Florida manatees face chronic welfare harm from watercraft strikes, with injuries ranging from propeller scarring to fatal blunt trauma in areas where boat traffic and manatee habitat overlap.
Manatee welfare involves both acute trauma from boat strikes and chronic starvation from seagrass loss. Propeller strikes cause injuries from minor scarring to fatal thoracic trauma. Manatees that survive strikes may carry permanent deformities and chronic pain. Speed restriction in manatee zones is effective at reducing impact severity when collisions occur, and polarity-detecting technology that alerts boaters to manatee presence is advancing. The 2021 starvation crisis — when algal blooms eliminated seagrass — demonstrated that food security is as significant a welfare threat as direct trauma in years with poor water quality.