Few vignettes present how a lot human exercise has affected wildlife greater than the scene at Florida Power & Light’s plant in Cape Canaveral. Hundreds of manatees indulge in an consumption canal on its southeast edge, drawn by the nice and cozy waters. These manatees are hungry. Pollution has decimated their normal menu of seagrasses within the Indian River Lagoon. Many have starved: 1,101 died in Florida in 2021, and as of December, 2022’s official estimate was almost 800 deaths. So alongside 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 manager 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.”

The supplemental feeding program started in early 2022 and restarted this winter, due to the persistence of what marine mammal consultants name an “unusual mortality event.” “It probably kept the manatees alive,” says Silverstein of the feeding program, “but it’s not a sustainable condition for manatees in the long term to need to rely on an artificial food source.”

An enduring repair would require an extended technique of environmental restoration, which is partly underway—nevertheless it’s an enormous process, one which has put native environmental advocates at odds with state and federal policymakers. And it’s a fancy one, because of the peculiarities of the Florida coast and of the ocean cows beloved by its human inhabitants.

Like most Floridians, manatees are fussy about water temperature. That’s just because they don’t have a lot physique fats. “People think it’s a big marine mammal so it has a lot of blubber, like a whale, dolphin, seal, or sea lion,” says Aarin-Conrad Allen, a marine biologist and PhD candidate at Florida International University. Because they’re not well-insulated, when the water dips under about 68 levels Fahrenheit, they’ll meander over to hotter areas. “That’s why they go to these power plants,” he says, and it’s what attracts so many to the Indian River Lagoon, which stretches about 160 miles down Florida’s area coast.

But over the previous 50 years, the human inhabitants of Brevard County, which is residence to the Indian River, has almost tripled. Human exercise has concurrently elevated agriculture within the area, led to extra boating accidents that injure manatees (96 percent of them have no less than one propeller scar), dried out Florida’s historic Everglades, and flooded its waterways with pollution. Because Florida sits on porous bedrock (“basically the Swiss cheese of rocks,” says Silverstein), water and pollution transfer simply into groundwater. “Everything that’s happening on the surface is also happening underground,” she says.

That means agricultural discharge and sewage leaks have jacked up the degrees of vitamins like phosphorus and nitrogen in close by waters. This further fertilizer drives microalgae blooms, which block daylight from reaching seagrass. The useless seagrass can fertilize blooms additional. This cascade of air pollution has destabilized Florida’s ecosystem for vegetation and herbivores; scientists estimate that about 95 percent of seagrasses have died off in components of the Indian River Lagoon. Without them, the manatees are dying too.