Welcome to our first in person full body meeting this term! We have lots to discuss including elections, Wold display cases, and earth day event planning.
First the news:
- Florida manatees are being threatened with loss of habitat and sea grass to forage
- In 2021 there were 1100 deaths many from starvation
- there are now 7500 individuals in the wild
- most years there are only about ~500 deaths
- Foraging becomes even harder in winter when manatees need to eat more to stay warm
- Algae blooms are killing the local sea grass and at Indian River Lagoon (bottom left picture) there has been a 58% loss in sea grass since 2011
- sea grass also happens to be an endangered species too
- Recently there has been an effort to cultivate sea grass using divers and cages
- this can be really labor intensive, but has shown to be successful at reintroducing seagrass
- New research tool which can sample animal DNA from the air
- this can be used to track animal movements especially for species hard to access
- other tracking methods include capturing and placing a tag or setting up camera traps
- tests are being preformed in Zoos as the technology is still in development.
- The animals pictured are dingos and the tube at the bottom of the photo is the air sampling device.
Thanks for reading!
