ORLANDO, Fla. — Manatee deaths reported in the past half-century include nearly 5,000 from boat strikes, water structures and red tides.
Across that span of mortalities tied to human activities, there has never been a die-off as gruesome as from December through May, when 677 carcasses were counted along Florida’s east coast. Half were in Brevard County’s portion of the Indian River, a coastal lagoon in biological collapse from pollution.
Partly because of the pandemic, necropsies were not done on two-thirds of the dead in Brevard. But by February, authorities had learned that winter cold was not the culprit. They knew from manatees’ contorted bodies and from finding nearly no seagrass in the lagoon they were dying of malnutrition.
