2019 management, maybe trying to take a more granular approach to the population histories and using those to set targets. Studies of other species like bowhead whales have recognized populations are differential, they\u2019ve been differentially impacted by histories of whaling and exploitation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pluckhahn, who co-authored the study with the GWU archaeology professor David Thulman, likened manatees to so-called snowbirds, the colloquial name attached by locals to seasonal visitors to Florida from colder climes.<\/p>\n
He said Florida\u2019s waters were once too frigid for manatees because of the little ice age, a period of intermittent cooling lasting from around 1300 until the mid-1800s. The authors believe only at its conclusion did manatees begin travelling north in greater numbers, and not during Florida\u2019s colonial days from the 16th to 19th centuries when it was assumed settlers from Spain and Britain might have hunted them.<\/p>\n
\u201cManatees are very sparsely represented in archaeological and archival records before the late 1700s and the most likely explanation is that they were present only occasionally,\u201d Pluckhahn said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a few documented examples of manatee bones in the archaeological records of Florida, most manufactured into tools or ornaments, which suggests they might have been traded from the Caribbean.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s also possible they were present but people didn\u2019t hunt them, but I just don\u2019t think that kind of taboo would have lasted 10,000 years or so, and it doesn\u2019t explain why they wouldn\u2019t show up on Spanish sites or in Spanish records.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we also don\u2019t see any art. If manatees were important to Native Americans, we might expect them to be represented. Other animals are represented in Native American art in Florida: panthers, dolphins, things like that. But we don\u2019t see manatees.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was this anecdotal lack of representation for a species supposedly so ingrained in Florida\u2019s historic culture that encouraged Puckhahn and Thulman to collaborate on their research. They studied dozens of pre-colonial archaeological records, and archives from explorers and settlers who landed in Florida from the mid-1500s onwards, and found that references to manatees were not showing up in any significant numbers.<\/p>\n
Beginning in the 1920s, they said, media reports became more common of manatees being routinely spotted along the east coast of Florida, from Miami to St Augustine, and \u201cbecoming more plentiful\u201d along the Gulf of Mexico coast and in Tampa Bay by the 1950s.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are still cold spells, and that\u2019s a limiting factor for manatees,\u201d Pluckhahn said. \u201cBut climate change was accompanied by changes to the landscape that created warm-water refuges, things like canals and yacht basins, and that\u2019s where people spotted manatees most commonly in the late 1800s and early 1900s.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen when power production ramped up, beginning in the 1920s power plants became the principal warm-water refuge outside of natural springs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pluckhahn notes that he and Thulman are not biologists, but hopes their research will help the decision-making process as efforts to restore the imperilled species continue.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we\u2019ve highlighted, some of the earlier manatee refuges were kind of passive, solar, shallow-water features, and we don\u2019t know if it\u2019s possible to create more of those or to make existing ones more manatee friendly, but we are going to need more warm-water refuges for manatees as the fossil fuel plants close,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has been mulling whether to restore to manatees the \u201cendangered\u201d status removed during the first administration of Donald Trump in 2017. The service announced last month that because of hurricanes Helene and Milton this year it was extending until late January a public comment period over revised or new critical habitat designations for two subspecies, the Florida manatee and the Antillean manatee in Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe future of the Florida manatee is uncertain, and the continued loss of essential warm water and foraging habitat poses a significant threat to its long-term survival,\u201d an alliance of advocacy groups, including Defenders of Wildlife, the Save the Manatee club and the Center for Biological Diversity, told FWS in a statement.<\/p>\n
Conservation efforts, they said, \u201chave been largely focused on the immediate need to rescue stranded manatees, rather than on engaging with the service\u2019s long-term policies to ensure the survival and recovery of the species\u201d.<\/p>\n