The MANTA Protection Act introduced by Florida state legislators Lindsay Cross and Ileana Garcia proposes a commendable step toward ending the aquarium trade for Florida megafauna. However, as written, the House version of the bill leaves a loophole that may allow mantas to continue to be captured for aquaria and does not impact 99% of Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) Special Activity License (SAL) permits to capture sharks and rays for aquarium captivity. To ensure protections to mantas and other threatened marine wildlife, legislators can:

1. Amend the House bill (HB 1171) to match the Senate (SB 988) by prohibiting SALs for both ESA and IUCN-listed species OR
2. Amend both to protect FWC-prohibited and/or CITES-listed species in addition to ESA-listed species

Only three sharks and rays for which FWC has issued exhibition SALs in the past ten years are recognized as threatened or endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). Only one is listed by the state of Florida. Together, these three species represent just 1% of shark and ray capture permits issued since 2015.

Furthermore, all mantas captured under FWC exhibition SALs are of the recently described Atlantic species (Mobula yarae), which is listed under neither federal nor state endangered species lists, and thus unprotected by the proposed legislation. In technical legal and scientific terms, capture contractors can comply with the proposed bill by simply correctly identifying Florida mantas as M. yarae in SAL applications. Even if FWC extends a grace period in which it continues to regard the Oceanic and Atlantic mantas as one species, the likely scenario of a rejected petition to list the Atlantic manta would provide a clear legal argument for contractors to resume capturing wild mantas for aquaria.

Additionally, while the scalloped hammerhead (Sphyrna lewini) is listed under the federal ESA, the Northeast Atlantic & Gulf of Mexico population, from which all animals of this species captured under FWC SALs in Florida waters were taken, is not listed under state nor federal law. Among all shark and ray species that occur in Florida state waters and are permitted to take under the SAL exhibition license, the proposed legislation only protects one animal: the oceanic whitetip shark (Carcharhinus longimanus), a pelagic species which is scarcely sighted three miles from shore, within state waters. Thus, the House bill must be amended to cover redlisted species, as the Senate version does.

Alternatively, to align with state law, the bills could propose restricting SALs for species which are prohibited to take under FWC regulations, including species such as tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier), spotted eagle rays (Aetobatus narinari), and goliath groupers (Epinephelus itajara). This proposal was put forward in the most recent FWC rulemaking workshop on December 18^th.

State legislators can also propose the prohibition of exhibition SALs for species listed under the Convention for International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), which would protect an additional 12 threatened shark species captured in Florida, including hammerheads (Sphyrna spp.) and requiem sharks (Carcharhinus spp.).

These species’ exclusion from the ESA registry does not mean they are not endangered. ESA listings are based on largely subjective assessments and should not be interpreted to accurately portray the extinction risk of species, as opposed to quantitative scientific frameworks such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Redlist. Listing Florida’s Atlantic mantas under the ESA is a protracted and political process which can take years and will likely be denied, as was the reef manta (Mobula alfredi) in 2017, and exactly twenty other internationally recognized threatened shark and ray species since the foundation of the ESA in 1973. In total, 86% of petitions to list marine fish species have been rejected (Roberts et al., forthcoming).

Billion-dollar aquarium corporations should not be exempt from wildlife protections that Floridians follow, on tenuous claims of the conservation and educational value of captivity. These animals are not captive-bred or reintroduced for conservation purposes. We urge Florida House representatives to amend the MANTA Protection Act to prohibit the issuance of exhibition SALs for IUCN-redlisted species, or for both chambers to settle on protecting FWC-prohibited and/or CITES-listed species in addition to the few listed under the ESA.

Fish Defender is a 501(c)3 organization of divers, scientists, and environmentalists dedicated to advocacy for imperiled marine fish species, based in Miami, Florida.