[narrator] The Florida manatee .

playful and beloved by people of all ages.

[jaime] They're this big kind of goofy, graceful creature.

[cora] You can literally be in a canoe or kayak, and you have this two-thousand-pound creature underneath you, and you would never know it's even there.

[narrator] Designated the state s marine mammal in 1975, manatees are often called sea cows because they graze on freshwater and marine plants.

This includes seagrasses, which have been disappearing at alarming levels.

[paul] It's heartbreaking to know that what once used to be a plush greenery is now basically an underwater desert.

[lorae] Manatees can eat approximately a hundred pounds of seagrass a day.

And so when you lose that seagrass habitat, you're losing that food source for manatees.

[dennis] Seagrass is really, really important.

[beth] If you don't have seagrass beds, you don't have juvenile fisheries.

That's where juvenile fishes go.

So, you have much larger problems that are eventually going to trickle down to humans.

[narrator] The loss of seagrass in parts of Florida has contributed to a record-breaking number of manatee deaths since December 2020.

The situation became so dire that the wildlife managers resorted to feeding the gentle giants during the winter months, at one manatee gathering spot where the waters are warm but the seagrass is scarce.

[cora] Which is really something that's unheard of.

That's never been tried out before and we have to keep in mind this is really only a band-aid to get manatees through the worst of the winter.

[ron] It's all trial and error, but we thought it was worth a try, see if we could reduce some of the rescues and some of the mortalities.

[jaime] It is a scary time for manatees.

[beth] Manatees are a Keystone species.

Meaning if you don't have manatees, you have serious problems with your environment.

[narrator] Will the unprecedented steps taken by wildlife officials help save the starving Florida manatees?

And what are researchers doing to replenish the lost seagrasses?

[announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by the Batchelor Foundation, encouraging people to preserve and protect America s underwater resources.

Additional funding was provided by the Parrot Family Endowment for Environmental Education.

[narrator] Florida s iconic manatees have fascinated both locals and visitors for decades.

[cora] Manatees are a big draw for tourism in Florida, our state lives off of tourism.

There's a lot of people who come here to see manatees.

So, manatees themselves are supporting a big part of our economy.

[narrator] The gentle giants were protected by federal laws in the 1970s, and are currently listed as threatened on the U-S Endangered Species List.

Over the years, the sea cows have overcome a number of setbacks, but none as severe as what happened in 2021, when starvation led to the largest die-off on record.

According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, around 11-hundred animals died, which is nearly double the five-year average.

This prompted the U-S Fish and Wildlife Service to declare an Unusual Mortality Event in March 2021.

[cora] So, the last counts showed us that we have between six and seven thousand manatees in the state of Florida.

So, losing over 1100 manatees in a single year, suddenly six or seven thousand manatees is not that big of a number.

If you would see a repeat of that, you know, for a couple of years, that could be a really big problem.

[narrator] As manatees have struggled to find enough seagrass, Florida s rescue organizations have seen an influx of emaciated animals.

ZooTampa at Lowry Park is one of four critical care centers in the state.

Its staff are treating a young manatee called Flapjack.

[jaime] He was just in a really poor state, very emaciated, so super, super skinny, could see all his rib bones had a very sunken in head.

We call that a peanut head because it looks like the shape of a peanut with that indentation.

So very important that he was rescued and brought here.

[narrator] Typically, a manatee will stay close to its mother for up to two years to learn travel routes, as well the location of food, and life-saving warm water refuges.

[jaime] They definitely are creatures of habit.

That migratory pattern is just kind of instilled with them and wherever their mom teaches them to go, they tend to go back to.

That's what we're facing, is a lot of manatees are just staying put and not leaving though there's no food available to them.

When a manatee comes in in a really emaciated state, such as Flapjack, we definitely go very slow with what we're offering for food.

We always say that Manatee stomachs are a lot like the engine of a car.

If you left your car to sit for months and months, it might not start back up or it might not run very well.

So, we don't wanna overwhelm his gut all at once by kind of providing him a buffet.

[narrator] Flapjack is tube fed a combination of electrolytes, formula, a protein, and sometimes romaine lettuce, all blended into a smoothie.

[jaime] We've definitely seen progress.

He's gained, I believe over a hundred pounds now since being at our facility just shy of four months.

So that is all going great.

But for someone like him, you know, we're gonna just take it day by day, make sure that his weight gain continues, make sure that he's filling out and that his blood work continues to progress as well.

Certainly, as we see animals, you know, missing out on the seagrass beds that used to be there or not being able to find adequate nutrition, that may definitely lead to females, not reproducing or producing calves or maybe even females being so malnourished that they cannot provide for their calves.

[narrator] It can take up to two years of care before a manatee is released back into the wild.

[jaime] We're still cautiously optimistic for him.

And, and our hope is that in a few months, once he puts on where he should have been weight-wise, he can hopefully go back home.

[narrator] The loss of seagrass is particularly prevalent in the 156-mile Indian River Lagoon, on Florida s east coast.

Known for its biodiversity, decades of degraded water quality have had devastating impacts.

[cora] We see pollutants, nutrients entering the water ways from various things such as leaking septic tanks untreated sewer runoff from agriculture or lawns, fertilizer.

All these kinds of things.

And these nutrients lead to these massive algae blooms that cloud the waterways.

So, the sea grasses cannot grow.

[paul] This island that we re approaching now on our right is called, Gem Island.

[narrator] Paul Fafeita has been fishing these waters for sixty years.

[paul] There's, virtually no seagrass in most of the areas that, that I fish or take people anymore.

Growing up, we used to see manatee almost daily, regardless of the time of year, they are migratory animals, so we'd see them coming north and south and in the canal systems and, and feeding.

[narrator] Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium s Dr. Beth Brady leads a joint effort of eight organizations that are using drones to scan for manatees in trouble.

[beth] We are at DeSoto park.

It is in Satellite Beach.

So, this is an aggregation site where manatees come to when the water temperatures drop below 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

[narrator] During the winter months, as ocean temperatures cool, manatees need to find warm water refuges to avoid cold stress, which is equivalent to hypothermia in humans.

Many migrate to Florida s freshwater springs which maintain a water temperature of 72 degrees year-round, while others flock to power plants which discharge warm water.

[beth] So what we've been doing with the drones is we're using it to fly over aggregations.

What we're looking for is signs of emaciation or critically ill animals, first and foremost.

So, animals that are swimming on their side, they're unable to maintain their buoyancy.

After that, we start looking at the body condition of these animals.

[beth] A drone can give you a very different vantage point.

You can look up and you can see a whole lot of things that you can't see from eye level.

[narrator] This includes Florida Power and Light s Cape Canaveral Clean Energy Center, a power plant discharging warm water the animals depend on.

The plant is located in Brevard County, where seagrass is particularly in short supply.

At least 2000 manatees, or approximately a third of the Florida population, are estimated to gather in these waters annually.

[cora] We are seeing a lot of manatees.

They have to make a choice.

Are they staying warm in these, these warm waters, by the power plant and forego feeding and risk starving to death, or are they trying to migrate further out trying to find food, which would expose them to cold water temperatures which could be fatal as well.

So, a lot of people may think that manatees are these really big blubbery fat creatures, but they actually only have about an inch of fat layer, which is very, very little, and it doesn t allow them to stay warm.

So unlike seals, walruses, sea lions, those kind of animals, that have a big blubber layer manatees don t have that.

[narrator] The dire situation led the U-S Fish and Wildlife Service and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to take unprecedented measures during the winter of 2021 through 2022, when they selected the site for an experimental feeding program.

[scott] We first started providing limited amounts of forage in the middle of December, but we had no evidence of successfully feeding animals until in January.

So, you know, we, we had weeks go by where we were trying to figure out the system and how it would work and what might work.

[ron] Truth be told, we'd rather have the animals not here.

We'd rather have them adapt and be somewhere else where, where there's food and they could do it on their own.

But, until that happens, we now know we can provide some supplemental forge and help some of the animals that are here.

[narrator] From mid-December through March, roughly 200-thousand pounds of lettuce was fed to manatees at this site.

[michelle] This is one of three refrigerated units we have at the temporary field response station.

The other two are behind us.

We stock it to the brim pretty full of both romaine lettuce and butter leaf lettuce so these are the two primary types of food that we re providing to the animals right now.

We've consulted with a lot of our health and behavioral experts, and they've given us a thumbs up on these types.

[ron] There were three things we're trying to do, when we, we talked through this with our experts.

One is we wanna make a, a difference on health so we could limit rescues and, and mortality, want to make sure that we didn't change behavior significantly.

And the last thing was, we don't want to damage the environment here.

It s got enough problems, we're trying to help that.

So when we took all that into consideration, you can see where we're feeding it's in an enclosed area.

There's just one opening on the far end, and it s about eight feet wide.

[narrator] Wildlife officials say preventative measures were taken to avoid having manatees associate humans with food.

[ron] The cloth barriers that's a buffer between us and the animals.

When they're down in the water, if they're looking up, they're seeing a cloth barrier, they're not seeing us.

[cora] Providing food to wild manatees is a really complicated issue.

The last thing you want is these manatees to become habituated to people and trying to seek out people for food, and then, you know, approaching docks, boats, marinas, and putting themselves in harms way.

That's why it's so important for individuals to not try to take matters into their own hands and give food to manatees.

[narrator] The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the U-S Fish and Wildlife Service scaled back their response in April of 2022 with the arrival of warmer water, which allows manatees to travel further in search of food.

Officials say they are assessing whether the feeding will be needed again the following winter.

[cora] I'm just upset about how many manatees have died really due to things that would've been preventable.

So we really need to look at addressing the source of the problem, which is the pollution, those nutrients entering the waterways and addressing that.

[narrator] Dr. Dennis Hanisak has more than thirty years experience studying the relationship between water quality, light, and seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon.

[dennis] In most of the nineties and the first part of this century, seagrasses were actually improving.

We were seeing greater aerial extension, the amount of area that was occupied by sea grasses and you know, the abundance in that area.

That kind of stopped around 2009.

But when things really started to be problematic was in 2011.

And what happened there was, we had an unprecedented algal bloom.

And it was primarily in the Northern Indian River Lagoon, but the that's the biggest part of the lagoon.

So about 71% of the lagoon for example, is in Brevard County and that's where most of this happened.

[narrator] Scientists called it a super bloom because it lasted eight months, much longer than previous blooms.

And that was just the beginning.

Recurring algal blooms have been an issue ever since, creating a no-win situation for the seagrasses.

As Florida s population and development increase along the lagoon, so do the pollutants that make algae grow.

The algae block light from entering the water, which the plants need for photosynthesis.

[dennis] They constantly need to also get the oxygen down into the root systems.

So, if you interfere with that in a significant way, for a long enough period of time, seagrasses are severely challenged.

You know, after several weeks, seagrasses will start to, reduce in size and abundance, and then will start to die.

That's essentially what happened in the in the blooms.

So very quickly we lost probably about 60% of seagrasses in the lagoon.

[narrator] Grazing manatees require a large amount of aquatic vegetation to survive, eating between four and nine percent of their body weight every day.

[dennis] Where we had most of the seagrass resource turned out to be where we had, the blooms, which is where we had the greatest loss.

And hence, that's why we're getting a lot more mortalities in Brevard County.

[narrator] In the 1990s, Dennis research was focused on how these stressors affected seagrass.

[dennis] And then my next step though really was rather than stress the seagrass, I kind of flipped it.

And I said, what can I do to grow seagrass?

The rationale was someday, we're gonna need seagrass nurseries, cause nothing existed at all back then.

[narrator] And that time came following the 2011 superbloom when there was little natural recovery of seagrass.

[dennis] So, we started to look at areas in the lagoon, specific sites that we knew from historic data, there had been really good seagrasses, but they were gone, totally zero for at least two years.

So, we asked a very simple question.

If we started to do experimental transplants into areas that had been great for seagrass in the past, but now was not recovering at all, could we maybe start to jumpstart things.

[narrator] Dennis and his team at Florida Atlantic University s Harbor Brach Oceanographic Institute in Ft. Pierce found they could grow seagrass in tanks.

They are focusing on a species called Shoal grass, the number one seagrass in Brevard County and the most tolerant of environmental changes.

[dennis] We can take pieces of it, and we can go out and work with other agencies or other organizations, and start to do a lot of test planting to see if particular sites might be ready for a larger scale restoration and sustainable because we don't have to go back and sample from nature again.

I think developing sustainable, nursery systems and working with, agencies and organizations very broadly up and down the lagoon and other places in Florida for that matter is the way we need to attack the, the challenge of how to bring back our seagrasses.

[narrator] One of those organizations working on seagrass restoration is the Florida Oceanographic Society in Stuart, under the direction of Dr. Lorae Simpson.

With the help of volunteers, more than 20,000 seagrass shoots have been replanted into the Indian River Lagoon since 2016.

[lorae] Because of the unusual mortality event of the manatees, it has really brought to light the importance of seagrass and the Indian River Lagoon and the pouring out of the community for seagrass restoration has been huge.

[narrator] The foster program, short for Florida Oceanographic Seagrass Training, Education and Restoration, is a multi-step process.

[lorae] And what we ask of some of our volunteers is to go out and walk the shores of the Indian River Lagoon.

We ask that if they find a little sprig of seagrass, anything that has a green shoot and some root on it, to please bring it back to us.

When they bring it back to us, we plant it in our seagrass nursery.

Some of the shoots will die, just like normal house plants that you have.

We have volunteers that come in for a total of eight hours a week and they will go through, and they just slowly clean out the nursery for us, get kind of the algae or any epiphytes that are growing on the seagrass blades out of there.

Just to kind of give the seagrass its best means of growth.

[narrator] Once the roots outgrow the bins, the seagrass is planted in a wet lab so it can spread out and continue to grow.

[lorae] The water here at Florida Oceanographic is pulled in from the ocean.

And so once it makes it into our system here, there's nothing that's gonna get into it, that's going to cause a harmful algal bloom.

[narrator] Before they are replanted into the lagoon, seagrass fragments from the wet lab are attached to a biodegradable mat using a small floral wire, which will dissolve.

The goal is to have 16 shoots on one mat, which will extend out to the edges and grow through the burlap and into the sediment in the lagoon.

[lorae] Seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon reproduces vegetatively.

So instead of reproducing from seeds, like most of our plants, these are really good at just putting out rhizomes or runners, some kind of like a vine.

And so over time it will just grow from that growing edge.

And so, by putting out one acre of seagrass that growing edge will keep growing and getting bigger and larger, and that one acre will turn into hopefully several acres.

[narrator] With the need for seagrass more urgent than ever, the Florida Oceanographic Society plans to replant 48-thousand shoots in 2022 alone.

[lorae] The manatees, they do not really discriminate on their seagrass.

They will take what they can get.

They do have their favorites but when it comes down to it, a seagrass is a seagrass.

[narrator] But scientists say seagrass restoration alone won t fix the problem.

Lorae is one of many scientists pleading for more to be done to improve water quality.

[lorae] We can pour all of our resources into this project, but if the water quality isn't there, that seagrass is going to eventually die anyway.

And so there needs to be a lot more conversation and all the stakeholders involved and how to change our storm water retention, how to stop fertilizer usage and pesticides, all the stuff that we do along our coast.

[beth] I'm extremely concerned.

Um, basically because for sea grasses, to be restored, you have to fix the underlying issues.

You can't plant sea grass if you don't have the right environment to plant it.

[dennis] What we do on land really can impact water quality in so many ways.

The lagoon will never be what it was a hundred years ago, but I think if we could decide what we would like to do to make it better.

And if those things were, you know, reasonable if there's something that we can imagine that it could be achieved, then I think that will lead to a much better lagoon than we would've had otherwise.

[narrator] Many scientists say the manatee s current plight is a situation they ve seen coming for years.

The late Manatee expert Dr. John Reynolds, urged the U-S Fish and Wildlife Service in 2016 to delay down-listing the then endangered manatees to a threatened status, citing Florida s exploding population and the environmental degradation that would ensue.

[beth] This was kind of known about for a long time, that there were some problems and issues in the Indian River Lagoon with lack of seagrasses.

And we just reached a tipping point.

I feel like the down listing may have been premature.

Definitely.

I didn't think it was a good idea based on the science.

[jaime] It does worry me when they were downlisted.

Cause I think anytime you change kind of a listing on an animal, it can kind of change perceptions or viewpoint from your local community.

[narrator] The Unusual Mortality Event in 2021 made it clear that threats to manatees in Florida s Indian River Lagoon are far from over.

It s taking a collaborative effort between scientists, animal care experts, and wildlife officials working together to find solutions.

[jaime] I would hope that they will get re-listed back to endangered.

I think through the years have shown that though their numbers have gone up, it only takes an event such as what we're facing now.

That's not gonna get better anytime soon.

It's definitely gonna take years to find solutions and kind of to make that forward progress.

[lorae] I just really hope that because of this unfortunate manatee mortality event, that people will see that this is really an important ecosystem and that we'll make the necessary changes to change our water quality.

Hopefully within my lifetime, I will see the decline, but I'll also see the increase in sea grass.

[dennis] I think the manatees are gonna have a number of rough years.

[cora] Fixing an issue like the disappearance of seagrass, this is not something that can be fixed overnight.

[dennis] I think 10 years is probably too optimistic.

I d like to think we could do it in ten years.

Twenty years might be kind of a reasonable goal.

[cora] It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.