Carl Hiaasen - Kick Ass - Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

The fourth man in the pickup was arrested. Authorities identified him as Gerardo Blanco, a Mariel refugee living on Stock Island in Key West. So far, he has been charged with one misdemeanor violation of the Endangered Species Act, for which he could spend a year in jail and get a $10,000 fine.

At a hearing Blanco told a U.S. magistrate that he knew nothing of the dead doe stuffed behind the seat of the truck, or of the .22-caliber rifle allegedly used to shoot the animal at extremely close range.

Then there was the odd matter of the carrots.

"There were carrots in the vehicle," Deborah Holle says, fresh carrots to entice the deer.

This is how the brave hunter works.

She floated clockwise in the current.

That she could move at all was miraculous, but every few minutes a whiskered nose poked through the surface to take a breath. She drifted in a special tank hidden from the Seaquarium's main attractions; not far away, people clapped for the killer whale show.

Dr. Jesse White, a veterinarian, studied the manatee and said, "What amazes me is that she can still move the back of her tail. There's four, maybe six major lacerations of her back, then one big chunk. The propeller had to be at least 20 inches in circumference—that's from a Cigarette boat on up."

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.

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.

Outside the park, August was the killer month. No. 24, a 126-pound male that roamed Highlands County, died for reasons that will never be known. A faulty mortality switch on its collar prevented biologists from finding the body before it decomposed.

Days later, another young male cat, No. 25, died near Alligator Alley after being badly bitten in a fight with another panther. The wounds resulted in a bacterial infection that raced fatally to the animal's heart.

Before the tests, though, state game officials wondered if it could be more than grim coincidence that so many panthers were dying in such a short time. "A very bad week," said biologist Sonny Bass. Experts speculated about a mystery virus.

So far, there is no evidence of it. Tom Logan believes a combination of things contributed to the death of No. 20 near Immokalee. The animal had a heart murmur, first diagnosed after the truck accident. While in captivity, the cat also broke all its canine teeth, which veterinarians painstakingly recapped before its release.

But the dental caps came off in the wild, making it difficult for the panther to take large prey such as deer and wild hogs. No. 20 had lost 33 pounds in the months before it died.

The deaths have rekindled the debate over the state's radio tracking program, with critics suggesting that the collars inhibit breeding and possibly harm the cats.

Bass, Logan and others disagree. Radio telemetry has enabled rescuers to locate several panthers that had been struck by cars and would have died without help. As for the mating cycles, biologists have tracked one family of collared cats through three prolific generations.