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Canada Uses Dangerous Sonar in Waters Protected by U.S.

2012-02-08T12:53:35Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

On Monday morning, a Canadian Navy frigate ran a sonar exercise in the waters of Haro Strait and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Washington. Incredibly, a good portion of that exercise took place on the U.S. side of the border – in waters we have designated as critical habitat for killer whales under the Endangered Species Act.

Environmentally, there are few worse places off our coasts to run a sonar exercise, and not just because of the killer whales. The straits and channels beyond Puget Sound act as a natural sound duct, causing the high-intensity pings of navy sonar to reverberate, and extending their life from 1-second blasts to 20-second ordeals. The effect, to human ears, is excruciating: like fingernails across a chalkboard. One can only imagine how it sounds at high volume to creatures as acoustically sensitive as killer whales and other marine mammals.

Fortunately, biologists from the Whale Museum and Beam Reach, who monitor the area with hydrophones, recorded every signal from a distance. And in an email sent yesterday, the Canadian Navy confirmed that the sonar use was part of a training exercise.

When the U.S. Navy last trained with sonar here, in May 2003, it caused a panic among the killer whales, driving them into shallow waters where they closed ranks and roiled about in what, to some worried biologists, looked like pre-stranding behavior. It caused porpoises to evacuate the area en masse, and a large minke whale to be seen literally thrusting out of the water. A large number of harbor porpoises were later found to have stranded around the same time, although the cause was never determined.

The simple fact is that these waters should not be used for sonar training. Period. Even the U.S. Navy -- which has thus far refused to protect marine mammal habitat anywhere else on the west coast -- has effectively put the area off-limits to sonar use.

NRDC will appeal to both the Canadian and U.S. governments to ensure that this patently dangerous activity does not happen in this place again.

Leading Experts Call for Action to Combat Ocean Noise

2012-01-19T22:03:42Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

Today two of the world’s leading marine mammal experts published an op-ed on CNN.com, calling on the U.S. to recognize a major threat to marine life: the rapidly rising level of chronic underwater noise off our coasts. It’s titled, Turn down the volume in the ocean.

As the experts explain, “Whales, dolphins and seals use sounds to communicate, navigate, find food and detect predators. The rising level of cumulative noise from energy exploration, offshore development and commercial shipping is a constant disruption on their social networks. For life in today's ocean, the basic activities that we depend on for our lives on land are being eroded by the increasing amount of human noise beneath the waves. These stark realities are worrying. But emerging technologies for quantifying and visualizing the effects of noise pollution can help drive a paradigm shift in how we perceive, monitor, manage and mitigate human sounds in the ocean. Ocean noise is a global problem, but the U.S. should step up and lead the way.”

They go on to identify concrete actions the U.S. can take to stem the loss of acoustic habitats for marine species.

This is an important call to action. So much of our ocean life – from whales to commercial fish – depend on sound for their survival. The Obama administration needs to heed the call, and start reining in the noise from offshore oil and shipping that’s eroding the marine environment.

Photo credit: NOAA

Mass Stranding in the Med: Numbers Up

2011-12-08T18:35:12Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

Yesterday, biologists investigating the recent mass stranding of beaked whales in the Ionian Sea reported a rise in the body count. At least 7, and possibly 8, whales are now known to have stranded on the Greek island of Corfu, in addition to the mother and calf that stranded in Calabria, Italy. (The mother died; the calf was led back into deeper waters, and no one knows its fate.) As one of the biologists has observed, it seems reasonable to think that other animals died at sea and did not make it to shore.

Judging by their decomposition, all of the newly discovered whales stranded around the same time as the previously discovered ones – which happens to be when a major Italian naval exercise was taking place in the Gulf of Taranto, directly across from Corfu on the Ionian Sea. The event looks increasingly like another mass mortality caused by naval training.

More soon.

New Mass Stranding; Sonar Responsible?

2011-12-05T13:00:00Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

Last week, beaked whales began stranding along the Greek island of Corfu, on the eastern edge of the Ionian Sea. The whales stranded alive, and rescuers struggled to lead them back to deeper water. Around the same time, a mother and calf stranded on the coast of Calabria, about 130 miles away on the other side of the water. The mother perished.

Back on Corfu, witnesses at two separate stranding sites reported hearing a strange whistling sound every ten or fifteen seconds – a truly remarkable thing since they were above the waterline and the signal probably came from below.

Sound familiar? For us, the species and the pattern of strandings immediately recalled the terrible mass strandings of whales caused by naval sonar.

From November 27 through Dec. 2, the Italian Navy has been conducting a major exercise known as “Mare Aperto” (“Open Seas”) in the central-southern Tyrrhenian, Ionian, and southern Adriatic. At least one of the participating ships in this year’s exercise, an Italian Maestrale-class frigate called the Scirocco, is equipped with active sonar made by Raytheon and identical to systems used by the U.S. Navy.

Of course, the Italian exercise covered a wide area, and we don’t yet know how closely it may be correlated in space and time with the mass strandings. All possible causes, including other anthropogenic noise sources, should be investigated. But the facts look ominous.

Sonar has killed Cuvier’s beaked whales in the Ionian Sea before, and researchers suspect it has played a role in several other strandings involving the same population. One biologist wrote that, thanks to these events, the population “may be steadily headed towards its extinction.”

We have called on the Italian government – which tries to mitigate against the impacts of sonar training – to furnish information on the nature, timing, and location of activities associated with Mare Aperto. Pathologists were heading to the region last Friday. More soon.

Photo courtesy of Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute

The Dolphin Die-Off Continues

2011-10-14T19:36:17Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

More than one year after the Deepwater Horizon was capped, biologists in the Gulf of Mexico are trying to determine what has happened to the dolphins—which continue to turn up dead in alarmingly high numbers along the coast, from Louisiana to Florida. Their latest effort is an extraordinary health assessment led by NOAA, focused on bottlenose dolphins in Barataria Bay, Louisiana. The rich bay waters were a battleground in the attempt to control the spill last year.

Here’s what we know so far. Hundreds of bottlenose dolphins have died in a series of mass mortality events in the northern Gulf of Mexico since Feburary 2010. The first event, troubling in itself, was already underway two months before the Deepwater Horizon exploded. Mortalities spiked again during the spill, which happened to occur at the beginning of the dolphins’ reproductive cycle, when much of the coastal population moves nearer to shore.

The third spate of strandings—which included unusually high concentrations of stillbirths and neonates—came at the start of the dolphins’ calving season, in January. Scientists have speculated that the dolphins’ ingestion or inhalation of oil, perhaps in combination with other factors, may ultimately be responsible. And while the number of stillbirths declined with the end of the calving season, the dolphins continue to strand in numbers six or more times the historic monthly average, at a rate that rivals the loss during the spill itself. In all, between February 2010 and August 2011, about 500 dolphins have stranded, nearly all of them found dead, and that number does not include, of course, the ones that died at sea but did not make it to shore. At least four more dolphins, including a pregnant female and a mother and calf, were discovered on Alabama beaches in the past week alone.

It is difficult to think of a mass mortality that has lasted as long, has involved so many animals, and has taken down so many calves.

Determining the health of the Gulf’s bottlenose dolphins is a matter of urgency. As I’ve written before, the dolphins that make their homes in the Gulf’s coastal waters and estuaries represent about three dozen separate communities, some smaller than 100 animals in size, and all extremely vulnerable. But pathologists can tell only so much from a distance, whether from behavioral observation or remote biopsy. For example, they cannot easily detect possible sublethal or latent effects, such as organ damage and immune dysfunction, which could link the strandings to the spill.

Since August 1st, the government has caught, physically examined, and released at least thirty bottlenose dolphins in the bay, performing a number of tests to get at the possible sublethal and chronic effects of the BP disaster. For example, scientists are testing samples of dolphin skin, blubber, urine, feces, blood, and blowhole swabs for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—a toxic component of oil that causes birth defects in humans and may be to blame for the baby dolphin deaths between January and June.

The same team of veterinarians, biologists, and wildlife epidemiologists conducting the physical exams will also conduct diagnostic ultrasounds to map the dolphins’ internal organs and then tag their dorsal fins with radio beacons and satellite transmitters, to gather data on their behavior and movements over time. The findings will be compared with data from wild dolphins in Sarasota Bay, Florida, that have not been exposed to Macondo oil.

Hopefully the investigations will shed more light on these devastating strandings, inform future recovery efforts—and help hold any culpable parties accountable.

Another Terrible Subsidy for the Offshore Oil Industry

2011-07-21T23:36:02Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

Apparently it’s not enough that Congress already subsidizes the oil and gas industry with billions of taxpayer dollars. Now, some senators want to hand over nearly a billion dollars more of our money, largely for harmful offshore exploration that the industry currently conducts itself.

Such was the outcome of today’s meeting of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The bill in question (S. 916) would authorize spending $850 million of taxpayer money on oil and gas exploration, focusing on waters with the greatest production potential off the east coast, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and in the Arctic.

Yet industry already intends to run surveys in the same areas. For example, after DOI announced last year that it would open up the Atlantic coast to exploration, it received 9 applications for extensive surveys up and down the eastern seaboard. If the bill ultimately passes, the federal government would hand over its $850 million to many of the same companies to conduct many of the same surveys – surveys that industry would otherwise have funded on its own.

To make matters (much) worse, these surveys have an enormous environmental footprint. Industry typically relies on arrays of airguns, which shoot intense impulses of air into the water every 10 to 12 seconds for weeks or months on end. Airgun arrays can disrupt feeding, breeding, and other vital behavior in endangered whales, and dramatically suppress fisheries, over vast distances of ocean.

Senators Udall and Cantwell offered up two amendments today, one to strip away the money and another to protect commercial fisheries from harm. The first amendment seemed to attract the support of Sen. Rand Paul, who rightly observed that Congress had no reason to subsidize the industry. But in a closely divided Committee, the amendments were withdrawn and the measure passed as part of a larger bill.

Now the language could come to Senate floor. Preventing another mad giveaway to the wealthiest industry on earth is something that everyone, on both sides, should be able to support. Right?

BP Oil Disaster at One Year: Assessing Impacts on Marine Mammals

2011-04-14T17:26:16Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

At least since the 1969 Santa Barbara blowout, we have tended to understand the environmental calamity of major spills through images of oiled wildlife lying dead or in agony along the shore. But animals whose bodies are recovered in a die-off are sometimes said to represent only “the tip of an iceberg”: simply the ones that, by chance, have stranded and been discovered and then reported to authorities. In the Exxon Valdez case, where serious impacts on killer whales, sea otters, and shorebirds took years to manifest themselves, the government came up with a multiplier to account for the numbers of undiscovered dead animals that the oil giant was liable for. In the Gulf of Mexico, the multiplier for some marine mammal species could be very high. According to a recent study, on average, only one in fifty whales and dolphins that die at sea are recovered on the Gulf’s shores.

For marine mammals, the most immediate danger from the Macondo spill was from oiling and inhaling toxic fumes, which can cause brain lesions, disorientation, and death. Going forward, the mechanisms of harm are subtler. As we have seen from the Exxon Valdez, oil can work up the food chain, accumulate in body tissue, induce cascade effects across an ecosystem, and impact wildlife populations for decades afterwards. For now, concern for marine mammals has centered on three particularly vulnerable species: bottlenose dolphins, sperm whales, and Bryde’s whales.

Bottlenose dolphins

The BP disaster happened at a terrible time for the Gulf’s bottlenose dolphins, at the beginning of their reproductive cycle when the coastal population comes nearer to shore. Many observers witnessed them swimming in and around the spill, demonstrating their inability (seen during previous spills) to avoid sheens and emulsified oil. More than one hundred bottlenose dolphins were found dead in the months following the blowout. Now a second die-off has plagued this year’s calving season, with more than 150 additional animals stranded – nearly half of them stillborns or neonates who seem to have been unable to take their first breath. Though some of these animals were visibly marked with Macondo oil, it is not clear what role the spill may have played in the recent strandings, and demonstrating a link is likely to be difficult. Regardless, the latest die-off is extremely concerning to residents and biologists alike. The dolphin communities that have made their homes in the Gulf’s bays, sounds, and estuaries are small and semi-isolated, and the death of even a few babies can have outsized effects on the group.

Sperm whales

Sperm whales have long been attracted to the underwater canyons that extend into the Gulf of Mexico, south of the Mississippi Delta. The waters there are both deep and nutrient-rich, and for the Gulf’s small sperm whale population they constitute a sort of nursery, inhabited by groups of breeding females and calves and immature males who are seldom seen outside of it. Unfortunately, the same waters, which ten years ago became one of the principal targets of deepwater drilling, also played host to the Macondo well. In the wake of the spill, a juvenile was found floating dead in the water – a rare find suggesting the loss of many other whales. Acoustic monitoring by Cornell’s Bioacoustics Research Program confirms that at least some sperm whales remained in the Mississippi Canyon last summer. It is unclear what long-term effects the oil and dispersants may have on these deep-foraging, endangered animals.

Bryde’s whales

Bryde’s (pronounced “Brutus”) whales are by far the Gulf’s most commonly occurring baleen whale species, but their numbers are surpassingly small. Even before the spill fewer than fifty of the whales were thought to remain, according to NOAA’s stock assessments, and these few have been sighted almost exclusively within a single location, the DeSoto Canyon, which lies offshore between Mobile, Alabama and Panama City, Florida. Bryde’s whales rely on their baleen to filter food, putting them at substantial risk of oil ingestion. No one knows how the whales weathered the spill; indeed, they stand as poster children for our astonishing lack of knowledge about the Gulf’s offshore species. Remarkably, we lack even the basic genetic information needed to determine whether they are indeed, as several biologists have theorized, a desperately small, distinct, and isolated population – information that is plainly critical to their conservation.

Life Goes On?

The northern Gulf is one of the most industrialized stretches of ocean on the planet. Its waters are dense with shallow and, increasingly, deepwater platforms, some with undersea structures that themselves can extend dozens of miles around a central hub. Ships and helicopters traverse the area to service them, and a variety of activities potentially disruptive to wildlife, from drilling to explosive platform decommissioning, take place daily.

According to most biologists, the most disruptive of these activities are probably seismic surveys, the industry’s primary tool for offshore exploration in the Gulf and elsewhere, whose high-powered airguns regularly pound the water with sound louder than virtually any other man-made source save explosives. These surveys have a vast environmental footprint, disrupting feeding, breeding, and communication of some marine mammal and fish species over tens or in some cases even hundreds of miles. For the Gulf’s sperm whales, they mean less food: even moderate levels of airgun noise appear to seriously compromise the whales' ability to forage. In an average year, BOEMRE approves more than 60 seismic surveys in the northern Gulf, none of which has undergone review under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. No one knows how the cumulative impacts of this nearly constant disruptive activity will affect wildlife already compromised by the spill.

The Way Forward

• Congress and the Obama administration should adopt the recommendations of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

• Congress should establish a research fund to ensure that vital research on Gulf marine mammals continues once Natural Resource Damage Assessment funds expire.

• The administration should strengthen mitigation requirements for seismic surveys and other activities that are currently impacting the same vulnerable species affected by the spill.

Credits: Stranded bottlenose dolphin/ Jerry Cope. Platforms and pipelines/ BOEMRE. All other photos and graphics/ NOAA.

Now It's Octopus and Squid

2011-04-12T21:58:54Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

One concern we’ve frequently voiced about ocean noise pollution is the potential for impacts across a wide range of species, up and down the food chain. A new study in Frontiers in Ecology gives yet more reason for serious worry.

A group of Spanish researchers exposed four species of squid, octopus, and cuttlefish to moderate levels of low-frequency, underwater sound for two hours. What they found in all of the animals was massive trauma “not compatible with life.”

Most of the damage occurred within the statocysts, a group of small air sacs around the animals’ head that helps them balance and orient themselves in the water. Over the course of two hours sensitive hair cells were destroyed, nerve fibers swelled and degenerated, sac linings were pocked with holes. At first the captive animals tried to escape; then they froze in their tanks. The damage is analogous to someone shredding your inner ear.

The study’s lead author said that investigators were “shocked by the magnitude of the trauma.” Particularly shocking were the levels of sound involved in their experiment: far lower than those believed to directly injure marine mammals and fish.

The new study would seem to confirm noise as the cause of two bizarre and disturbing mass stranding events from several years ago. In 2001, and again in 2003, unusual numbers of giant squid (Architeuthis dux) – a near-mythic creature that until recently had never been photographed live – washed ashore along the Bay of Biscay, in Spain. Their strandings coincided with high-powered seismic surveying for oil and gas, which produces some of the loudest sounds in the ocean. All of the dead animals showed injury in the statocysts.

Over the last hundred years, humans have radically altered the acoustic environment of the ocean, and low-frequency noise is only getting louder with increases in oil and gas exploration, naval training, shipping, and offshore construction. We’ve only tapped the surface of the impacts that ocean noise is having on marine mammals. This study makes us think again of its consequences for the broader web of ocean life.

Photo by Richard Ling, from Flickr. For more photos of cephalopods, check out the group pool on Flickr.

Dolphin Die-Off: How Big Is the Iceberg?

2011-03-30T13:41:19Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

Counting dead marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico, or any body of water, is extremely difficult because most marine mammals never make it to shore. They perish at sea, perhaps dozens of miles from any beach, in deep water. Animals whose bodies are recovered in a die-off are often said to represent “the tip of an iceberg” – simply the ones that, by chance, have stranded and been discovered and then reported to authorities.

Which begs the question: if more than 130 bodies have been recovered so far in the Gulf's bottlenose dolphin die-off, how many animals are actually dying? Just how big is that iceberg in the Gulf?

Today, a group of well-respected marine biologists gave us a first look at the answer, and it’s not pretty. Their paper, which has just appeared in the journal Conservation Letters, pores over five years of stranding records for 14 Gulf species and, for each one, compares the number of reported bodies with what we know about their population size and survival rates. They conclude that, on average, only one in fifty whales and dolphins that die at sea are recovered on the Gulf’s shores.

Not surprisingly, the discovery rate varies by species, depending on such factors as habitat preference, physical size, and the sociality of the animals. Your odds of finding a dead sperm whale are slightly better than average (about one body for every thirty deaths), of finding an offshore striped or spinner dolphin are far worse (less than one in 200). The paper doesn’t assign a number to bottlenose dolphins, no doubt because of their complicated demographics in the northern Gulf. But presumably nearshore dolphins would have one of the best rates of discovery (the highest rate given in the paper is about one in sixteen), and offshore dolphins perhaps among the worst, with dolphins on the shelf lying somewhere in the middle.

Regardless of which numbers you pump in, the paper suggests that thousands of Gulf dolphins are dying.

This frightening math makes determining the provenance of the 130 stranded animals all the more urgent. As I’ve said before, the dolphin communities that have made their homes in the Gulf’s bays, sounds, and estuaries are small and semi-isolated, and the death of even a few babies can have outsized effects on the group. The shelf and offshore populations are larger but not vast, and the death of hundreds, let alone thousands, of animals would far exceed the government’s estimate of what they can reasonably sustain.

To be sure, the Conservation Letters paper is a first take, and investigators will have to account for greater monitoring efforts made since the Deepwater Horizon blowout, among other things. But it demonstrates the need to start thinking beyond the shore, especially if investigators determine that the BP spill may be responsible.

As the authors note, “Many media reports have suggested that the spill caused only modest environmental impacts, in part because of a low number of observed wildlife mortalities, especially marine mammals.” In the Exxon Valdez case, the government came up with a multiplier to account for the numbers of undiscovered dead animals that the oil giant was liable for. If BP is to blame for even a fraction of these strandings – not only of the bottlenose dolphins this year, but of the whales and dolphins found during the spill itself – the government will have to face the same grim mathematics now.

Three Urgent Questions about the Die-Off of Gulf Dolphins

2011-03-03T17:09:20Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

By now about 80 bottlenose dolphins, half of them newborns and stillbirths, have washed ashore in the northern Gulf of Mexico since this year’s calving season began. One TV station filmed a response team taking tissue samples from a stranded baby – a gut-wrenching scene that is being repeated, as my colleague Rocky noted, across beaches in Mississippi and Alabama. The federal government has held at least one press conference, and the story has spread well beyond the region to national and foreign media. What everyone rightly wants to know, of course, is whether BP is responsible.

Yet the investigation remains in its early stages. Marine mammal stranding networks in the United States are coordinated, not centralized, and NOAA is spending much of its time trying to secure the bodies, create freezer space, and ensure that samples are properly taken. A few organizations, such as the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Mississippi, have begun to perform necropsies on recovered bodies; still, most of the detailed lab work needed to probe the Deepwater Horizon connection is weeks or months away.

Here are a few questions (aside from the obvious one) that we should be asking.

(1) Will the government be able to determine the cause of death? Biologists have developed reasonably good tests for certain pathogens, like some of the brevotoxins associated with red tides, but oil is a tougher case. Many of the standard assays are good at detecting acute toxicity, but not so swift at picking up the molecules of hydrocarbons and other matter that oil weathers into. Gestational problems can be even harder to understand. And investigators aren’t exactly helped in this case by the poor condition that most of the bodies are in. Whether they’ve been carried along by currents or left undiscovered on a beach, the dolphins are now in a state that NOAA biologists describe as “Code 4” decomposition, meaning their tissues and organs are too broken down for many of the available tests.

If the BP spill is responsible, drawing a link could well depend on other types of research, such as comparative studies of exposed and unexposed populations, which could take years. For now, NOAA may make more progress in ruling out other causes than in ruling oil in. And that’s important, too.

(2) Which dolphins are dying? As I’ve mentioned before, the Gulf’s bottlenose dolphins don’t all belong to a single, solitary group. Biologists divide them into offshore, coastal, and near-coastal populations, which do not mate with one another and are genetically distinct. What’s more, the near-coastal population breaks down further into dozens of dolphin communities that have made their homes in the bays, sounds, and estuaries of the Gulf’s winding shore. Some of these communities are exceedingly small, no more than a few dozen animals, and none are much larger than a thousand. On these tiny, semi-isolated groups – the dolphin equivalent of a remote village – the death of even a few babies could have outsized effects.

We have enough baseline genetic data to identify stranded dolphins down to the population and possibly even the community, depending on where they’re from. Investigators haven’t yet done this work, but it should be an absolute priority given what it could tell us about the cause of the die-off and the welfare of dolphin communities.

(3) Are dolphins declining in the Gulf? This is the other big question. Biologists assume that, during a die-off, the bodies they see on shore represent only the tip of an iceberg, and that many other animals perish at sea or are never discovered or reported. Whatever has killed the stranded dolphins over the last two months is also driving up the mortality rate in dolphin populations in at least some parts of the Gulf. Understanding how these populations are coping with this latest die-off, and with the spill more generally, will take years of research: aerial or boat surveys, to better estimate their numbers; photo-identification work, to track the coastal communities over time; and the kinds of comparative studies that were used after the Exxon Valdez to assess that spill’s impact on sea otter populations in Prince William Sound.

For the moment, biologists have some of the funding they need through the government’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment, a process established under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 to determine the liability of oil companies after major spills. But whether that research will continue beyond the year or two of initial assessment remains to be seen. The Deepwater Horizon disaster made additional research and protection imperative for marine mammal populations in the Gulf. Committing to conserve them over the long run seems even more important now.

Dolphin Deaths in the Gulf

2011-02-24T14:37:37Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

Six months after the Deepwater Horizon was capped, biologists in the Gulf are still trying to understand what has happened to their region. One thing they’ve noticed recently is an unusually high number of strandings of bottlenose dolphin calves.

Since January, calves have been turning up dead on the Gulf’s mainland beaches and barrier islands at a rate that is reportedly ten times greater than average. The animals are all extremely young – stillbirths or perhaps neonates that were born alive but unable to take their first breath – suggesting problems in development. “Something is amiss,” the Director of Mississippi’s Department of Natural Resources said earlier this week. An obvious question is whether the Deepwater Horizon is responsible.

Determining the cause of death in stranded whales and dolphins can be tricky business, even with a major offshore spill in the backdrop. We know that oil exposure can upset reproduction in wild mammals, and that dolphins aren’t particularly adept at avoiding sheens and emulsified oil. On the other hand, the calves might have died of infectious disease, or their mothers’ exposure to unrelated toxins, or any one of a variety of other causes, and their high reported numbers could be an artifact of the intensified monitoring that presumably has followed the spill.

Getting to the bottom of this mystery is an urgent matter. Biologists have identified more than 30 distinct bottlenose dolphins communities in the Gulf’s coastal waters and estuaries, some as small as a few dozen individuals. In communities this size, a high number of stillbirths can have serious consequences.

Whether or not the deaths are ultimately attributed to BP, the concern that has accompanied their discovery belies the hearty “mission accomplished” message that some are putting out. The fact is that oil lingers. It can work up the food chain, accumulate in body tissue, induce cascade effects across an ecosystem, and impact wildlife populations for decades after a spill. That’s one lesson we’re supposed to have learned from the Exxon Valdez disaster, where serious impacts on sea otters, killer whales, and shorebirds took years to manifest themselves. The worry we’re seeing over these poor dolphin calves won’t be our last reminder.

Blackbirds and Whales

2011-01-07T15:12:01Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

On New Year’s Eve, not long before midnight, some 5000 blackbirds began, literally, dropping from the sky in the small town of Beebe, Arkansas. The die-off quickly became something of an international story as it coincided with a spate of wildlife deaths in other places (birds in Tennessee and Louisiana, fish in the Chesapeake), which apparently some have taken as a sign of the apocalypse.

Now an underlying cause for the Arkansas event has been found: loud noise from fireworks. It seems likely that the explosions shocked the birds from their roosts and sent them flying, confused (and with natively poor vision), into the night sky, where they collided with houses, trees, and power lines.

Now birds and whales are vastly different species, with different ecologies, but the die-off in Beebe couldn’t help but make me think of the oceans and the growing problem that marine wildlife is facing from disruptive, manmade noise. There certainly are limits to the comparisons you can draw, but the reactions of birds, which are generally far easier to study, can shed some light on marine animals and how they are adjusting or failing to compensate for the urbanization of their world.

One thing we can say about the blackbirds’ behavior in Arkansas is that it was maladaptive. The birds weren’t in any direct physical danger from the fireworks, and by tearing off into the dark sky they put themselves at risk of collision and death.

But the “fight-or-flight” response, which is highly conserved across species, doesn’t always lead to the best results. Take for comparison the melon-headed whales caught in a naval sonar exercise off Hawaii, in 2004. The exercise seems to have herded a large pod – representing a significant part of the melon-head population – towards the main islands and around Kauai, where they wound up stranded for two days in Hanalei Bay and might well have died were it not for a brilliant local rescue.

In the end it would have been better for the whales to have braved the Navy’s high-intensity sonar signals than to have fled, just as it would have been better for the blackbirds to have stayed put as the fireworks boomed around them. Sometimes it is just hard to deny the primal urge to run.

Good News (and Bad) for Hawaii's Resident Whales

2010-11-17T08:31:59Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

Over the last year, my colleagues and I have written repeatedly about the plight of Hawaii’s coastal false killer whales, which have declined to about 150 animals. NRDC petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service last fall to put them on the endangered species list. Today the Fisheries Service proposed to do just that.

This is an enormously positive step for which the administration deserves real credit and encouragement. It is also, of course, a moment of terrible ambivalence. Listing means that the whales could receive the resources they need from our distracted wildlife agencies to survive and recover in the wild, but it also means that they are perilously close to extinction.

The government’s findings are sobering. In considering our petition, Fisheries biologists ran a complex computer model, using the best available data, to forecast what might become of the population in the absence of serious intervention. Under most model runs, the whales were likely to dwindle within 75 years to fewer than 20 individual animals – their point of no return. It is painful to think that seventy-five years falls almost within the lifetime of a single whale.

Numerous factors account for this dire prediction. Some are inherent in the whales’ biology: they don’t mix genetically with other false killer whales, they occupy a small range, their mothers seem to calve at long intervals, and their calves’ chances at survival depend on maintaining an intricate and fragile social structure in the wild. But some risk factors are clearly the creation of humans.

In all, NMFS has identified a dozen ways in which we ourselves are putting the whales at a medium or high risk of extinction. Chief among them is injury and death from the longline, shortline, and kaka line fisheries that operate in their coastal range; but we’re also depleting their food, raising their toxic loads, introducing new pathogens through climate change, and flooding their environment with noise.

Listing means that we would have the best possible opportunity to target these threats and save the whales. Among other things, the government would produce a recovery plan, probably convene stakeholder groups to reduce injury from unregulated fisheries, and carefully review activities that risk harming the population.

Barring this, it seems likely that these extraordinary animals – and representatives of Hawaii’s unique marine environment – won’t survive into the next century. You can support the listing by going here.

NRDC Goes to Court: Sperm Whales vs. BP

2010-07-02T15:27:33Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

A few months ago, as oil began to gush from the wellhead and it had become clear to all but BP’s Tony Hayward that we had a major environmental disaster on our hands, I blogged about the Gulf’s small population of sperm whales.

I was particularly concerned about the sperm whales because BP's oil happened to be gushing directly into their neighborhood. For more than one hundred years, mothers and calves have congregated in the Mississippi Canyon, a large submarine valley that extends south into the ocean from the Mississippi Delta. Male whales like to range across the northern Gulf, but for mothers and calves the canyon is prime nursing habitat, and they’re not often seen outside of it. Now their home is encompassed by oil; one young animal has already been found floating dead in the water (a rare find); and the government is launching a special research cruise to find out what is happening to them and to another small, imperiled population of whales to their east.

NRDC has been working over the past weeks to improve the science essential to helping the population recover. But we are also seeking to reverse the oil-mad policies that led to this mess in the first place and that continue to doom the sperm whales and every other species in the industrialized Gulf.

One policy that must be changed is the government’s astonishing disregard of its own wildlife laws. Each year the Interior Department approves hundreds of drilling plans and exploration permits for the northern Gulf without taking step one to comply with the Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act. These laws are important because they require the government and industry to take every practicable measure to reduce harm to wildlife. In the Mississippi Canyon, this could well have meant capping the sperm whales’ exposure to seismic blasting and taking additional precautions against the risk of an oil spill in their nursery.

This week, we filed the first of several lawsuits to restore the rule of wildlife law in the region. We began by challenging the government’s free-wheeling approach to seismic surveys—what my colleague Cynthia Sarthou, from the Gulf Restoration Network, calls “Exhibit B in how the Gulf of Mexico is suffering from the abuses of the oil industry.”

To search for deep deposits of oil, industry trolls the ocean with high-powered airguns that, for weeks and months on end, regularly pound the water with sound louder than virtually any other man-made source save explosives. These surveys have a vast environmental footprint (see fact sheet here), disrupting feeding, breeding, and communication of some endangered species over literally hundreds of thousands of square miles. For the Gulf’s sperm whales, they mean less food: even moderate levels of airgun noise appear to seriously compromise the whales' ability to forage.

Since January, the Interior Department approved nine of these surveys in the same Mississippi Canyon that the sperm whales need for their survival—all without complying in the most fundamental ways with our environmental laws. It is intolerable to think that the same animals now dying in the massive spill will have to contend in the brave new world that follows with the industry’s constant pounding, without any serious attempt to mitigate the harm.

This must stop. Look for more to come.

The Latest MMS Outrage – and Why Salazar’s “Restructuring” Plan Is Insufficient

2010-05-14T16:42:02Z

Michael Jasny, Senior Policy Analyst, Vancouver, B.C., and Santa Monica

The Minerals Management Service (or MMS) was born with an inherent conflict of interest. It’s the agency we rely on to regulate offshore oil and gas development and make sure it’s safe for the environment – but it’s also the agency that rakes in the bucks from all of that oil and gas. So when Secretary Salazar announced on Tuesday that he would “restructure” MMS – to put some daylight between the enforcement and business sides – that seemed like a good start. Until some folks noticed that his plan keeps all of the agency’s regulatory and environmental compliance duties with the money counters.

The lack of any concrete step to improve regulation was inexplicable. The Secretary’s announcement came amid a torrent of stories about MMS’ regulatory malfeasance: how the agency handed out categorical exclusions for drilling, parroted industry’s risk estimates, and took up the companies’ cudgel against control measures that would have shaved a micron of profit from their multi-billion-dollar bottom lines.

The latest outrage, reported in today’s New York Times, is that neither MMS nor industry ever bothered to obtain mandatory permits under the Marine Mammal Protection Act for their industrialization of the Gulf. Not a single permit for their thousands of wells or their tens of thousands of track-lines of airgun surveys – which significantly impact endangered whales. These permits are important because they require measures that would have lowered the impact from all of these activities.

Here’s what the Times says about MMS’ record just since January 2009:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is responsible for protecting endangered species and marine mammals. It has said on repeated occasions that drilling in the gulf affects these animals, but the minerals agency since January 2009 has approved at least three huge lease sales, 103 seismic blasting projects and 346 drilling plans. Agency records also show that permission for those projects and plans was granted without getting the permits required under federal law.

And that awful record began long before Obama took the helm. Here’s one of the government scientists the Times interviewed, who worked at MMS earlier in the decade:

Another biologist who left the agency in 2005 after more than five years and who now works as an industry consultant said that agency officials went out of their way to accommodate the oil and gas industry.

He said, for example, that seismic activity from drilling can have a devastating effect on mammals and fish, but that agency officials rarely enforced the regulations meant to limit those effects.

Based on my own years of advocacy, I can tell you that MMS never obtained a marine mammal permit for seismic surveys or any other activity in the Gulf, or compelled the oil companies to obtain one. The companies decided they couldn’t be bothered. And why should they since the Marine Mammal Protection Act lacks a so-called “citizen suit” provision, making it impossible for the public to enforce the law against them? MMS let them carry on regardless.

And I can add that MMS hardly did any better with the National Environmental Policy Act, the law that requires agencies to “look before they leap” by thinking through the environmental consequences of their actions. In 2004, MMS glibly concluded that “no significant impact” would result from all that seismic blasting and refused to prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement – even after the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration insisted it was necessary.

Which makes Secretary Salazar’s omission of regulation from Tuesday’s restructuring plan all the more disturbing. By all accounts, MMS is an agency incapable of reforming itself. Understating risk, suppressing science, and cutting corners on permitting are part of an agency culture that has transcended Democratic and Republican administrations. Someone – Secretary Salazar, or President Obama, or Congress – is going to have to get tough, and soon.