Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay’s founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
Few creatures better embody the notion of peaceful coexistence than the manatee. Slow-moving and largely indifferent to human affairs, these aquatic herbivores graze on seagrasses and algae in the shallow coastal waters of the Americas and West Africa. Yet despite their unassuming nature, manatees are increasingly at the mercy of human activity.
The West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus), found along the Atlantic coasts of the United States, the Caribbean and Central America, offers a case in point. Once hunted for its meat, hide and oil, the species now faces more insidious threats: boat strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and the relentless degradation of its habitat. Florida’s recent surge in manatee deaths — driven by seagrass loss linked to nutrient pollution and algal blooms — has exposed the fragility of the species’ hard-won recovery.
Also at risk is the manatee’s elusive cousin, the dugong (Dugong dugon), found across the warm coastal waters of the Indian and Western Pacific oceans. In Asia, dugongs once ranged widely from India to Japan and throughout Southeast Asia, quietly grazing in seagrass beds much like their American relatives. But their numbers have dwindled precipitously. Hunting, habitat loss and accidental capture in fishing gear have driven local extinctions, most recently in China, where the dugong was declared functionally extinct in 2022. Today, scattered populations persist in places like the Philippines and Indonesia, where rapid coastal development and destructive fishing practices threaten what little remains of their habitat. As with manatees, the dugong’s disappearance would signal the unraveling of fragile marine ecosystems that millions of people depend upon.
Such losses are not merely sentimental. Manatees serve as ecological bellwethers for the health of coastal ecosystems. Their appetite for seagrass, consuming up to 10% of their body weight daily, shapes underwater meadows that store carbon, filter water and protect shorelines from erosion. Their decline signals broader environmental distress.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies the West African manatee as vulnerable and the Amazonian manatee as endangered. In the United States, regulatory protections are now being reconsidered. Conservationists argue that relisting the species as endangered under federal law may be necessary to unlock stronger safeguards.
Saving manatees will require more than nostalgia for a charismatic species. It will demand difficult policy choices: tighter pollution controls, restrictions on coastal development, and rethinking water management. In a world of diminishing ecological margins, the fate of the manatee is less a curiosity than a measure of how well societies balance economic priorities with the modest needs of nature.
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Banner image (from left: Florida manatee (Trichechus manatus) in Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge, Florida, by David Hinkel. Manatee, courtesy of NOAA’s National Ocean Service.