Sources of Danger
Various human activities threaten manatee populations, and activists working to save the species aggressively protest these actions. Fishing nets and lines can cause injuries to manatees that often lead to serious infections. Many manatee deaths are the result of collisions with boats when the mammals are surfacing for air. They are not fast enough to elude the boat propellers, and thus suffer from fatal gashes. Additionally, the recent increase in coastal development has severely affected manatee habitats. The habitats themselves have been destroyed as residential and commercial development has occurred along seagrass beds, mangroves, and salt marshes where manatees live. Pollution in these areas may also have an effect on manatee mortality, as chemicals introduced into their habitats lead to impaired immune systems. The fact that manatees tend to gather in the warm water outflows of power plants furthers the likelihood of the spread of disease. Humans are the only life that endangers manatees.
Read more about this topic: Manatee Conservation Status
Famous quotes containing the words sources of, sources and/or danger:
“Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding—and this means, among other things, a public philosophy of gender equality and concern for child welfare. When instead the larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers, the family gets a little more dangerous for everyone, and so, inevitably, does the larger world.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (20th century)
“The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of receiving it from ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)