Manatee Awareness Month Starts When Florida's Water Turns Cold

A Florida manatee cannot stay long in water colder than 68°F. As the water cools each year, it has to reach somewhere warmer or risk cold stress, and November is when that search begins. That timing is why Florida gives the whole month to manatees.

A Governor's Declaration in 1979

Bob Graham, then governor of Florida, first declared November Manatee Awareness Month in 1979. The state did not make the designation official until 2005, 26 years later.

Two years after the declaration, while still governor, Graham joined the singer Jimmy Buffett to found Save the Manatee Club in 1981. The club began as the Save the Manatee Committee.

A Sea Cow Related to the Elephant

Manatees are often called sea cows. A Florida manatee is a large gray mammal with a wrinkled face, whiskers on its snout and a body that tapers into a flat, paddle-shaped tail. The average adult is about 10 feet long and weighs 800 to 1,200 pounds. Its closest living relatives are the elephant and the hyrax, a small, gopher-sized mammal.

A manatee eats only plants, and a lot of them: it can graze on seagrass for up to eight hours a day and eat up to 10 percent of its body weight in aquatic vegetation. The rest of the day goes to resting, anywhere from 2 to 12 hours of it. Breathing sets the rhythm. An active manatee may come up for air as often as every 30 seconds, while a resting one surfaces every three to five minutes on average and can hold its breath for as long as 20 minutes.

Springs, Then Power Plants

For all its size, a manatee has a low metabolic rate for a marine mammal, and in cold water it cannot make enough body heat to keep up with what it loses. For most of their history, manatees rode out the winter at warm springs and other natural refuges. Then power plants and other industrial sites began discharging warm water, and many manatees started spending the cold months in those discharge basins instead. About 60 percent of the population now depends on industrial sources of warm water. As older plants retire, losing those refuges could mean more manatees dying of cold stress.

Slow Speed, Manatee Area

Boat strikes are a major threat to Florida manatees. Seasonal manatee zones require boaters to slow down or stay out of certain areas, and some of those zones run from November 15th to March 31st, the months manatees spend in warm water.

Florida law also makes it illegal to harass, feed, disturb or harm a manatee, and giving one water is against the law too. Manatees that are fed or given water by people can lose their fear of humans.

An injured, sick or dead manatee should be reported to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's Wildlife Alert Hotline at 888-404-FWCC (888-404-3922).

The Seagrass Die-Off

Florida's manatee population has grown to a minimum of 8,350 animals, and in May 2017 the manatee moved from endangered to threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. A downlisting holds only while the conditions behind it do, as with the numbat, which left Endangered in 2026 on the strength of fences and predator control. The manatee's test came three and a half years later.

Between December 1, 2020, and April 30, 2022, Florida recorded 1,255 manatee deaths in what was declared an unusual mortality event. Of those, 1,039 died during the winters of 2020 to 2021 and 2021 to 2022. Investigators found the cause was starvation. The Indian River Lagoon had suffered a historic loss of seagrass, the food manatees depend on, and the deaths peaked in winter. State and federal teams and their partners rescued 137 manatees during the event, which is now closed.

Adopt-A-Manatee

In 1984, Jimmy Buffett came up with the Adopt-A-Manatee program, and it became an important source of money for manatee conservation. The adoption is symbolic: a supporter picks a real manatee and adopts it for themselves or as a gift, starting at $25 a year. The adoption includes a year of membership in Save the Manatee Club, along with the chosen manatee's biography and an official adoption certificate. The money goes toward manatee conservation, public awareness and education.

Graham declared the month, and Buffett thought up the adoptions. Both point at the same few cold months, when 10-foot animals that need to breathe every few minutes and eat for hours a day gather wherever Florida's water stays warm.

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