July 2008

NGOs Save Belizean Manatees from Deadly Boat Collisions

By Rob Goodier

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Boaters and manatees have a fabled history of killing each other, often inadvertently. Early sailors are rumored to have confused the gray seagrass grazers with mermaids. Their... well... curvaceous figures and "fish" tails caused enamored captains to wreck their ships, which says more about the effect of weeks at sea on a man than it does about the manatee's good looks. This phenomenon lent the creatures the name of their scientific order, Sirenia, and now gives boat guides a good joke for manatee watching tourists.

Eventually sailors no longer fell for the siren's lure, so the fatalities became one-sided, starting with man's hunting one manatee species, the Steller's seacow (Hydrodamalis gigas), to extinction in the mid-18th century, and continuing today with the accidental maiming and killing by boat propellers, a leading threat to manatees.

Nicole Auil, program director for the Wildlife Trust in Belize, is working to reduce boat injuries of the Antillean manatee, one of two subspecies of the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus). Though manatees are one of the great marine mammals, little is known about their behavior or populations. The best studied are the West Indian manatees that cruise the warm, shallow coasts and estuaries of the Caribbean and Mexico. They are divided into two subspecies, commonly called the Florida manatee and Auil's specialty, the Antillean.

In her nine years working off Belize's coasts she has seen dozens of boat injuries that leave telltale scars -- parallel almond-shaped gashes along their bodies demarcating the wounds inflicted by propellers. She sees orphaned calves and even dead manatees that didn't survive their boat-inflicted injuries. They are difficult to spot from boats, disappearing under the surface of the murky waters that they usually inhabit, and are easily missed by boats traveling at high speeds. Of the several threats to their survival, including the pollution of the coastal waters they inhabit, habitat destruction, and hunting -- which is now rare in the Caribbean -- she considers boat collisions as the deadliest.

With a grant from the Wildlife Without Borders program of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), Auil and two field staff from local villages launched a campaign to educate coastal communities and boat captains about the manatees' vulnerability. They worked with community-based conservation groups in villages near each of Belize's three manatee reserves: the northernmost Corozal Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, Swallow Caye Wildlife Sanctuary to the south, and Gales Point Wildlife Sanctuary furthest south. Auil and her team helped the groups Sarteneja Wildlife, Environment, and Ecotourism Team; Friends of Swallow Caye, and the Gales Point Wildlife Sanctuary Community Management Committee establish speed zones in the reserves and hope to help them secure future funding for their conservation work. Signs were distributed to each of the groups that warned boaters to slow down and set speed limits.

Auil and her team also created pamphlets for distribution by the three groups, and more importantly, by the Belize Port Authority. A manatee education guide was developed and combined with educational materials for elementary school students, supported by the Columbus Zoo. Auil had to navigate a two-department governmental system, complying with the regulations of both the Belize Port Authority, which issues mandates for boats, and the Forest Department, which is responsible for manatee protection. The Port Authority granted use of its logo on the pamphlets, and they were distributed to boat captains when they sought to renew their licenses each year. They were also distributed around the three manatee reserves. The pamphlets outline proper boating protocol in the reserves, including slow speeds, obeying signs, having an assistant watch by the bow, and avoiding shallow seagrass beds.

A surge in cruise ship business has made safe boating advice a boon not only for the manatees but also for local people. "Some boats go so fast, they have hit other boats and then kept going," Auil explains. "The speeding craft can be a serious hazard to tourists coming to shore in small boats from cruise ships."

Lionel Heredia, an elderly, sun-wizened boat captain whose passion for manatees and for showing them to tourists has landed him endorsements on the pages of major Belize guidebooks, works with Auil and the Wildlife Trust in his post as president of Friends of Swallow Caye. He demonstrates what appears to be a deep empathy with the creatures when he speaks of seeing them and claims a friendship with them that coaxes them into the open and alongside his boat whenever he enters Swallow Caye.

Heredia heartily endorses the education campaign. "I believe the only way to protect manatees is to have rules and regulations on how to approach them," he emphasizes." We need patrolling ...so you make sure that each boat that goes there follows the rules. They have to cut the motor and use a stick to get to where the animals are."

Auil sets an example to others, he says. "She is a picture for a lot of people. It's not too easy to deal with the public. Not many people were interested in things like this until recently."

Though the educational campaign puts her in the public spotlight, the primary thrust of Auil's work is manatee tracking. With USFWS funding, she worked for a year taking weekly core samples of seagrass beds, dried and weighed them, and monitored water quality. Sometimes groups of students from nearby elementary schools would lend a hand.

In 2006 her team made a discovery not seen before in that area -- a large male manatee nicknamed "Super-K" had traveled 124 miles (200 kilometers) from Belize's Southern Lagoon (where Gales Point Wildlife Sanctuary lies) to Mexico's Chetumal Bay, a manatee reserve. The journey took several days, after which manatee stayed in the reserve for one month and then returned to Belizean waters. It was among the first evidence of an Antillean manatee moving across international boundaries. This complemented data from colleagues at ECOSUR, an NGO in Mexico that tagged manatees in Chetumal -- one of their males came straight down to Southern Lagoon, where it met Super-K before he traveled northwards.

"Researchers suspect that this may continue to be a common occurrence as manatee populations respond to changes in habitats," she wrote in her project report to the USFWS. "We are planning to prepare a joint research proposal with colleagues in Mexico, to study movement patterns and health of the animals between both countries."

Heredia credits Auil and the community groups with making people more aware of their impact on manatees, but adds that Swallow Caye and the other reserves lack sufficient budget from a government strapped for resources, a shame considering the cayes' importance as prime habitat for the endangered marine mammals. He adds, "There is not another place like Swallow Caye in Belize that you could go any, any time and see manatees."

Contacts: Nicole Auil, Wildlife Trust, P.O. Box 378, Belize City, Belize. Tel/fax: +501/223-5172, auil@wildlifetrust.org, www.wildlifetrust.org.