 Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle trudges through beach, photo by krembo1
The sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico may turn out to be the ones in the most trouble from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Even though they haven’t shown signs of oil, they may be ingesting it.
Dr. Mike Ziccardi, a veterinarian who runs the Oiled Wildlife Care Network and is handling all the non-bird oiled wildlife in the gulf, now says they’re getting a high number of dead turtles, 156 so far. Mostly juveniles and mostly the rarest kind, Kemp’s Ridley, TampaBay.com reports. The dead sea turtles “are in higher numbers than you would expect,” he told Reuters.
No one is sure what killed the turtles. There was Dr. Ziccardi was initially very cautious, noting that turtles just wash up dead this time of year and that they showed no oil. Some blamed shrimpers. OnEarth, the NRDC blog, says that Sea Turtle Restoration Project (STRP) estimates fishermen kill 25,000 sea turtles each year. And that’s way down from a decade ago, before the mandated Turtle Exclusion Device, when 86,000 were wiped out.
Now Dr. Ziccardi he’s contemplating something more insidious: that they are injesting the oil but it doesn’t show up on the outside. “Marine mammals and sea turtles are much more likely to have less apparent external exposure and greater internal exposure than avian species,” he wrote on his blog. Animals that don’t show oil can have internal oil damage. Sometimes you can see it
Keep reading Will Sea Turtles Be The Big Victims of the Gulf Oil Spill?
 Hundreds of volunteers are assembling booms at Boom B Qs
Funny thing about all that hair and fur being shorn around the country to great fanfare to sop up the BP gulf oil spill: nobody wants it. Or at least the people actually cleaning up the oil say it isn’t as good as the store-bought booms they’re using. But that hasn’t stopped people from sending it in and reporters from extensively covering the sweet but so far futile gesture.
Last week the official spill Facebook page, Deepwater Horizon Response, put out this deeply unpopular message:
We are not using hair booms at this time but are using commercially available sorbent boom when possible. In a February 2010 NOAA field test, commercial sorbent boom absorbed more oil and much less water than hair boom. Widespread deployment of hair boom could exacerbate the debris problem. There is adequate supply of …sorbent boom for now, but we do encourage ideas of alternative solutions by calling (281) 366-5511.
The main group amassing hair, Matter of Trust, does some amazing recycling and has been championing and testing hairmats since at least 2007. The hair, stuffed inside pantyhose, really seems to work. But even they say only the hazmat crews should install and remove the booms. They’re taking the rejection graciously, but proceeding full steam ahead:
BP hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking about the properties of hair, fur, wool and fleece. And they’re a little busy right now…. Matter of Trust is
Keep reading Your Hair Probably Isn't Going to Clean Up the Oil Spill–and Neither Is Your Dog's or Alpaca's
Wildlife rescuers in the gulf are getting so few oiled animals they’re starting to worry that the cost per animal seem ridiculous. After Exxon we had reports of “$80,000 otters.” If you hear anything about a $300,000 sea gull, be skeptical.
Mike Ziccardi, a veterinarian who runs Oiled Wildlife Care Network, has been offering the most candid and complete news on the wildlife situation on their blog. He’s been bracing for both an onslaught of injured animals and a backlash against the cost of saving them. “This response is likely to be very costly when it is all said and done – especially if compared on a “per-bird” or “per-turtle/mammal” basis (or at least I hope it is, as that will imply low animal numbers),” he writes today. Continue reading The Price of All This Cleaning Up Oiled Wildlife?
 How does the Deepwater Horizon oil spill compare to the historical monster of Exxon Valdez, by which we judge all oil disasters? How long will this go on?
We went back to the records of Valdez to look at its size and what we might lay ahead.
In the Valdez spill Scientific American reports that 2,000 sea otters, 302 harbor seals and about 250,000 seabirds died in the first few days. So far we have only 2 birds in care that I know of. Rescuers retrieved a total of 36,471 carcasses and captured 1,630 live birds, the IBRRC reports. The Valdez spill was March 24, 1989. The last wildlife rehab center closed September 6 of that year. The Deepwater Horizon spill was on April 22, 2009. By that measure, rehabbers will be on the scene until early October. By the 10th day of the Valdez oil spill, rescuers were finding 180 oiled birds per square mile, the Coast Guard reported. The oil spread so far in Prince William Sound that rescuers had to set up four wildlife care centers. They’ve already set up three down south. There are Oiled Bird Rescue Centers in Fort Jackson, Louisiana, Theodore, Alabama and Pensacola, Florida. How long will it take the wildlife to recover? Here’s the really scary part. They’re still digging up oil in Valdez and some species are still recovering. Where to Go to See Wildlife Where to Go See Wildlife Down South RESCUE GROUPS International Bird Rescue Research Center, based in
Keep reading Valdez: A Comparison for Wildlife
 One peculiar thing about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill so far: hardly any wildlife covered in oil. The lack of oiled birds has mystified rescuers and exasperated the media. TV networks are clamoring for images, showing clip files and giving the impression that tons of animals are showing up hurt. That’s not so–at least not yet.
Mike Ziccardi, a vet and director of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network, says on the OWCN blog that he got into a spat with “a fairly irate reporter from a major national news outlet” who demanded video access to the necropsy (animal autopsy) of some sea turtles. The network were desperate for dead turtle images even though the turtles didn’t show initial signs of oiling and, as Ziccardi pointed out, were in found in a time and place typical of stranded turtles. (The other big threat to turtles is shrimp boats, Wallace Nichols from Grupo Tortuguero points out.)
Keith Olbmermann started a broadcast this week in ominous tone about “as dead jellyfish begin to wash up on the Mississippi coast.” Dead jellyfish might be the one bright spot of the oil spill, given that the Gulf Dead Zone has caused a plague of jellyfish in the gulf.
A brown pelican is only second bird to be treated. Photo by IBRRC
Apparently California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger so expected oiled wildlife images that he dreamed some up. He just announced that he was withdrawing support for drilling off California’s shores: “I see
Keep reading Where Are All Those Oil-Soaked Birds We Were Expecting?
 Oiled gull in CA in 2007 by Ingrid Taylar. Not many oiled birds seen yet in the gulf.
So far only a single bird, a Northern Gannett, has shown up oiled from the massive Deepwater Horizon spill. Wildlife rescuers and nonetheless overwhelmed–by all the untrained human volunteers.
As the potential for the spill gets bigger, the big wildlife groups are contemplating holding training classes to equip the would-be volunteers, says Kai Williams, executive director of the International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council.
Right now several groups are taking in information from potential volunteers. The National Wildlife Federation is directing people to sign up with the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana.
“If you have the ability to restain an animal, that’s going to be huge, just the basic ability to hold an animal,” says Williams. “They’re getting a lot of untrained people, not wildlife rehabilitators, people who have never picked up a bird.”
What makes planning the response so hard is no one knows how big this still-developing catastrophe is going to be or when and where a rush of injured animals will show up. Some contemplate that the Gulf Stream could wrap it around Florida. Some worry the spill could end up bigger than Valdez. Williams notes that fewer birds live in Valdez, but there are also turtles and marine mammals to worry about.
The northern gannet is being bathed, fed electrolytes and pepto bismal, but rough weather this weekend prevented picking up more patients. A caretaker
Keep reading Wildlife Rescuers in Gulf Overwhelmed–By Volunteers, Not Patients
The Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico may collide with an area already bedeviled by environmental catastrophe, the infamous Dead Zone–an area of essentially no life or oxygen. So what happens when an inexorable oil slick meets and an undead patch of water?
The Gulf’s Dead Zone is about 6,000 to 7,000 square miles, one of the biggest in the world, Microbial Life Educational Resources of Carleton College says. It’s caused by fertilizer run-off in the Mississippi overfeeding algae. Phytoplankton gobble up the algae–and all the oxygen. Scientists call the areas hypoxia–or low oxygen. They can’t support life.
The oil spill so far is smaller, about 1,800 square miles. So far.
Right now the dead zone is west of the Mississippi and the oil spill is east of it. The dead zone is mainly at the bottom, which is littered with phytoplankton carcasses. The oil is on top.
But Nancy N. Rabalais, Ph.D., executive director of Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium thinks they’re likely to meet.
“If the winds continue from the southeast as is common this time of year, then the surface manifestation may move to the west of the Mississippi River delta and become a surface feature of the Louisiana area of hypoxia,” says
Some seem to have fantasized that the oil burn off will end up cleaning up the dead zone. Not so, says Rabalais. “The burn would reduce the more volatile and toxic components,” [in the oil] she says, but not burn off the algae.
The
Keep reading How Will the Gulf’s Dead Zone Impact the Oil Spill?
Biologists know that a handful of manatees are in the Gulf of Mexico and swimming westward–toward the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but so far they have decided not to try to intervene. Mobile Bay officials may release dammed waters to push the oil away from the bay, a local scientist says.
A female manatee that spends the summer in Mobile Bay is now in Appalachicola Bay, FL, says Ruth H. Carmichael, senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, which is bracing for the oil slick. Appalachicola Bay is roughly 250 miles from Mobile–if you take the shore route. They can swim up to 45 miles a day, but 5-15 is more likely.
“I hope she finds a nice location to wait for a while,” Carmichael says. “The USGS also has a few tagged manatees they know are moving this way. We are doing nothing to move or disturb the animals. Right now the oil is offshore and the manatees are in shore. We need to trust them to take care of themselves for now.”
Manatees spend the winter near hot springs or power plants in Florida, but as their population has recovered, they are swimming further in the summer. A few now regularly visit Alabama and every few years a young male makes it up to New England.
“Mobile Bay is trying to arrange for discharge of dammed waters , if needed, to force water out of the Bay and keep it westward off shore,”
Keep reading Several Manatees Swimming Toward Danger and the Oil Spill; Mobile May Release Dammed Waters
A stunning 400 species of birds, marine mammals, turtles, land mammals and reptiles could be hurt by the Deepwater Horizons oil spill, which is now just 6-7 miles off Louisiana. The current strong winds may blow the muck to shore by Friday morning, the latest report says.
Nola.com obtained a list of 400 species put in harm’s way by the oil from the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources. Bob Marshall writes that this is a particularly horrible time for the oil spill–right when birds are migrating through or nesting. The soon-to-be oiled area is:
vital wintering or resting spot for more than 70 percent of the nation’s waterfowl, is used by all 110 neo-tropical migratory songbirds, and produces 50 percent of the nation’s wild shrimp crop, 35 percent of its blue claw crabs and 40 percent of its oysters. Ressearchers say 90 percent of all the marine species in the Gulf of Mexico depend on coastal estuaries at some point in their lives, and most of those estuaries are in Louisiana.
The New York Times has a great chart highlighting which species are most at risk, mostly migrating birds. The brown pelican was just removed from the endangered species list.
The Oiled Wildlife Care Network–a collection of wildlife responders across California–has sent its director down and is collecting info on volunteers. They say it’s too late to train you to clean up animals but you could become a “convergent volunteer.” Specialized groups or state rehabber associations do
Keep reading Groups Recruiting Volunteers to Clean up to 400 Wildlife Species at Risk From Oil Spill
 Deepwater Horizon oil spill seen from space over LAImagery courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory
Endangered sea turtles, herons, white and brown pelicans, dolphins, whales, manatees, tuna and assorted sea birds could all be hurt by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that is now 16 miles off the tip of Louisiana and alarming wildlife officials all the way to Florida.
The Coast Guard is burning the oil, hoping that will keep it from making landfall and destroying wetlands. I wonder if, ironically, the giant dead zone in the gulf may mean that the area the oil spill hits may be devoid of life anyway. The next step for wildlife rescuers would be to herd animals out of the area by hazing them. The International Bird Rescue Research Center in Texas says they’ve been put on alert for the decapitated oil well, which is gushing about 1,000 barrels (42,000 US gallons) of crude daily and already can be seen from space, with a circumference of 600 miles.
If the spill stays offshore then the impact will likely be minimal to birds. Coastal birds that are highly at risk if the spill hits shore are brown and white pelicans, terns, gulls, shorebirds, skimmers and herons. Nesting and feeding areas for birds and sea turtles such as marshes and beaches could be impacted.
Loggerhead and Kemp’s Ridley turtles are in the area, Live Science says. Birds are vulnerable if they ingest the oil or get coated in it. The
Keep reading Pelicans, Otters, Manatees Could be Hurt by Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
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