Pictured: Members of Bishop Animal Care performing ultrasound on Janus the Manatee. Photo courtesy of The Bishop Museum of Science and Nature.

On Monday, The Bishop Museum of Science and Nature announced that it has secured an additional state funded grant for $718,700 to be used in the expansion of its manatee care and rehabilitation program. The funds appropriated through the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) will provide supplementary assets for manatee rescue and rehabilitation. Upgrades include emergency transportation, veterinary lab equipment, and renovation of a newly-leased facility in Myakka City, formerly used as a sea lion conservation center. The facility has seven pools with life support systems that will need to be retrofitted to hold manatees. Manatees are plant eating marine mammals with a sensitivity to cold water temperatures. The life support will be adapted to filter plant material and the pools will need heaters to keep the manatees warm in the winter.

Wild manatees are facing more challenges than ever due to an Unusual Mortality Event (UME) affecting Florida’s manatee population. A UME is defined by the Marine Mammal Protection Act as a significant die-off that demands immediate response. Since 2020, more manatees have been lost to the current UME than any other period in our state’s history. The Bishop has been rehabilitating manatees since 1998 and was a founding member of the Manatee Rescue and Rehabilitation Partnership (MRP) in 2001. The MRP is a cooperative of nonprofit, private, state, and federal entities that rescue, rehabilitate, and return manatees to the wild. In addition to the over 700 manatee deaths related to the Unusual Mortality Event in the past two years, the dangers and risks to the manatee population include getting hit by boats, becoming entangled in crab trap and monofilament line, water pollution, cold-stress syndrome, red-tide illness and orphaned calves.

“The Bishop performs second stage manatee rehabilitation and release,” says Virginia Edmonds, Director of Animal Service at The Bishop Museum of Science and Nature. “We are expanding our manatee program to include an offsite facility that will allow us to increase our manatee holding capacity and perform emergency hospital care work for injured and ill manatees. The second funding award we received will help us purchase much needed equipment for transport, manatee handling and care, and veterinarian equipment to help with manatee illness and injury diagnosis and treatment.”

November is Manatee Awareness Month. Please watch for manatees as they start making their way to warm water refuges. Report an injured or ill manatee to FWC at 888-404-FWCC.

Pictured: Members of Bishop Animal Care performing ultrasound on Janus the Manatee. Photo courtesy of The Bishop Museum of Science and Nature.

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