Michael Jasny's Blog: Reviving the World's Oceans

Marine Mammals and the Gulf Spill

2010-04-30T20:38:19Z

Sperm whales have long had a particular attachment 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. Yankee whalers liked to hunt this area more than a hundred years ago, and in 2002, when biologists sought out the Gulf’s sperm whales as part of a government-industry study, this is where they came.

Now much of that whale nursery is occupied by the massive oil slick that is spreading across the Gulf.

As with all other sea life, marine mammals and oil do not mix well. The most immediate harm as the slick approaches shore may be from oiling and inhaling toxic fumes, which can cause brain lesions, disorientation, and death. Some 300 harbor seals are thought to have died from inhalation alone during the Exxon Valdez disaster. In the Gulf, the most vulnerable animals may be bottlenose dolphins, whose dozens of tiny populations fill the bays, passes, and channels along the northern shore. Some of these dolphin stocks have only a few dozen members, and under the right conditions, the incoming slick could devastate them.

But that of course is only the beginning. Once oil gets into the sediment along the beaches, it will work up the food chain through zooplankton, invertebrates, and fish. In Prince William Sound – ground zero for the Exxon Valdez spill – chronic oil exposure has been worst among species like sea otters that feed on bottom-dwelling invertebrates and along the shore. In the Gulf, it is again perhaps those small populations of coastal bottlenose dolphins that stand at greatest risk.

And what of the sperm whale mothers and calves off the Mississippi Delta? They’re already suffering the loss of a substantial part of their habitat due to the enormous size of the spill, and, like virtually everything else that lives in the area, they’ll go on consuming contaminated prey long after the oil is dispersed. And this is on top of the booming of the industry’s exploratory airguns, which may seriously be impacting their ability to feed.

Marine mammals, sea birds, fish and fisheries – not to mention the loss of human life. It seems to take a catastrophe every twenty years or so to remind people of the incalculable risks of offshore oil.

Photos courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce.

Boom, Baby, Boom

2010-03-31T20:46:07Z

In the debate over offshore oil, it’s important to remember that environmental impacts don’t start with drilling. Before companies drill for oil and gas, they explore for oil and gas, and it’s not a pretty scene. Industry scopes the seafloor using long arrays of airguns that send extremely intense blasts of noise into the water column, about once every ten seconds, for weeks or months at a time. The impacts that this continual booming has on the marine environment – on species as varied as right whales and cod – are profound.

Today President Obama announced that he would open a huge expanse of ocean, from Maryland to Florida and the eastern Gulf of Mexico, to new exploration and drilling. For decades, a federal moratorium effectively barred the oil and gas industry from running airgun surveys along the east coast of the U.S. But these restrictions were lifted during the Bush years, and Obama’s announcement today could well end with airguns booming up and down the eastern seaboard.

For months now the exploration industry has been lining up at the trough. Spectrum Geo has proposed shooting 112,500 line miles of surveys from Massachusetts down to Florida; Western Geco another 54,900 miles between New Jersey and Georgia; and CGGVeritas more than 42,000 miles running southwards from Maine. And that’s just for starters.

Yet the science shows that the industry’s airguns disrupt the marine environment on a massive scale. In 2006, a single survey off the northeast caused endangered fin whales to completely stop vocalizing – a behavior essential to their ability to mate and feed – over an area at least 100,000 square nautical miles in size. In Norway, a single survey so deranged the behavior of fish that catch rates plummeted over thousands of square miles, and fishermen in some parts of the world have begun demanding compensation.

In short, airgun surveys are “the most intrusive form of man-made undersea noise short of actual naval warfare,” in the words of one prominent biologist from Cornell. That’s not just the proverbial “camel’s nose under the tent” for drilling – it’s a pretty big part of the camel itself. And it’s no way to balance the country’s energy needs with environmental protection.

Sea Change for Sonar?

2010-01-19T21:26:23Z

Barack Obama took office last January with a long to-undo list of terrible rules, decisions, and policies that the previous occupant (as Garrison Keillor might call him) inflicted on the environment. A few of these terrible rules had to do with the Navy’s use of mid-frequency active sonar – a technology known to injure and kill some species of whales and cause widespread disruptions in many others. As we reported one year ago, the Bush administration was doing its utmost to finalize the fed’s position on Navy sonar, in the form of three major rulemakings affecting most of the continental United States, before the torch was passed.

Change comes slowly, but sometimes it does come. Today the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced a new initiative that, at its core, is focused on identifying important marine mammal habitat where the Navy trains. This is welcome news for those of us who have repeatedly sued the Navy and NOAA over their failure to keep any habitat off-limits to sonar use.

Here are some of the highlights of today’s announcement (available here):

NOAA recognizes that “ongoing mitigation efforts must do more” to protect marine mammals from sonar, in part because of the “difficulties of limiting the impact of active sonar where the mitigation efforts depend on visual sighting of whales.” In other words: more must be done because keeping abreast of whales around a sonar ship (the Navy’s current practice) just doesn’t cut it. Even making this basic acknowledgment amounts to a major shift in Bush-era policy, which insisted, despite abundant scientific opinion and court findings to the contrary, that the Navy’s measures were sufficient.
The administration puts a great deal of emphasis on avoiding habitat: “Protecting important marine mammal habitat is generally recognized to be the most effective mitigation measure currently available.” This is another important break with Bush policy, which gave the Navy carte blanche over hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean, with few if any meaningful restrictions. With this statement, NOAA has put itself in line with the prevailing consensus of the scientific community.
Going forward, NOAA has committed itself to conducting a series of workshops to identify important habitat; to assess the cumulative impacts of sonar, oil exploration, and other sources of ocean noise; and to improve monitoring of marine wildlife on Navy ranges. It also says that it will join negotiations between the Navy and NRDC over sonar mitigation – another welcome development.

So what does this all mean, practically, for the oceans? NOAA is clear that the new information it hopes to glean on habitat and monitoring could translate into revisions of the Bush rules and into more (and more effective) protections for marine mammals. Whether it will or not depends in part, of course, on the public, on the scientific community, and on NOAA itself, which has a clear mandate to protect marine mammals from sonar under federal law, but in the past has been bowled over by its more powerful sister agency.

NOAA, under Dr. Lubchenco, has put a premium on “marine spatial planning” – a very promising form of ocean zoning that my colleague Sarah Chasis has written about before. The administration’s efforts on sonar could dovetail nicely with its larger plans for the oceans. So we’re hopeful (and engaged), but as with many of Obama’s environmental initiatives, there’s still a long road ahead.

Scientists to Obama: Less Ocean Noise, Please

2009-10-07T19:44:04Z

If, like me, you're desperately concerned about the fate of the oceans, probably the most hopeful development this year is President Obama's launch of a new National Oceans Policy. The task force he convened in June recently came out with its Interim Report and, as my colleague Sarah Chasis wrote at the time, there's much to celebrate. Still, in a high-level document, there were bound to be a few omissions. One of the most salient - as a group of scientists said in a path-breaking statement released today - is the growing problem of undersea noise.

Navy sonar has received the lion's share of media attention, but it's not the only noise-maker in the sea. Biologists are deeply concerned about the gamut of sources that are contributing to this rapidly rising form of pollution: not just sonar, but also airguns used in oil-and-gas exploration, supertankers and large cargo ships, pile-drivers and dredgers used in construction, and on and on. When whales turn up on the beach with bleeding around their ears, we know there's a serious problem; ironically, the chronic noise that's destroying the ability of whales and other species to hear, feed, and find mates is more of a silent killer.

Today's statement from a group of marine scientists describes the problem eloquently:

The ocean is a world of sound. Animals such as whales, dolphins, and fish depend on hearing for communicating, foraging, finding mates, detecting predators, and maintaining family and social groups. Human activity is rapidly altering the ocean's natural acoustic habitats. Industrial and commercial underwater noise propagates over enormous distances, affecting millions of square miles of ocean. For example, background noise at the same low frequencies vital to many marine species has increased 100-fold in some locations over the last 50 years. This growing fog of noise is shrinking the perceptual world of whales and other marine life, undermining their ability to "see" with sound. Chronic noise exposure is a recently recognized, largely hidden threat that can reduce long-term survival rates, while exposure to loud noise can result in injury, and even death in certain circumstances. Today few places in the world's oceans remain free of noises from human activities.

The profile of the issue is almost certain to grow. At this moment, Interior Secretary Salazar is deciding whether to open portions of the outer continental shelf to new oil and gas exploration; some states, like Florida, are considering drilling right along the coast; and environmentalists fear a new and untrammeled Gold Rush in offshore development.

With all of this activity looming, the scientists are clear about what's needed. They urge President Obama towards an ocean policy similar to our successful "no net loss" of wetlands policy of the 1990s: "that no net increase in ambient noise occurs in U.S. coastal waters and that a schedule be established to realize substantial reductions in ocean noise by 2020." Remarkably, they write, many of the tools needed to curb the problem are currently available or soon will be.

What is needed - of course and as always - is the political will. Inclusion of undersea noise in the National Oceans Policy would make a very good start.

Navy Games

2009-04-09T22:23:26Z

The Obama Administration has put a premium on good science in environmental policy, but some folks in the Navy don't seem to have gotten the message.

In a study soon to be published in Biology Letters, researchers exposed a captive bottlenose dolphin to recordings of Navy sonar and then gave the animal a hearing test, to see whether it suffered hearing loss. In fact, the study is the latest in a line of similar experiments that the Navy has sponsored, usually on bottlenose dolphins since the Navy maintains several of the animals in captivity. In this case, it took higher sonar levels to produce hearing loss in that one animal than might have been predicted from earlier studies.

That's useful to know, and it adds to our existing knowledge about sonar's effects on marine mammal hearing. The problem is that the Navy, hungry for any science that might justify its recalcitrance on sonar policy, wants it to mean a lot more than it says.

Simply put, studies of hearing loss like this one don't address the central concerns that scientists have about sonar: its widespread impacts on marine mammal behavior, its long-term effects on marine mammal health, and its startling capacity to injure and kill certain species of whales.

Let's take mortalities first. Deep-diving beaked whales - exposed to levels of sonar much lower than those needed to cause hearing loss - have consistently turned up with hemorrhaging in their brains and emboli in their livers and other organ tissue. The leading theory is that Navy sonar drives them to alter their highly-evolved dive patterns in ways that induce "bends"-like injuries. This view is supported by multiple peer-reviewed articles on dive physiology, tissue pathology, and other subjects. And while a number of other mechanisms remain possible (an expert workshop organized by the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission identified several), hearing loss is not among them.

How to prevent these injuries is a deadly serious problem given that beaked whales make up one-sixth of all marine mammal species on earth. But the new study doesn't move us any closer to a solution and, quite reasonably, doesn't attempt to.

Nor does the new study contribute to our knowledge of an even more important problem: sonar's impacts on whale behavior. Navy sonar is known to cause whales and other marine mammals to stop vocalizing and feeding, to abandon habitat, to panic, to put themselves at risk of ship collision, and, in some cases, to strand and die. These impacts occur in some species at very low levels of sonar exposure and affect vast numbers of animals. Even the Navy estimates that its exercises off the coastal United States would significantly impact marine mammals more than 2 million times each year. All of these behaviors may be critical to survival, not just of individual animals but of entire populations, many of which are already endangered or depleted.

The new study has little, if anything, to say about these critical behavioral effects, and rightly so. "Boris," the dolphin used in the experiment, wasn't a wild animal or even an ordinary captive animal, but one that was specifically trained for years to stay on task during experiments.

But that won't stop the Navy from spinning the study as though it were some Archimedean lever displacing years of research on completely different issues. Hopefully, the press will put on the brakes.

Whales and Oil

2008-06-19T19:00:34Z

As offshore oil gets dragged once again onto the political scene, it’s worth remembering the environmental costs that led to the adoption of an offshore moratorium in the first place.

One of the seminal events in the modern environmental movement was the 1969 blow-out of Union Oil Platform A, which sent millions of gallons of crude into the Santa Barbara Channel and tarred beaches for miles along the California coast. The Santa Barbara spill became an object lesson for the hazards of offshore drilling, a lesson that has since been relearned in the Gulf of Mexico, the Black Sea, and many other locales here and abroad. But even aside from the occasional headline-gathering calamity, the search for oil at sea remains an environmentally risky business, and not only for its direct effects on humans.

Two weeks ago, for example, some 200 melon-headed whales stranded in the shallow waters of Loza Bay on the northwest side of Madagascar. ExxonMobil had been conducting an oil-and-gas survey nearby, using sonar a few days prior to the strandings to map the seafloor and later booting up powerful airguns to look for deposits below.

Melon-headed whales are deep-water animals that very seldom strand but seem acutely sensitive to man-made noise. A huge pod of melon-heads came into Hanalei Bay, on Kauai, in July 2004 as the U.S. Navy ran a major sonar exercise offshore. In that case residents managed after a day of struggle to lead the whales back out to sea, but the news from Madagascar is grim by comparison, with more and more animals reported dead. ExxonMobil suspended its operations, and an investigation into the strandings has begun.

Biologists who’ve looked at the problem of oil-and-gas exploration are concerned less about mass strandings than about subtler, more far-reaching effects on marine mammals: things like habitat abandonment and interference with breeding and foraging, which are not so easily observed but are probably occurring on a population scale. The die-offs in Loza Bay are just a reminder of what offshore oil means for the creatures who live offshore.