No, You Can’t Start Hunting Manatees — But the Real Story Is Worse

Photography by Jake Kinzer — More of Jake’s work →

I kept seeing the same manatee claim everywhere, and after about the fifth version of it, I finally stopped scrolling. One guy on Reels had red block letters behind him saying Trump had legalized killing, trapping and harassing Florida manatees. Another post listed manatees, monarch butterflies, spotted owls and sage grouse like we had all just agreed to start hunting them. Then there was the version on X with Trump next to a manatee, because apparently that is where every federal rule ends up eventually.

At first I thought I had missed something huge. Not a proposal buried in an agency document or a change to how a rule gets applied. I mean an actual, direct change that made killing manatees legal. So I started opening links, and that is where the whole thing got messier.

Because no, people cannot suddenly go kill manatees. They are still protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act and Florida law. Nobody can legally shoot one, trap one, chase one or turn Florida waterways into open season. Even the government’s pending proposal involving the Florida manatee was written to keep it protected.

So the viral claim is wrong, but it didn’t come out of nowhere.

What actually changed

Once I started reading the actual rules, I realized most of these videos were mixing together two completely different changes. One has to do with threatened species. The other has to do with habitat.

The first one is probably what a lot of those creators were talking about.

For years, when Fish and Wildlife listed an animal as threatened, that label automatically came with basic protections against killing, trapping and harassment unless the agency wrote something different for that species. It was called the blanket rule. The easiest way to think about it is that the protection came first. The agency could adjust the details later, but there was not supposed to be a gap where a newly threatened species had a label and nothing behind it.

That rule is gone again. The first Trump administration removed it in 2019, Biden restored it in 2024, and now it has been removed again. Fish and Wildlife can still write a separate rule protecting a threatened species, and it can do that on the same day the species is listed, so newly threatened animals are not automatically fair game. The difference is that the protection no longer comes built into the word “threatened.”

Now the agency decides what protections to give, how strong to make them and when to put them in place. Online, that has been flattened into “you can kill threatened species now,” which is too broad, but I can see how people got there.

The Florida manatee happens to be sitting right in the middle of it. Fish and Wildlife has proposed splitting the West Indian manatee into two listings, with the Florida manatee staying threatened and the Antillean manatee listed as endangered. When that proposal was written, it relied on the blanket rule to keep the Florida manatee’s protections in place.

Then the blanket rule disappeared.

The proposal was not written as a plan to leave Florida manatees exposed. It was written with the assumption that those protections would carry over automatically. If the split moves forward now, the agency has to decide how to carry them over under the new system, probably through a rule written specifically for the Florida manatee.

That still does not mean manatee hunting suddenly became legal. But now I understood what those posts were trying to say.

The habitat problem

Then I got to the habitat rule, and honestly, that is where I stopped caring quite so much about whether the viral wording was technically wrong.

For decades, the agencies that enforce the Endangered Species Act used a definition of “harm” that included some habitat destruction when it actually killed or injured a protected animal. You did not have to hit the animal yourself. If you destroyed the place it depended on and the animal died because of it, the law could still connect those two things.

That definition has now been removed from the agencies’ rulebook.

The word “harm” is still written into the Endangered Species Act. Congress did not erase it. Fish and Wildlife and NOAA Fisheries are changing how they say it should be read, arguing that destroying habitat by itself should not count as harm unless the action is directed at the animal.

Put a manatee in that sentence and it stops sounding like policy jargon pretty fast.

Manatees eat seagrass. Destroy the seagrass bed they depend on, and under this new interpretation, the habitat loss alone does not establish illegal harm, even if the manatee later starves because of it.

Other protections are still there. Federal projects may still require review. Critical habitat still exists. The Marine Mammal Protection Act and Florida law still protect manatees from direct harm. I am not saying every habitat safeguard disappeared overnight.

But one of the strongest legal ways to connect destroying an animal’s home to killing the animal that depended on it just became much harder to use.

You do not have to trap a manatee to end it. You can take away its food and wait.

The posts overstated it, and the people calling the whole thing fake stopped reading as soon as they found the overstatement. Meanwhile, the rules underneath threatened-species protection changed, and the agencies removed the definition that let habitat destruction count as harm when it killed or injured wildlife..

I usually write about grizzly bears, not manatees, but I know this kind of fight. The animal stays on the list. The label stays on the door. Then the meaning underneath it starts changing one rule at a time.

“They legalized killing manatees” fits neatly into a reel. “They removed automatic protections for future threatened species and changed how habitat destruction is treated under the Endangered Species Act” does not exactly roll off the tongue.

The kitchen-table checklist

The next time one of these videos lands in your feed, start by checking whether direct killing actually became legal. A habitat rule changing does not erase every other protection overnight, and direct killing usually still has its own legal hurdles.

Then look at whether the story is really about the animal or the place it lives. A lot of the biggest conservation fights happening right now have nothing to do with opening a hunting season. They involve food, water, migration routes, nesting grounds and whether destroying those things still counts as harming the animal that depends on them.

It also matters whether the species is already listed or still waiting on a decision. Most existing protections remain in place. Species entering the system now are walking into a different one, where the protections attached to “threatened” depend more heavily on what the agency writes for them.

And finally, look at where the claim came from. A reel with 30,000 likes is not a source, and neither are five more reels repeating it with different faces. Find the rule. Find the agency proposal. Find the organizations suing over it, and read what the agencies say in their own defense. That tells you more than the number of times the same caption was reposted.

I have a feeling this won’t be the last time something like this ends up all over our feeds. More than anything, this just reminded me to slow down a little. Not every viral post tells the whole story, but not every fact check does either. Sometimes you have to keep reading past both before you can figure out what actually changed.

The manatee is not getting hunted this week. But one of the strongest ways federal law connected the death of an animal to the destruction of its habitat has just been stripped out of the agencies’ rulebook. Other protections are still there, and the lawsuits over this are only beginning, but pretending nothing changed because nobody declared open season on manatees misses the real story entirely.

As this was being published, members of Congress also introduced legislation aimed at reversing these changes. Whether it becomes law is another question, but it shows this story is already moving beyond the rule itself.

Sources & Further Reading

If you’d like to read the rules and reporting for yourself, these are the documents and articles I relied on while researching this piece.

The Wilds Project.