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Currently, the water temperature at the mouth of Mobile Bay is 56 degrees but due to the spring-fed area on the river the temperature there is hovering in the low- to mid-60s and obviously attractive to the manatees.
Manatee specialists with the sea lab as well as Dr. Tres Clark, an aquatic veterinarian, and Suzanne Smith of the Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans and over 20 community volunteers conducted a day-long rescue operation at the Cold Hole.Using the sea lab's boat, volunteers helped load up a net that was used to capture the first manatee just before 2 p.m. During the second rescue attempt, debris at the bowl-shaped Cold Hole, which has a maximum depth of about 30 feet, caused the net to hit several snags that led to the eventual release of the manatee despite a roughly hour-long effort.
During the unsuccessful attempt, many of the sea lab manatee specialists were in the water around the net with the manatee within 10 feet of the shore and at times catching breath within inches of rescuers' faces.
Scott Carmichael, who helped coordinate the on-site rescue operation, came so close to the manatee that he commented on the smell of its breath. He worked alongside sea lab technicians Elizabeth Hieb and Noel Wingers and senior graduate student Allen Aven along with several volunteers in the water.
While crews were attempting to rescue the second manatee, the first one was covered with blankets and being administered oxygen on a padded floor of a U-Haul truck.
Carmichael said a large, open lesion on the mammal's right side was usually only found on carcasses. The roughly 7-foot-long body was also very skinny.
After the mammal's death en route to Florida, crews turned around and headed to the Dauphin Island Sea Lab where the body was iced for examination.
"We're actually doing a necropsy on the animal today just to confirm case of death but it's obvious it was a very cold-stressed animal, very sick," Carmichael said in a phone interview Friday morning. "When we looked at the ventral side, the belly side, last night after we got the animal back here, it actually had big open lesions like that other one, about two inches diameter. ... It had those all over its stomach. It was probably really close to death when we brought it in. It's unfortunate and it was worse than we initially realized."
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Why are they still here?
Thanks to the tracking tag, the sea lab has discovered that many of the manatees coming to Alabama originate in Crystal River on Florida's west coast, near the Big Bend.
According to Carmichael, manatees usually migrate to Alabama waters in mid-May and leave in mid-November with some fluctuation due to weather conditions. At any given time during the peak of the season, Carmichael estimates there are upward of two dozen manatees somewhere in state waters feeding, breeding and calving. But in terms of those coming and going as part of a migratory stop-over point, the numbers are close to 100.
She called the stranding of the three manatees, especially as a percentage of the core population, very unusual.
"We've never had this happen before," she said.
Her theory on why the trio got stuck is centered on a growing population of the endangered species, whose numbers were as low as 160 in the late 1960s. With some 5,000 manatees in Florida today, Carmichael said it's likely the manatees are reestablishing themselves in fringe areas due to a lack of resources in more heavily populated areas of the Sunshine State.
"A lot people like to think they've never been here before and this is new, but they're in the fossil record here," Carmichael said. "We had animals here before when their population was high. ... So if you figure, you've got recovery and you don't have an increase in resources so you have a situation where the animals have to go somewhere and all of sudden it's a cost-benefit thing. It's actually worth it for them to make the travel. Maybe because they can have better access to certain females or maybe because there's certain resources they're just spreading out. They're just doing their thing.
"Then if you add to that, depending on what you think about climate change, if climate conditions are changing in a way that is even allowing the animals to come here earlier and stay longer than you can have a couple of different things working together."
Leading up to recent cold winters starting in 2009-10, there were 14 years of warm winters, Carmichael said.
"My guess is that animals figured out places like these where they can overwinter in mild years," she said. "So then you add to that just more animals come here, staying longer and some animals figuring out or getting cues from environment that they can probably stay here. Or just because they're young and naive and not figuring out they need to leave. Add all those things together and we've gotten more strandings and we've gotten more carcasses. We've gotten more carcasses since we started our stranding network than in the entire history of the state ever recorded. Just us in the last seven years."
Dauphin Island Sea Lab researchers found that prior to 2007 only seven dead manatees were recorded in waters in and around Alabama and for this season alone the manatee stranding network picked up six in the state as well as Mississippi and a portion of the Florida Panhandle.
"I just think that the carcasses alone are some pretty substantial evidence that something has changed; things are changing," Carmichael said.
And the sea lab specialists are trying not to add to the death toll with hopes that the two remaining manatees in Magnolia Springs are not as sick as the first one and can be rescued when conditions allow.
