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2012 COURSE DATES: AUGUST 4 – 17, 2012 - Sirenian International

2012 COURSE DATES: AUGUST 4 – 17, 2012 - Sirenian International

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number of manatees spotted. Volunteers are easily distracted by each other during long<br />

scan periods and survey days and do not have the same level of focus as trained observers.<br />

This can easily be minimized in the future by limiting the number of volunteers present<br />

during surveys.<br />

We do not know the relationship of our index to actual abundance. It is an index of<br />

relative abundance that can be used to detect trends. Index validation, by comparing the<br />

number of manatees counted via boat surveys to the number counted during concurrent,<br />

localized aerial surveys, could provide an indication of the relationship between boat counts<br />

and aerial survey counts which could help determine bias and thus the relationship of our<br />

index to actual abundance. Aerial surveys were conducted along the entire Belizean<br />

coastline, including the Drowned Cayes, from 1997 <strong>–</strong> 2002 (Auil, 2004). These surveys<br />

overlapped with our boat surveys in 2000 - 2002, but were only conducted once during the<br />

wet and once during the dry season and did not directly correspond to our survey effort and<br />

unfortunately, are not useful for evaluating bias of our method. It is interesting to note that<br />

the trends of Auil’s (2004) index of relative abundance from 2000-2002 mirrors our trends<br />

across those same years.<br />

There was a very slight negative trend in the data, but this trend was not significant.<br />

Our analysis indicates that we would have only had a 4%, 9% and 22% power to detect<br />

slight, moderate or precipitous declines after 7 years <strong>–</strong> our study duration. Even slight<br />

negative trends can be important for small populations which can be impacted by stochastic<br />

events or behavioral biology that can drive small populations to extinction (Meffe and<br />

Carroll 1997) or prevent these populations from recovering (Meffe and Carroll 1997). The<br />

Antillean subspecies of the West Indian Manatee is currently listed as endangered on the<br />

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