Florida manatees are large, gentle herbivores whose welfare is threatened by boat strikes, cold stress syndrome, and loss of warm-water refuges — a combination that has caused alarming population crises in recent years.
Manatee welfare involves both acute injury from boat strikes and chronic physiological stress from cold exposure and food scarcity. Boat propeller injuries cause severe lacerations that heal slowly, may cause permanent disability, and are a source of ongoing pain during recovery. Cold stress syndrome, triggered when manatees cannot access warm water refuges, causes a progressive immune failure that leaves animals vulnerable to secondary infections. The 2021 mass starvation event was a welfare crisis on an extraordinary scale — thousands of manatees experiencing the physiological distress of prolonged starvation as their seagrass food source disappeared. The dependency of a wild population on artificial warm water outflows from power plants creates a fragile single-point-of-failure for winter survival that climate change and plant decommissioning threaten to eliminate.