Florida Is Fighting to Feed Starving Manatees This Winter

WIRED reported on Florida’s desperate effort to hand-feed lettuce to starving manatees — more than 1,100 dead in 2021 and nearly 800 in 2022 as pollution wiped out roughly 95% of the seagrass in parts of the Indian River Lagoon. Miami Waterkeeper Executive Director Rachel Silverstein called the spectacle a measure of how far things have fallen: “The point where we would need to artificially feed a wild animal because their ecosystem is so destroyed that they cannot find food for themselves is pretty extreme.”