Dolphin deaths still high after Gulf oil spill, environmentalists say

Dolphin deaths and sea turtle strandings in the waters affected by the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill continue to occur at elevated rates nearly three years after the disaster, environmentalists said in a new report Tuesday.

The National Wildlife Federation report asserted that while the response by BP and other officials to date has been focused on cleaning up visible oil, little has been done to repair the damage caused to marine life and their food chain.

“Despite the public relations blitz by BP, this spill is not over,” David Muth, director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Mississippi River Delta Restoration Program, said in a statement.

... BP said in a statement that it has done plenty to clean up the Gulf over the last three years and protect wildlife.

“No company has done more, faster to respond to an industrial accident than BP did in response to the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010,” BP said. “As a result of our $14 billion clean-up effort, BP funded early restoration projects as well as natural recovery processes, the Gulf is returning to its baseline condition – the condition it would be in if the accident had not occurred.”  Read More

Ten New Studies Show Impact on Coast

Dolphins: Signs of Serious Illness

Photograph courtesy Reuters

In the depths of the ocean and on shore, science is only beginning to measure the long-term impact of the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

On the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, a slew of new studies paint a complex picture of how the Gulf of Mexico's ecosystems absorbed the insult of 4.9 million barrels of crude oil.

The catastrophic failure of BP's Macondo well off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, 2010, triggered a blast and fire that took the lives of 11 rig workers and sent oil spewing from the deep sea bed for 87 days. Unprecedented steps were taken to minimize the amount of oil that reached shore, including the application of some 800,000 gallons (3,028,000 liters) of dispersants directly at the wellhead nearly a mile (1,500 meters) below the surface. Still, the oil left its mark, scientists now say, on marine mammals, salt marshes, corals, tiny organisms and coastal communities. The new studies track both lingering harm and recovery.

Bottlenose dolphins in oil-contaminated Barataria Bay off the coast of Louisiana are showing signs of serious illness, including extremely low weight, anemia, low blood sugar, and some symptoms of liver and lung disease, according to a health assessment conducted by U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists and their partners.

The scientists, who performed comprehensive physicals last summer on 32 dolphins from the bay, also found that half of the tested dolphins showed abnormally low levels of hormones that regulate stress response, metabolism, and immune function, indicating adrenal insufficiency. One of the dolphins in the survey was found dead on Grand Isle in January.

Lori Schwacke of NOAA, the project's lead investigator, said the findings were preliminary and could not be conclusively linked to the oil spill. But she added that control groups of dolphins living along the Atlantic coast and in other areas that were not affected by the 2010 spill did not manifest those symptoms.

"The findings that we have are consistent with other studies that have looked at the effects of oil exposure in other mammals," she said.

The study is a part of an ongoing examination of the U.S. government-led Natural Resource Damage Assessment process and the Gulf of Mexico Dolphin Unusual Mortality Event. Since February 2010, more than 675 dolphins have stranded in the northern Gulf of Mexico—a much higher rate than the usual average of 74 dolphins per year.

BP's Houston office did not respond to requests for comment on this research or the other scientific studies related to the Gulf Oil Spill.



—Barbara Mulligan

This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

Gulf dolphins suffer post-oil spill illnesses

A veterinary technician handles a dead bottlenose dolphin, one of many collected along the Gulf of Mexico. Patrick Semansky/AP

In Barataria Bay, La. (located in the northern Gulf of Mexico), bottlenose dolphins are suffering from severe illnesses - the aftermath of the BP oil spill, according to a report by Click Green.

Last summer, marine biologists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration conducted physicals on 32 dolphins from that area. Results show many of them are underweight, anemic, have low blood sugar, and exhibit symptoms of liver and lung disease. Nearly half also have exceptionally low levels of the hormones that typically help with stress-coping, metabolism, and the immune system.

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Dead dolphins in the Gulf raise questions

Dolphin cold case: Investigators say cause of calve die-off may never be known

By Brian Vastag


Scientists have found four more dead baby dolphins on Horn Island in the Mississippi Gulf of Mexico and another on Ono Island off Orange Beach, Ala., adding to the unusually high number of dead dolphins found in the past two months.

Was it the oil?

That's the question of the day as the number of stillborn or dead young dolphin calves washing up on Gulf of Mexico shores continues to rise.

The research team called in to investigate the incident has a disconcerting answer: We might never know.

On Friday, five more dead baby bottlenose dolphins were found in Mississippi and Alabama, pushing to 67 the number of dolphin carcasses tallied since Jan. 1 on beaches from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle. Of those, 35 are so young that they might be spontaneously aborted fetuses, making this "unusual mortality event" even more unusual, though not unprecedented.

But determining the cause of this, or any other, wave of dolphin deaths is a huge challenge.

There are no witnesses to interview.

The whereabouts of the dolphins before they died is unknown.

Any unusual behavior preceding death went unobserved.

And, worst of all for the federally coordinated team investigating the incident, all the carcasses are badly decomposed.

"A lot of the organs are mush, basically," said Blair Muse, who collects reports of beached dolphins in the southeastern United States for the National Marine Fisheries Service. "They are coming ashore decomposed. It may prohibit us from determining the cause unless we get some fresh bodies."

That's bad news for the teams scouring beaches to collect whatever blood and tissue samples they can, the laboratories rushing to analyze those samples and the scientist who will eventually try to piece together the spotty evidence.

Those limitations also explain why the record of determining the cause of mass marine mammal deaths has not been good.

Baby dolphin deaths rise along Gulf Coast

http://www.reuters.com

By Leigh Coleman

BILOXI, Mississippi |

BILOXI, Mississippi (Reuters) - Marine scientists are examining the deaths of 26 baby dolphins whose carcasses have washed ashore along the U.S. Gulf Coast this year, the bulk of them since last week, researchers said on Tuesday.

The alarmingly high number of dead young dolphins are being looked at as possible casualties of oil that fouled the Gulf of Mexico after a BP drilling platform exploded in April 2010, killing 11 workers and rupturing a wellhead on the sea floor.

An estimated 5 million barrels (205.8 million gallons) of oil spilled into the Gulf over more than three months.

The bodies of 26 infant and stillborn dolphins have been discovered since January 20, on islands, in marshes and on beaches along 200 miles of coastline from Louisiana east across Mississippi to Gulf Shores, Alabama, officials said.

"When the world sees something like baby dolphins washing up on shore, it pulls at the heartstrings, and we all want to know why," said Blair Mase, marine mammal strandings coordinator for the Southeast region of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That tally is more than 10 times the number normally found washed up along those states during this time of the year, which is calving season for some 2,000 to 5,000 dolphins in the region, said Moby Solangi, director of the Institute of Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport.

"It's an anomaly," he told Reuters by telephone, explaining that the gestation period for dolphins runs 11 or 12 months, meaning that calves born now would have been conceived at least two months before the oil spill began.

Steve Tellis, a local environmental activist and member of the Nature Conservancy in Mississippi, called the discoveries "horrific."

Most of the carcasses, measuring just over 3 feet in length, were found during the past week, the bulk of them washing up in Mississippi and Alabama.

The remains of about 10 adult dolphins, none of them pregnant females, have also been found so far this year.

BP cleanup crews found some of the carcasses. Others were discovered by park rangers, police and passersby.

"What makes this so odd is that the dolphins were spread out over such a large area," Solangi said.

Dolphins encountering oil on the surface of the water would face serious health consequences, Solangi said.

"We take short breaths. These animals take a huge breath at one time and hold it. And when they take it, the fumes stay in the lungs for a long period of time and they cause two types of damage, one of which is immediate to the tissue itself. Second, the hydrocarbons enter the bloodstream," he said.

None of the carcasses bore any obvious outward signs of oil contamination. But Solangi said necropsies, the equivalent of human autopsies, were being performed and tissue samples taken to determine if toxic chemicals from the oil spill may have been a factor in the deaths.

Documented mortality in the adult dolphin population off the Gulf Coast roughly tripled from normal numbers last year, climbing from about 30 typically reported in a given year to 89 in 2010, Solangi said.

(Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Peter Bohan and Greg McCune)