Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

The boat ran her down last Thursday in a Stuart waterway. The props shredded the animal's tail to raw pulp and tracked an awful spiral trail across her flesh. The folks who did this certainly knew—the impact would have been comparable to smashing a 900-pound log. Yet they sped away, leaving the young manatee spinning in a cloud of her own blood.

Amazingly, she was able to swim, and for some reason went south. By late Friday she made it under the Kobe Sound Bridge; by Saturday morning, Jupiter Inlet. At dusk Sunday she was spotted offshore at Juno Beach.

By dawn Monday she lay dying in the warm waters of Florida Power & Light's Riviera Beach power station. She had traveled more than 30 miles before the Florida Marine Patrol and rescue workers could get a net on her. By this time she was too weak to struggle.

Back at the Seaquarium, Dr. White cut away strips of dead and rotting flesh. Using a seven-inch needle, he gave the manatee two enormous injections of antibiotics. Afterward the doctor stood by the tank and stared at the wounds. "Damn," he said, under his breath.

The seasonal slaughter has begun. Cold weather has driven the slow-moving sea cows to warm water, where mindless boaters run them down. Last week three manatees in South Florida were killed this way.

You'd have to live under a rock not to know better. Jimmy Buffett sings songs and Gov. Graham goes on TV, and warning signs are posted throughout the inland waterways. The law is tough and the fine for speeding in protected waters is steep, averaging $119.

Still, boatloads of morons don't care. Go out any Sunday and watch them tear through the cooling canal at Port Everglades.

Sgt. Royce Hamilton of the Marine Patrol helped with the Riviera Beach rescue. This time of year he writes a lot of tickets to boaters speeding through manatee zones.

"We've had people tell us that manatees are like dinosaurs, and nobody misses them. We get that all the time. I had an attorney who I arrested last year who said he hadn't seen a manatee in five years. As I was writing the ticket one surfaced right by his boat! That shut him down real fast."

It would be easy to blame the snowbirds for the mayhem against the manatees, but Hamilton said this is not fair. Most of those arrested, he noted, are year-round Florida residents, "the ones who should have the most concern."

At the Seaquarium, Dr. White pointed at the drifting manatee and said, "The third cut is so deep it hit the spinal cord longitudinally … the only wounds I've seen worse than this are on dead animals."

Up close she looks as if she's been chewed by a threshing machine. Odds of survival: "Very slim."

Somehow the manatee made it through Monday night. On Tuesday morning she got another jolt of antibiotics. Dr. White talked more hopefully of saving the animal and including her in the Seaquarium's captive breeding program, saying, "We keep putting babies back in the world to take the place of the ones they keep killing."

Next month the first captive bred-and-born manatees, named Sunrise and Savannah, will be released into the Homosassa River.

The Seaquarium's newest manatee has no name. Dr. White said it was too soon for that. It's a lesson he's learned over the years—if you name them right away, it hurts even more to watch them die.

A loud cry for the state's wild panther Septembers, 1988

Last summer, in a pine hammock north of the Big Cypress Swamp, a rare Florida panther was released to the wild.

The big charcoal cat, known as No. 20, had been hit by a pickup, rescued and nursed back to health. To those of us who watched it dash into the wilderness, the animal looked awesomely fit and unconquerable.

But two weeks ago, the radio collar around No. 20's neck emitted an alarm from a device known as a mortality switch. The signal meant that the panther had not moved its head in several hours. No. 20 lay dead in the scrub.

Experts were deeply worried. Within days, three wild panthers would die from a population of only a few dozen. Another captive animal would die of liver disease. Tom Logan of the Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission: "When you're dealing with low numbers to start with, any loss makes you pucker up a bit."

The deadly streak began in mid-June, when the only breeding female in Everglades National Park was found lifeless. Panther No. 15 had recently given birth, but the kittens were missing. It is believed they were killed by a predator, possibly a male panther.

A necropsy noted wounds on the female's forearms, but the cause of death remains unknown.

Another collared panther was struck by a car near Homestead and suffered a severely broken leg. A juvenile found starving on an island near Shark River was flown to Gainesville for emergency treatment. Both cats are recovering, but it is not certain when, or if, they can be safely freed again.