tagged w/ Marine Biology
-
Los Angeles Times...
.
Marine biologist indicted for allegedly feeding killer whales
January 5, 2012 | 2:24 pm
PHOTO:
Monterey orcas
.
A California marine biologist and whale-watching tour operator has been indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly feeding killer whales in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, in violation of federal wildlife provisions.
Nancy Black, owner and operator of Monterey Bay Whale Watch, was indicted in San Jose federal court Wednesday and charged with violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which bars harming, harassing, feeding and otherwise interfering with marine mammals, including dolphins, sea lions and whales.
The four-count indictment accuses Black of twice feeding killer whales in the marine sanctuary -- once in 2004 and again in 2005.
The indictment also alleges she altered a video showing possible illegal contact with an endangered humpback whale during a whale-watching trip in October 2005, then lied to investigators about doing so.
Black’s tours and research aboard her company’s whale-watching vessels -- the 70-foot Sea Wolf II and the 55-foot Pt. Sur Clipper -- have been featured extensively in local media and appeared on the "Today" show and the "CBS Evening News."
Black’s attorney, Lawrence Biegel, said she was gathering scientific data and broke no laws when she filmed the behavior of killer whales feeding off free-floating pieces of blubber from a gray whale calf.
Black and several assistants, he said, cut a hole in the blubber and used a rope to secure it close to her 22-foot inflatable research dinghy so she could film killer whales with an underwater camera as they approached to eat it.
Calling the indictment “wholly unjustified” and based on a misunderstanding of her techniques and methods, Biegel said she acted within the boundaries of a whale-research permit issued by the federal government and presented the footage to other researchers at a conference in Norway.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the sanctuary spanning 276 miles of California’s Central Coast, first revealed the investigation in 2006 and has had ongoing negotiations with the marine biologist over the charges, Biegel said.
The Monterey Bay Whale Watch website calls Black an expert in the biology of killer whales off the California coast who has a master’s degree in marine science and works to catalog, identify and document their behavior in Monterey Bay.
The website boasts of trips led by experienced marine biologists who “collect valuable data on the marine mammals sighted” and “the most skilled captains who know where to find whales and how to approach them.”
.Los Angeles Times...
.
Marine biologist indicted for allegedly feeding killer... more
-
-
Renown Salmon biologist Alexandra Morton- flanked by former BC Environment Minister Rafe Mair, Greenpeace co-founder Rex Weyler, and First Nations leaders- drew attention outside the Department of Fisheries and Ocean's Vancouver office last week to the federal agency's failure to protect wild salmon stocks from the impacts of open net pen salmon farms on BC's coast. Morton highlighted a memo unearthed by the Cohen Judicial Inquiry into collapsing sockeye stocks that reveals DFO's public relations work on behalf of the Norwegian salmon farming industry to counter negative public opinion on the farms.
Morton is currently spearheading a campaign to make salmon a federal election issue.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pu7NAjAgdI&feature=player_embedded
www.votesalmon.caRenown Salmon biologist Alexandra Morton- flanked by former BC Environment Minister... more
-
-
-
-
-
Farmed Salmon Exposed: The Global Reach of the Norwegian Salmon Farming Industry
by Vancouver Documentary Film maker Damien Gillis (Part 1 of 4 part Series)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZBbYzyuwF0Farmed Salmon Exposed: The Global Reach of the Norwegian Salmon Farming Industry
by... more
-
-
Official: No foul play in massive fish kill in California harbor
By Michael Martinez, CNN
March 8, 2011 4:29 p.m. EST
Los Angeles (CNN) -- A southern California fish kill that authorities identified as more than a million sardines is not the result of any environmental foul play but rather is the product of natural forces, officials said Tuesday.
Floating fish were so pervasive in King Harbor Marina in Redondo Beach, California, that some moored boats seemed surrounded not by water but by the lifeless aquatic animals a foot deep.
"All evidence points to oxygen deprivation as cause of death," California Department of Fish and Game spokesman Andrew Hughan told CNN.
"There is no oil sheen, nor is there a chemical sheen," Hughan said.
Redondo Beach Police Sgt. Phil Keenan said authorities are confident of test results showing that oxygen deprivation caused the massive fish kill because the other part of the sardine school is alive and well in the mouth of the harbor.
Keenan said the floating fish are a foot deep, and clean-up boats will spend the next few days removing the silvery animals by net.
"Part of the sardine school is out in the channel of the harbor and they're doing fine," Keenan told CNN. "For some reason, this large school of sardines got chased into the harbor -- and they died off."
Authorities said that the sardines likely sought calm waters inside the 1,400-vessel marina Monday evening when winds were gusting up to 45 mph and the waters were rough.
"They like to follow each other and it only takes one to come in before the others follow," Brent Scheiwe, program director of the SEA Lab, a hands-on coastal science education center in Redondo Beach, told reporters at a press conference Tuesday.
"The fish found these back areas of the harbor, and then the oxygen depletion would have occurred... If it's rough out there, they will stay here in the waters where it's more sheltered," Scheiwe said.
"There is a risk of the same thing happening tonight," he added.
The harbor's algae may have contributed to the lack of oxygen, and then when the fish started dying, the resulting bacteria also consumed oxygen, Scheiwe said.
Once the fish got into the harbor, "they couldn't get out," said Redondo Beach Fire Chief Dan Madrigal.
About the extraordinary number of dead fish, Hughan stated that "while it is unusual, it is not unprecedented. This is natural selection."
Hughan said a necropsy, including a chemical analysis, will be performed on some of the dead fish.
In what officials described as $100,000 clean-up effort, crews had been moving the dead fish into the open ocean to let them decompose naturally, but they decided on a more efficient method of removing the fish from the marina and having them sent to be recycled for fertilizer, Madrigal told reporters.
Photo: Millions of dead anchovies float to surface in Redondo Beach
Older Article Today...
March 8th, 2011
01:35 PM ET
Officials say millions of the pungent, oily fish are covering the sea bottom in the harbor. They began rising to the surface Tuesday morning, the Daily Breeze in Torrance, outside Los Angeles, reported.
“We need to get rid of them,” Sgt. Phil Keenan of the Redondo Beach Police Department told the paper. “This is going to create a terrible pollution and public health issue if we don't.”
Fire, police and public works officials have yet to cite a definite cause, but Keenan said the fish appear to have died from lack of oxygen.
There were no red tides (oxygen-depleting algae blooms) or other obvious phenomena that could have caused the mass deaths, the paper reported.
“Yesterday, everything looked absolutely normal,” Walter Waite, who lives at the harbor, told the newspaper. “This morning when I got up, there were millions and millions of them floating everywhere.”
The temperature in Southern California is expected to climb into the 70s Tuesday, exacerbating the urgency of removing the scads of 6-inch fish scattered throughout the harbor.
http://media.trb.com/media/photo/2011-03/59953114.jpg
SCROLL DOWN FOR LATEST UPDATESOfficial: No foul play in massive fish kill in California harbor
By Michael Martinez,... more
-
-
-
The latest development in the Gulf is how an incomprehensible bacterium is remarkably eating up the methane gas. It appears that engineered designer genes have also been used to remove the gas just as they have been used to consume the oil. The common denominator is that neither of these microbes are natural microorganisms. This should come as no surprise.
Microbiologist David Valentine at the University of California at Santa Barbara stated,
“Within a matter of months, the bacteria completely removed that methane. The bacteria kicked on more effectively than we expected.”
It sounds to me that this created synthetic genome microbe far exceeded the engineering and programming expectations.
According to a Fox Business report,
“This discovery offered a rare glimpse into the remarkable abilities of an obscure family of microbes in the depths of the Gulf”.
I agree. It is scientifically incomprehensible that any natural microorganism could do this and synthetically engineered microbes are definitely obscure by comparison.
University of Georgia microbiologist Samantha Joye, who has been independently analyzing methane from the Gulf of Mexico, also agrees with me. She said,
“It would take a superhuman microbe to do what they are claiming.”
So it has, Samantha. It was specifically engineered and its “superhuman” genetics were created synthetically.
In a January 7, 2011 article, the UK Register wrote how the scientists were particularly
“surprised at the speed with which the bacteria consumed their enormous meal”.
They also brought up the fact that earlier studies elsewhere in the world suggested methane levels around Deepwater Horizon would be well above normal for years ahead. It’s remarkable what highly engineered designer genes can do.
On January 6, 2011, the Christian Science Monitor reported how the study’s leaders boldly stated that rates of methane decomposition after the Gulf oil spill
“were faster than had ever been recorded in any other place on the planet.”
That’s because these are not natural microbes. You can’t compare apples to grapefruit.
TRACE ELEMENTS ADDED TO THE GULF
In the same CS Monitor report, University of Georgia microbiologist Samantha Joye stated how
“[The Gulf] is not well stocked with trace elements the bacteria need to survive – among them, copper, which bacteria specifically use to deal with the methane. Shortages of copper, as well as other trace elements, likely would have slammed the brakes on the exponential growth in bacterial populations needed to get rid of the methane in fewer than four months.”
The same applies to hydrocarbon-eating bacteria that consume oil, except that iron is needed more than the other trace elements. Since copper and iron are not prevalent mineral elements normally found in the Gulf of Mexico, the synthetic bacterium eating both the oil and the methane would not be able to do so at the remarkable speed they have without such essential earth elements. The only possible way these synthetic bacterium could have done this is by adding the required elements to the Gulf. Spraying a highly dissolved or colloidal mixture of trace elements onto and into the Gulf of Mexico would be absolutely required to accomplish this.
In our October 21, 2010 research article The Gulf BLUE PLAGUE (BP): It’s Not Wise To Fool Mother Nature, we had revealed the abnormally high amounts of elements found in the Gulf and that it was being sprayed along with or separately from the oil dispersants. In August 2010, rain water samples were tested by the Coastal Heritage Society of Louisiana where rain coming directly from the Gulf had unusually high concentrations of iron, copper, nickel, aluminum, manganese, and arsenic.
Without a doubt, the synthetically created bacterium introduced into the Gulf of Mexico to consume the oil and gasses were – and continue to be – fed these essential trace elements. Otherwise, they could not have thrived or reproduced at the accelerated rate they have. The continued spraying in the Gulf by aircraft and by boat is not Corexit or other oil dispersal chemicals. Consider the current spraying to have the same effect of adding liquid fertilizer to your crops.
SYNTHETIC MICROBES MUTATING NATURAL MICROORGANISMS
In early December, 2010 the research vessel WeatherBird II, owned by the University of Southern Florida (USF), went back to the Gulf of Mexico for follow-up water and core samples. As reported by Naomi Klein on January 13, 2011 in Hunting the Ocean for BP’s Missing Millions of Barrels of Oil,
“…these veteran scientists have seen things that they describe as unprecedented …evidence of bizarre sickness in the phytoplankton and bacterial communities…”
This “bizarre sickness” in the indigenous Gulf microorganisms is the direct result of the synthetic microbes that are still creating genetic sicknesses by mutating the DNA of the natural microbes. We had alerted our readers to this in DNA Mutations Confirmed in Gulf of Mexico on September 28, 2010 when we stated,
“DNA mutations are occurring within the Gulf of Mexico at a microscopic cellular level. The obvious effect this has on marine life as well as humans is a Pandora Box of unknowns.”
Tampa Bay Online gave further insight to this in an interview with Dr. John Paul, an oceanography biology professor at USF, regarding the oil plume they had discovered 40 miles off the Florida Panhandle:
It was found to be toxic to microscopic sea organisms, causing mutations to their DNA. If this plankton at the base of the marine food chain is contaminated, it could affect the whole ecosystem of the Gulf.
“The problem with mutant DNA is that it can be passed on and we don’t how this will affect fish or other marine life,” he says, adding that the effects could last for decades.
In Naomi Klein’s article, she describes how Paul introduced healthy bacteria and phytoplankton to Gulf water samples and what happened shocked him. The responses of the organisms “were genotoxic or mutagenic”. According to Paul, what was so “scary” about these results is that such genetic damage was “heritable,” meaning the mutations can be passed on.
Genotoxins pass on genetic changes to successors who have never been exposed to the original gene. Healthy microorganisms are then genetically changed and will pass on their DNA mutations to their descendants. This is a genetic chain-reaction as each mutated microbe interacts with and affects other microorganisms, especially with regards to the food chain:
“…the phytoplankton, the bacteria, and the [microorganisms] that graze on them – the zooplankton – seem to be the most potentially impacted.” – Dr. David Hollander, USF Marine Geochemist: December 6, 2010: Video interview on WeatherBird II.The latest development in the Gulf is how an incomprehensible bacterium is remarkably... more
-
-
BP has confirmed well-preserved deposits of crude from the BP oil spill are under the sand in about 3 feet to 5 feet of water in a cove at Fort McRee, one of the area's most popular recreational boating areas.
Lab results from a marine biologist working for Gulf Breeze reveals the oil is as toxic as the fresh oil that washed up on Pensacola Beach in June, even though the Florida Department of Environmental Protection disputes its toxicity.
BP is conducting its own test — not for toxicity, but to measure how much oil is submerged at Fort McRee and how to clean it up, said Ray Melick, a BP spokesman in Mobile.
"They are working up the best plan," Melick said of officials at the Florida Branch of BP's Gulf Coast Restoration at Bayou Chico. "How much (oil) there is will determine how big the response will be."
Cleanup methods are being tested in the water off Barrancas Beach, where, since August, cleanup crews have been removing large deposits of oil siphoned in from the Gulf of Mexico on strong currents and submerged in the sand in Pensacola Bay most likely in June and July.
About 17,000 pounds a month continue to be removed from the Barrancas area, said Sandy Jennings, Escambia County community and environment bureau chief.
Once those crews — which include scuba divers — complete cleanup at Barrancas Beach, the plan is to bring the same team to Fort Pickens and Fort McRee, said Terry Morris, oil spill spokesman for Gulf Islands National Seashore. Both sites are part of the seashore.
Morris was told during a briefing at the Florida Branch that cleanup could begin in about 60 days, although BP did not confirm a timeline.
Meanwhile, Morris urges the public to use caution in the area.
"We have the same oil impact notice that's still in effect in parts of Escambia County," he said. "It states that people should avoid contact with oil. We never wanted to close the beach, but the public needs to be aware and take precautions."
Angler Mark Fuqua was shocked to find out on Tuesday that there still was that much oil out in the bay, especially near one of his favorite fishing holes.
"Oh, no. I'm cleaning flounders right now that I just caught within eyesight of there," said Fuqua, who in August reported finding oil on his anchor near Palafox Pier.
He was under the assumption all the oil had been found and was being cleaned up.
"That really bothers me. (BP) knows about it and hasn't done anything about it yet," he said.
Fuqua goes to great lengths to protect himself and his family from pollutants, including installing a high-power water filter in his house, and believes BP should be posting stern warnings about the oil.
"That oil at Fort McRee is like having a chemical dump site and not telling anyone, and letting everyone play and fish there," he said.
BP and the Department of Environmental Pollution said they learned about the oil at Fort McRee about four weeks ago, after Heather Reed, marine biologist and oil spill environmental consultant for Gulf Breeze, Shane Carmichael, the Gulf Breeze community service director and other scientists reported finding "an abundance" of oil during a search.
"I had gotten a call from a lady who was relaxing at Fort McRee in the water," Reed said. "Her hands burrowed down in the sand, and when she brought it up, it had oil on it. She said it was real sticky."
The consistency of the oil alarmed Reed, because most of the BP oil being discovered buried in sand is weathered to a harder consistency.
The scientists who found the deposits sent samples to several labs to be tested.
"It was off the chart," Reed said. "It had to be diluted 20 times to get a reading. The crude has very high danger levels of petroleum organics and is not safe for the public to be exposed to. I would be concerned for boaters, swimmers and fishermen who come in contact with it."
When she smelled it, Reed said she immediately got a headache, the same reaction many people experienced when the air was filled with the "burnt tar" smell when oil began washing up in June.
Gulf Breeze also collected samples to compare to any future oil that may wash up on its shores, Carmichael said. "We had heard a lot of rumors there was oil out there and people who said it was not," Carmichael said. "We wanted to go out and make sure it was there so we can be on guard to watch for potential impact on the city."
Florida DEP officials dispute the claim that the oil is toxic.
In an e-mail, Amy Graham, Florida DEP interim press secretary, said when the agency was notified of the oil four weeks ago, scientists assessed the site and sent samples to the DEP Central Laboratory in Tallahassee for analysis.
"The sampling results indicated that the oil had been weathered and contained no volatile organic compounds," Graham stated. "According to the sampling results, unless coming into contact with the oil itself, there is a minimal human health risk."
But Graham went on to say that swimmers who come into contact with the oil mats "should immediately wash off the oil and avoid recreating in the area where they came into contact with the oil."
Reed said she is not surprised that DEP's findings differed from hers.
"I suspected this would happen," she said. "The Fort McRee oil found was collected according to the same protocol, split and sent to different labs and agencies, and each agency's lab came up with different results. This is because, what I believe, there is no standardization in testing methods and ranges due to the criteria each agency requires. Agencies and researchers need to be on the same wavelength in the initial testing, otherwise most results are useless when determining the effects of oil on certain cases."
Reed mentioned the testing disparity and other concerns to the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force set up by President Barack Obama. The task force met in Pensacola on Tuesday. Reed was optimistic about the meeting and the panel's potential ability to restore the Gulf.
Dick Snyder, director of the University of West Florida Center for Environmental Diagnostics and Bioremediation, which has grants to study the effects of the oil spill on the ecosystem and marine life, has not tested the oil at Fort McRee.
"What Heather has found in the inlet is a huge find," he said. "Anytime you let people know where there's oil located, that's a good thing, so people can clean it up and remove as much as possible, and the people who go out and recreate there can know it's there."
Snyder does not believe the oil at Fort McRee poses a public health risk, although he said people should use common sense and avoid it.
"If you find oil or a tar ball and analyze it, you're going to get high numbers," he said. "But that's not going to show you exposure (risks)."
Snyder's scientists have been focusing their studies on the search for dissolved oil — microscopic concentrations that the public could be exposed to even if they can't see it.
"We've not seen any significant concentration of oil dissolved in the water since late June or early July," Snyder said about tests in the surf off Pensacola Beach. "And we know there's oil out there (under the sand) in mats and tar balls."
Snyder said it all boils down to what level of toxic exposure individuals are willing to accept. Educating the public about the risk is important, which makes Reed's find valuable, he said.
Snyder said several groups are sampling the water: the DEP, the Environmental Protection Agency, universities and health departments.
"(The oil spill) is such a big mess," he said. "The more people we have looking, the better."BP has confirmed well-preserved deposits of crude from the BP oil spill are under the... more
-
-
cbsrf
-
added this
-
1 year ago
- |
-
17,000 years ago and 7000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, terrible things happened to the world our ancestors lived in. Great ice caps over northern Europe and north America melted down, huge floods ripped across the earth, sea-level rose by more than 100 metres, and about 25 million square kilometres of formerly habitable lands were swallowed up by the waves.
Marine archaeology has been possible as a scholarly discipline for about 50 years - since the introduction of scuba. In that time, according to Nick Flemming, the doyen of British marine archaeology, only 500 submerged sites have been found worldwide containing the remains of any form of man-made structure or of lithic artefacts. Of these sites only 100 - that's 100 in the whole world! - are more than 3000 years old. This is not because of a shortage of potential sites.
It is at least partly because a large share of the limited funds available for marine archaeology goes into the discovery and excavation of shipwrecks. This leaves a shortage of diving archaeologists interested in underwater structures and a shortage of money to pay for the extremely expensive business of searching - possibly fruitlessly - for very ancient, eroded, silt-covered ruins at great depths under water. Moreover, with the recent exception of Bob Ballard's survey of the Black Sea for the National Geographic Society, marine archaeology has simply not concerned itself with the possibility that the post-glacial floods might in any way be connected to the problem of the rise of civilisations.17,000 years ago and 7000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, terrible things... more
-
-
Evidence Mounts of BP Spraying Toxic Dispersants
http://www.truth-out.org/
Shirley Tillman is incredulous. “Why would anyone bring their children here and put them in water that has had millions of gallons of toxic chemicals dumped into it, not counting the oil itself?” she asks. “Why would you want to eat seafood that has been living and dying in the water, with all those contaminates?”
Truthout has earlier reported on other fisherman in the area, James “Catfish” Miller and Mark Stewart, who have reported being eyewitnesses to the contractors in the Carolina Skiffs spraying dispersant as well.
Meanwhile, local, state and federal authorities continue to claim that dispersant was only used south of Mississippi’s barrier islands and that the Carolina Skiffs and the large tanks they carry are only used to “skim” oil.
“If dispersants were only being sprayed South of the islands, why would these 330 gallon hazardous goods tanks be located at two different work sites, right by the tank skiffs?” Shirley asks. “Why would the skiffs tanks be so clean if they were really skimming oil?”
The Tillmans and thousands of other fishermen and residents along the Gulf of Mexico are deeply concerned about local, state and federal government complicity in what they see as a massive cover-up of the oil disaster by using toxic dispersants to sink any and all oil that is located.
Dr. Riki Ott, a toxicologist and marine biologist, is a survivor of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska. She recently submitted an open letter to the US Environmental Protection Agency expressing many of these same concerns.
Ongoing government denials of this problem neither fool nor dissuade Shirley. “I know what I have seen,” she told Truthout. “I know what I have been told. I know what I have experienced. I know what I have documented. I also know that I have taken hundreds of pictures to verify what I am saying.” http://figrd.blogspot.comEvidence Mounts of BP Spraying Toxic Dispersants
http://www.truth-out.org/... more
-
-
Portraying interesting facts about seahorses, deep sea fishes, marine plants, micro-organisms, marine products is the major objective of the site. Deep sea explorations and research has been categorically sorted out for reference. A collection of deep sea pictures and wallpapers will truly render you to the facts about sea-life if you are unknown about the mesmerizing beauty under the sea.Portraying interesting facts about seahorses, deep sea fishes, marine plants,... more
-
-
-
Hundreds of penguins wash up on Brazilian coast
Also, numerous other sea birds, five dolphins and three giant sea turtles
By Mariano Castillo, CNN
July 22, 2010 11:19 a.m. EDT
__
(CNN) -- Biologists suspect that unusually cold waters off the coast of Brazil were responsible for the deaths of more than 550 penguins that washed up on shore in the past 10 days.
Since July 11, about 556 dead penguins have appeared on beaches, Thiago do Nascimento, a biologist at the Peruibe Aquarium, told CNN.
At the beach of Praia Grande alone, on the Sao Paulo coast, more than 170 penguins have washed up on shore since Friday, according to the local government.
It is not unusual for penguins to show up on the Brazilian coast during their migration, but most of the time, they are alive, said another biologist, Isabelle Nunes.
Necropsies performed on many of the penguins show that they had no food in their stomachs and probably starved to death, Nascimento said, adding that cold weather probably contributed to their deaths.
Nunes said it is possible that the cold waters, brought on by a regional cold front, made the fish that the penguins eat seek other waters.
More tests are being conducted, Nunes said.
Farther north, on the famous beaches of Rio de Janeiro, penguin appearances and rescues have become common in recent years.
It's normal for Magellan penguins to leave their colonies in the Antarctic in an annual migration in search of fish, following the plankton-rich, frigid water currents traveling north along the coast of South America. What has changed is that they are increasingly unable to return home because they get sick, weak or disoriented for reasons that have yet to be determined.
Climate change, overfishing and pollution of the water all could contribute to the penguins becoming lost.
The Niteroi Zoo, near Rio de Janeiro, first began receiving penguins for rescue in 1999. Since then, they have received an increasing number of the birds, peaking with 1,000 penguins in 2008.
CNN's Rafael Romo contributed to this report.
http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/WORLD/americas/07/21/brazil.dead.penguins/story.penguin.cnn.jpgHundreds of penguins wash up on Brazilian coast
Also, numerous other sea birds,... more
-
-
"Government agencies don't have the data they need to accurately count populations of the six species of endangered and threatened sea turtles in the United States, says a report issued today by the National Research Council. And that will throw a wrench into ongoing efforts to figure out how badly the turtle populations that live and nest in the Gulf of Mexico have been hit by the oil spill, says report chair Karen Bjorndal, a marine biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who studies loggerhead and green turtles. The data gaps also hamper the government's ability to set sensible, "acceptable take" limits, the numbers of turtles deemed permissible for fishermen to accidentally catch, she says.
A first, rough estimate of the oil spill's impact will emerge when government scientists count nests next year, says a report author, Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. But if the government sticks to that method alone, they won't know the fate of this year's endangered Kemp's ridley hatchlings, which seek out floating seaweed patches in the gulf after leaving their nests in Mexico, until those hatchlings mature, up to 15 years later. "Something like a Kemp's ridley has to live for a dozen years before it becomes a statistic," he says.
"If [government agencies] had the kind of data that we tell them they should obtain, we'd be in a much better position to judge the impacts on the sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico and the repercussions down the line," says Bjorndal."
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/07/headcount-of-sea-turtles-proves-.html"Government agencies don't have the data they need to accurately count... more
-
-
Baby animals in oil spill face uncertain future
Photo: A baby laughing gull impacted by oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is seen at the Fort Jackson Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Buras, La., T AP –
By JANET McCONNAUGHEY, Associated Press Writer Janet Mcconnaughey, Associated Press Writer – Mon Jul 12, 4:25 pm ET
Baby
FORT JACKSON, La. – The smallest victims are the biggest challenge for crews rescuing birds fouled with oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill.
There's no way to know how many chicks have been killed by the oil, or starved because their parents were rescued or died struggling in a slick.
"There are plenty of oiled babies out there," said Rebecca Dmytryk of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, one of the groups working to clean oiled animals.
The lucky ones end up in a cleaning center at Fort Jackson, a pre-Civil War historic site on the Mississippi River delta south of New Orleans.
Pelican chicks often come in cold because oil has matted down the fluffy down that's meant to keep them warm. They must be warmed quickly just to survive long enough to be cleaned. And the youngest must be taught to eat.
"They only know their parents regurgitating food into their mouths. They don't know how to pick stuff up," said Dmytryk, whose organization is working with Tri-State Bird Rescue, a company hired by BP to coordinate animal rescue and cleaning in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
That means tube feeding three times a day. Others, a bit older and accustomed to taking fish from a parent's throat, must be hand-fed until they can eat fish from a bowl.
Adults can be checked a few times a day, but babies needed two staffers' full-time attention to be sure they are eating and are warm.
Many adults and juvenile pelicans get coated with heavy oil diving for fish. That doesn't happen with the chicks, though they may wade into oily puddles or get smeared by oil from their parents' feathers.
In general, rescuers don't go into nesting colonies, said Mike Carloss, a Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries biologist. He said most rescued chicks were near shorelines or were on nests so low that oil washed onto them.
Lightly oiled chicks will lose the oil when they shed their down feathers, he said. "We've seen a lot of those birds in those stages make it. A lot of them are fledging now. It gives you hope that is the right thing to do."
Nearly 60 pelican chicks and more than 600 adults were brought to Fort Jackson in June after oil washed onto a rookery on Queen Bess and other nearby islands in coastal Louisiana.
They're among more than 1,000 oiled birds and more than 100 oiled sea turtles rescued since the BP-leased rig Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20, killing 11 workers. About three-quarters of the birds and all but a handful of turtles have been cleaned in Louisiana.
All but two of the sea turtles — a 150-pound oiled loggerhead dubbed Big Mama and an 85-pound loggerhead that was sick but free of oil — are juveniles, ranging from saucer- to dinner-plate size.
Doses of fluids, antibiotics and a mix of cod-liver oil and mayonnaise used to help break up the oil they've swallowed are administered based on the animal's weight. But the basic treatment is the same.
"The difference is it takes five people to lift Big Mama and her sister. It only takes one person to lift the little guys," said Michele Kelley, Louisiana's sea turtle and marine mammal stranding coordinator.
Baby turtles leave their sandy nests and head straight for the sea knowing everything a turtle needs to know.
Chicks need far more care.
Keeping them warm can be the biggest challenge, and tern chicks are among the hardest to keep alive because they're so small, said IBRRC staffer Mark Russell.
The birds lose body heat through their skin, and smaller animals have more skin in proportion to their size than larger creatures. Some of the tern chicks are smaller than a tennis ball.
The chicks also tend to be dehydrated and malnourished.
"If they're dehydrated, they don't want to eat because they feel sick," Russell said. And they're so small that it's hard to keep a tube down their throats to give water and liquid food.
In the week he'd been in Louisiana, he knew of two or three tern chicks that died, Russell said Friday.
Once a chick is eating on its own, staff have as little contact with it as possible.
"We don't want to be raising what is commonly referred to as a pier rat," said Wendy Fox, director of Pelican Harbor Seabird Station, the Miami rehabilitation center where the pelican chicks were moved Saturday.
The babies will be housed next to adult "role models," and eventually with adults, Fox said. Their pens also have pools deep enough to dive for fish. Pelicans take five to six months to reach independence.
At Fort Jackson, one of the youngsters perched alongside a pool and flapped its wings energetically.
"See that?" Holcomb said. "He's almost ready to learn to fly!"Baby animals in oil spill face uncertain future
Photo: A baby laughing gull... more
-
-
Saving nature's unborn from the Gulf oil disaster
By Kim Segal, CNN
July 9, 2010 7:50 p.m. EDT
Sea turtle eggs are packed into a cooler along with sand from the Gulf Coast beach they are leaving.
* U.S. wildlife experts are moving sea turtle eggs by hand to save them from the oil disaster
* Such a relocation effort has never been done before
* They are being taken from Florida Panhandle to Kennedy Space Center
* They will be stored in a special NASA building, then released into the Atlantic Ocean
Port St. Joe, Florida (CNN) -- One by one, with a hand as steady as a surgeon's, Lorna Patrick removes eggs from a sea turtle's nest on a Florida beach.
"If it falls, you probably killed the hatchling that's developing inside," said Patrick, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Patrick admits she holds her breath each time she takes an egg out of the sand and places it in the foam cooler.
Sand is delicately placed in the cooler between and on top of each egg. Patrick uses the sand from the nest, which is located just a few inches from the beach's surface.
This process is part of an unprecedented sea turtle relocation program. Moving sea turtle nests days before the eggs are to hatch has never been done before.
It is also the first time that wildlife experts had to deal with oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.
"Shy of letting the hatchlings swim in oil, it's our best alternative," said Sandy MacPherson, the national sea turtle coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service.
"We're confident if they go into oil they're going to die."
Patrick is working on the second sea turtle nest to be moved since the program started. Ninety percent of the United States' sea turtle population can be found on Florida's beaches, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
It is estimated that 700 nests can be found in the Florida Panhandle, an area vulnerable to the oil spill.
"This is a huge relocation effort," said Thomas Strickland, assistant secretary of interior for fish and wildlife and parks. "As many as 50 to 100,000 eggs over the next six to eight weeks will be dug up."
An average nest has anywhere from 100 to 120 eggs. Sea turtles come out of the water a few feet from the coastline and lay their eggs in the warm sand.
Loggerhead turtle eggs, the type Patrick is handling, usually hatch within 60 to 70 days. The eggs are moved just over a week before they are expected to hatch.
Wildlife officials want to keep the eggs in their natural environment as long as possible.
"Through the eggs it's believed they actually connect to the landscapes where they were born," Strickland said.
Once the turtles mature it is hoped that they will return to the original nesting area and the natural birthing cycle will continue. Once Patrick's two coolers are full, with the nest's 107 eggs, they will start a journey across the state.
A special climate-controlled truck donated by Federal Express will deliver the eggs to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The coolers will be stored in a special NASA building that will be regulated to the warm summer temperatures to which the eggs are accustomed.
Instead of the beautiful white sandy beach, the hatchlings will be born in the transport coolers.
Once they break out of their shells, the warm blue Atlantic Ocean will be awaiting them.Saving nature's unborn from the Gulf oil disaster
By Kim Segal, CNN
July 9,... more
-
-
NASA's latest mission doesn't have anything to do with spacecraft or satellites. The space agency is helping thousands of baby sea turtles make their successful pilgrimage to the ocean. Biologists are digging up some 700 turtle nests on northern Gulf beaches affected by the BP oil spill, from Panama City to Apalachicola, Florida, and relocating them to NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Florida's Space Coast.
To simulate the natural environment, the eggs will be buried in damp sand inside Styrofoam coolers and transported via a temperature-controlled truck to KSC. There, they will be held and monitored at an undisclosed facility until they hatch. Once the turtles begin to break free from their shells, they will be moved quickly to nearby beaches to make their trek to the sea, where they feed exclusively along the line of Sargassum seaweed at the edge of the current. Most of the nests are made by the threatened loggerhead sea turtle, but some are possibly from three endangered species -- Kemp's ridley, leatherback, and green sea turtles. Each nest has 100-120 eggs.
Only about one in 1,000 sea turtle hatchlings typically survives to adulthood under the best conditions. Experts say that with oil right off the Gulf Coast, the turtles' odds of survival there drop to virtually zero. BP's ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill has released hundreds of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and is considered the largest offshore spill in U.S. history.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission all played a role in developing the relocation plan. NASA offered to house the turtles until they hatched at its climate-controlled facilities at KSC. Although biologists can't be certain the sea turtle relocation plan will succeed, they say all of this year's hatchlings from the northern Gulf of Mexico will be lost if nothing is done.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-07/nasa-will-rescuethousands-sea-turtle-eggs-oil-leak-areasNASA's latest mission doesn't have anything to do with spacecraft or... more
-
-
"Brown pelicans and other seabirds often dive into the oil because the slick makes the water look calmer. If they are coated in oil, they will be unable to regulate their temperatures, leading to hyperthermia.
Plankton, tiny immobile organisms at the base of the food chain, can be killed by chemically dispersed oil.
All four species of sea turtles in the gulf are threatened or endangered. Some have already washed up ashore, and with numbers already low, it would be harder to rebuild the population.
Dolphins, which often follow boats to play, have been following response crews, getting near the slicks.
Shrimp and other shellfish are more vulnerable to oil and chemical dispersants because they are stationary, while some adult fin fish populations may be mobile.
Fish larvae are most at risk. Bluefin tuna, now spawning near the spill, are of particular concern. The Gulf of Mexico is one of only two nurseries in the world for bluefin tuna.
Sperm whales, which spend most of their time diving for prey, may come up in the slick as they reach the surface to breathe."
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/28/us/20100428-spill-map.html"Brown pelicans and other seabirds often dive into the oil because the slick... more
-
