Manatees can’t survive long in water much below 68°F, so when Florida’s coastal water cools each winter, animals that spend summer scattered across the state’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts converge on a handful of reliable warm-water refuges, natural springs and the heated outflows of power plants, and that seasonal squeeze is exactly what the record shows: sightings bunch hard from December through March and drop by more than 70 percent through the warmer months.
NatureServe ranks the species S2, imperiled, in Florida, and the IUCN lists it Vulnerable globally, a genuine conservation concern behind the more than 8,000 records logged here. Winter cold-stress events remain one of the leading causes of manatee deaths in the state, which makes that same December-through-March cluster a signal worth taking seriously rather than just a quirk of when people go looking.
