A sun-bleached skull, scattered ribs and the decaying husks of dozens of manatees sully the smooth tan sand on a handful of mangrove islands north of Manatee Cove Park in Brevard County.
The emaciated remains, reported by waterfront residents or spotted by boaters, have been collected and dumped on the sandy outcroppings by state wildlife officers, turning these idyllic tropical settings into sea cow mass graveyards.
The smell of death owns the air. Vultures own the sky above as they circle what is quickly becoming an environmental catastrophe.
The manatees are dying by the hundreds
Up and down the Sunshine State, manatees, the gentle giants of the inland waterways, are dying en masse. They are, in fact, starving to death. The mangrove coves and canals that once were havens for the creatures are increasingly empty of them. Decades of conservation success have given way to jumbles of bones and rotting carcasses all around Florida.
Conservationists patted each other on the back for the success. It was short-lived.
Two years later, more than half the grass was gone.
Much of Florida s seagrass would die post 2011. Extreme weather and storm runoff fed algae blooms that harmed seagrass beds along the Panhandle, Big Bend, southwest Florida, and along the east coast from Biscayne Bay to the northern Indian River Lagoon.
Here on the Space Co, drought, then extreme cold, set the stage for severe algae blooms that killed off 60% of the lagoon s seagrass, a consortium of 26 scientists concluded in 2015.
While runoff often delivers the nitrogen and phosphorus that trigger algae blooms, drought preceded the massive lagoon algae blooms that began in late 2010.