PUNTA GORDA, Florida–The program to feed lettuce to starving manatees is scaling down as the weather gets warmer, The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) said on March 23. “Efforts are being made now to sort of scale down some of the operations,” Scott Calleson, an Ecological Services officer in the Florida office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a Zoom call. “We’re continuing to feed out lettuce at the site and we have been making plans for how we’re going to transition down to demobilizing.” “We will probably reach 200,000 pounds of lettuce by the end of March,” he said. As the weather gets warmer, the manatees are beginning to “fan out from warm-water sites,” Calleson said.  Unlike whales, manatees do not have blubber to insulate and protect them against the cold elements; they are mostly muscle. Wild manatees gather in a Brevard County, Florida, waterway …