Florida Icon, Wayne Hartley, Joins Staff at Manatee Club …
Vital Research on Blue Spring Manatees Continues
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Ranger Wayne Hartley takes notes on manatees at Blue Spring State Park. (Photo by Marcy Taylor)
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For Immediate Release: February 25, 2010
After a long career with the Florida Park Service, Park Ranger Specialist Wayne Hartley is retiring at the end of February and will continue his important manatee research as a Save the Manatee Club staff member.
Manatee research has been conducted at Blue Spring State Park since 1978 on a continuous basis, resulting in one of the longest running databases in existence on the endangered Florida manatee. Hartley has been the project’s principal investigator since 1980 under the auspices of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey’s Sirenia Project.
Manatees are subtropical marine mammals and must find sources of warm water, such as natural springs and power plant effluents, to survive Florida’s cold snaps. First magnitude Blue Spring is the major warm-water refuge available for the entire Upper St. Johns River manatee management unit and is considered vital to their health and welfare. The spring is a state manatee refuge established in the 1970s after a visit from Jacques Cousteau, the famous ocean conservationist.
A large part of Hartley’s research consists of observing manatee behavior from a canoe and taking morning roll-calls (manatee counts). This has resulted in an extensive body of knowledge on the manatee’s life history. He’s shown that female manatees become sexually mature at between three and five years, which is a younger age than previously thought, and that calving intervals (the time between pregnancies) and weaning times are of a shorter duration than was known. He has been observing the Blue Spring manatees for so long that he is able to identify many family relationships, including several matriarchal lineages spanning five generations of manatees.
Patrick Rose, Save the Manatee Club’s Executive Director said, “Wayne’s research has added significantly to what we know about manatees, as well as how they utilize warm-water habitat. For instance, some of the hundreds of manatees he’s been documenting have been returning to Blue Spring since the mid-70’s. Although I began observing manatees back in the mid-70’s as well, I am always amazed to observe Wayne as he effortlessly identifies his old manatee friends and points out new calves.”
Hartley is able to identify one manatee from another by the scars they bear caused by boat strikes. His vast knowledge of individual manatees has been the basis of Save the Manatee Club’s Adopt-A-Manatee program, begun in 1984 by Jimmy Buffett, the co-founder of the organization and the co-chairman of the Club’s board of directors. The Adopt-A-Manatee program educates people about manatees as they follow the progress of an individual manatee with a unique name and a known history. These manatees are ambassadors for their species and many adoptive parents go on to become active in the Club’s grass roots efforts to strengthen management policy and to obtain stronger protection measures.
Monitoring usage of the spring by wintering manatees is crucial to the long-term survival of the Blue Spring population, especially in light of plans at the St. Johns River Water Management District to continue to pump excessive groundwater for development and to divert surface water from the river for drinking water and other consumptive uses for the surrounding counties.
“If too much water is diverted, the spring flow could be reduced to the point that there would not be sufficient warm water to protect all the manatees wintering at Blue Spring,” added Rose. “By all accounts, this population of manatees is growing, largely due to land use practices and protection measures both enacted and implemented over the past few decades at the urging of the Club and its members. The addition of Wayne to our staff will help us protect these manatees for more generations to come.”
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