TWICE AS MANY DOLPHINS, WHALES STILL DYING IN GULF

Stranded spinner dolphin. Credit: qnr via Flickr.

  

The latest NOAA report on unusual strandings of whales and dolphins in the northern Gulf of Mexico finds they're still dying at twice the normal rate 18 months after BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Map of strandings in relation to Deepwater Horizon well. Click for larger version. Credit: NOAA.

  

As you can see in the map above, the most heavily oiled shoreline still corresponds with the most dead whales and dolphins.

Bottlenose dolphins are shown as circles and other species as squares. Premature, stillborn, or neonatal bottlenose dolphins (with actual or estimated lengths of less than 115 cm/45 inches) are shown as a circle with a black dot inside. 

Pink points mark the most recent week of data. Green points mark are all other cases since 1 January 2011.

 

All stranded cetaceans (dolphins and whales) from Franklin County, FL to the Texas/ Louisiana border. Credit: NOAA.

Here you can see how the numbers of strandings have not yet stabilized or even begun to decline. In some cases they're still growing. 

The magenta-colored bars mark strandings per month in the year 2010. The ivory-colored bars mark strandings per month so far this year.

Credit: NOAA.

This graph shows stranded premature, stillborn, or neonatal bottlenose dolphins.

In my Mother Jones article The BP Cover-Up last year, I wrote about the kind of long-term problems the Gulf might face not just from oil but from extreme quantities of oil in very deep water, as well as from chemical dispersant, including dispersant injected into very deep water.

Sadly, it seems that cetaceans�past, present, and future�may be bearing some of those burdens.

Beached sperm whale. Credit: Rachel Denny Clow, Corpus Christi Caller-Times/AP.

  
You might be interested in these other posts describing other scientific findings in the wake of last year's Gulf catastrophe:

• Canadian Seabirds Walloped by BP's Oil
• Gulf Oil Hammers Fish
• Deepwater Horizon's Uncounted Victims
• The BP Cover-Up

THE PELAGIC ZONE

PIELAGO from Rafa Herrero Massieu on Vimeo.

Here's some of the most beautiful footage of one of my favorite worlds�the bottomless blue waters far offshore known as the pelagic zone. Life here shines.

Whether you've had the good fortune to visit this realm or not, you're in for a treat with this short film by Rafa Herrero Massieu, shot in the waters around the Canary Islands. 

A few highlights to look out for, with timecodes:

• Rare underwater footage of a beaked whale (not sure which species): 01:10
• Common dolphins showing their gorgeous colors: 01:16
• An Atlantic spotted dolphin emitting signature whistles: 01:26
• Bryde's whale (I think, or else a Sei whale): 03:23

(Loggerhead turtle. Credit: ukanda via Wikimedia Commons.)

Because big life is relatively sparse in the pelagic zone, encounters between individuals tend to generate a lot of curiosity. 

You can see how all these species investigate the novelty of a person in their world�particularly the pilot whales at 03:00 and the triggerfish at 03:21.

For more of Rafa Herrero Massieu's films, visit his blog: NacidasDelMar (Born of the Sea), or his Vimeo page.

(Strata of the pelagic zone. Measurements in meters. From here.)

VOICE OF THE DOLPHINS

In his newly released book, The Voice of the Dolphins, filmmaker Hardy Jones reports his story of a life spent working with dolphins�working to understand them and working to save them. 

Ultimately, and with a sad irony, this dolphin work proves important to Hardy's own survival. He writes:

This memoir covers three phases of my more than thirty years spent among dolphins and other sea creatures: my initial, exhilarating encounter with friendly dolphins; my subsequent discovery that these creatures are mortally threatened by both slaughter and the chemical contamination of our oceans; and, finally, my diagnosis with a form of blood cancer that has clear links to the same chemical toxins that are causing disastrous consequences among dolphins.

(Atlantic spotted dolphins. Credit: Bmatulis via Wikimedia Commons.)

Like all love stories, Hardy's story with the dolphins�Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas, spinner dolphins in Hawaii and Tahiti, orca in the Pacific Northwest and Norway, to name a few�is full of beauty, discovery, and wonder. 

The book resonates with these passages. Here Hardy describes swimming for the first time in the wild with dolphins who did not flee him... a feat even Jacques Cousteau considered impossible in 1978 when Hardy pulled it off.

Dolphins raced at me from all directions, their eyes wide and bloodshot with excitement. The sea was a cacophony of breaking waves, my own gasping, yells, outboard motors, and the creaky-door buzzing of dolphin sonar. Whenever I surfaced, I tried to get some idea of how the filming was going, but no one was even remotely coherent. Words tumbled out of ecstatic faces...

I made a surface dive and swam down among a mixed group of juvenile and adult dolphins, blending into their formations, banking and turning in mid-water. It seemed I had no need to breathe, that I�d assumed properties of a dolphin just by being among them. When my air did run out, I clawed my way back to the surface and gasped for breath, often to find a trio of dolphins accompanying me.

(Photo from here.)

But like many love stories, Hardy's with the dolphins is also full of pain and sickness. In 1979 he went to Japan to film the slaughter of dolphins. This was the first of many trips to talk, listen, and argue with the fishermen in defense of the dolphins�all done decades before The Cove filmmakers got there. 

Hardy writes of being haunted by the two irreconcilable dolphin worlds he'd come to know:

Again and again, especially in early morning hours when I couldn�t sleep, my thoughts returned to the brutal images of dolphins piled on the beaches of Iki... I placed an aerial photograph of the dead dolphins littering the beach at Iki on my desk. Next to that photograph, stood a framed print of two dolphins, looking at me as we swam side by side in the turquoise waters of the little Bahama Bank.  

(Shamu Stadium, SeaWorld. Credit: David Bjorgen via Wikipedia.) 

Hardy's first film on the dolphin slaughter in Japan was called Island at the Edge�a masterpiece of restrained, elegant reporting. But that was only the beginning.

In the course of my travels to Japan, I�d come to realize that... a major part of the incentive to local fishermen to pursue and kill dolphins is cash put on the table by international dolphin traffickers who come to Taiji to pick out "show-quality" dolphins. They pay enormous amounts, as much as $150,000 for a dolphin trained in Taiji. The service includes trainers who will accompany the locally trained dolphin to its final destination in one of the many dolphinaria in Japan, as well as to China, Korea, French Polynesia, Turkey and Egypt. For dolphins, this must be the equivalent of an alien abduction. The captive dolphins eventually end up in a cement tank performing for fish in aquarium shows and "swim-with-dolphins" programs around the world.

(Dolphins in tuna nets. Photo from here.)

From stories of the brutal dolphin entertainment industry, Hardy was eventually drawn into other problems, including the monumental tragedy of six million dolphins drowned in tuna nets.

His film If Dolphins Could Talk helped tip that story in a new direction.

When the show hit the air, the results were explosive. The emotional impact of the footage was amplified by a short PSA hosted by George C. Scott that included a 900 number, produced for the show by Stan Minasian of the Marine Mammal Fund. The result was a pile of six thousand telegrams hitting the desk of the chairman of Starkist tuna demanding an end to catching tuna by setting nets on dolphins. Within weeks, Starkist announced that it would no longer accept tuna caught on dolphin. The dolphin-safe label was born and is today overseen by Earth Island Institute and the Marine Mammal Fund. My film synergized with years of hard work by several organizations and was a major conservation victory.

In 2003, Hardy was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer. A few weeks later, he was offered an exciting film project with the PBS series Nature. The film that would eventually come to define him was called The Dolphin Defender.

In follow-up conversations with [PBS], we mapped out the general shape of the film that would be an episodic journey through my career of making films about dolphins. It would combine archival footage shot over a period of several decades with newly shot footage that would fill in gaps in the story and bring it up to date... I hadn�t looked at a lot of that old film for years, and as I started to screen bits and pieces, memories flooded back with a combination of exhilaration, nostalgia, and not a few thoughts of how young I looked. The reaction was, no doubt, intensified by my new-found sense of mortality. 

Amazingly, Hardy eventually discovered that his rare disease was not rare in dolphins. Investigating further, he found that places where dolphins were suffering were also myeloma hot-spots for people.

But I'll leave the rest of that amazing chapter of Hardy's story for you to read.

(Hardy Jones.)

There are a lot of old friends in Hardy's book, and many facile sketches of others in that strange realm where dolphins, diving, and filmmaking intersect. I'm there too, because Hardy and I worked together for 20 years making nature documentaries. I shared many of the adventures and some of the horrors he describes in The Voice of the Dolphins.

After more than three decades, Hardy's relationship with the dolphins he loves and admires has mellowed. You can get a sense of that in this clip (below) from BlueVoice.org�Hardy's nonprofit dedicated to fighting to end the slaughter of dolphins and to exposing levels of toxins in the marine environment harmful to marine mammals and humans. Hardy included.



Among Dolphins from BlueVoice.org on Vimeo.

So buy the book. It's vivid, vibrant, impassioned, generous, inspirational, and packed with one good sea yarn after another.

Best of all The Voice of the Dolphins is loaded with dolphins�old friends with names and personalities and great stories that only Hardy can tell on their behalf.

DEEPWATER HORIZON'S UNCOUNTED VICTIMS

(Killer whales. Photo by Pittman, courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.)

A new paper in Conservation Letters calculates that the numbers of whales and dolphins killed in BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster could be 50 times higher than the number of carcasses found. 

The authors�a high-powered list of renowned cetacean researchers from Canada, the US, Australia, and Scotland (including Scott Krause, who I filmed years ago for a documentary about North Atlantic right whales)�write of a general misperception of the Deepwater Horizon impact:

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.

(Atlantic spotted dolphins. Photo by Bmatulis, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Compared to the 1989 Exxon Valdez, with its iconic oiled otters and high body counts, the Deepwater Horizon seems, well, not so bad.

The authors point out that "only" 101 dead cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) were found in the Northern Gulf of Mexico as of 7 November 2010. The number's misleading though.

The issue arises when policymakers, legislators, or biologists treat these carcass-recovery counts as though they were complete counts or parameters estimated from some representative sample, when in fact, they are opportunistic observations. Our study suggests that these opportunistic observations should be taken to estimate only the bare minimum number of human-caused mortalities.

(Humpback whale. Photo by Whit Welles Wwelles14, via Wikimedia Commons.)

So how many more whales, dolphins, and porpoises actually died? That problem is tough to figure to begin with and is compounded by a dearth of data in the Gulf�a fact that will work greatly in BP's favor when the time comes to levy fines.

The Gulf of Mexico is a semi-enclosed subtropical sea that forms essentially one ecosystem with many demographically independent cetacean populations. Some of these cetacean populations, such as killer whales (Orcinus orca), false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens), melonheaded whales (Peponocephala electra), and several beaked whale species, appear to be quite small, are poorly studied, or are found in the pelagic realm where they could have been exposed to oil and yet never strand. Small, genetically isolated populations of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) could have experienced substantial losses either inshore or offshore.

(Mother and calf bottlenose dolphins. Photo by M. Herko, courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.) 

Two methods of extrapolation could shed light on how many cetaceans BP's disaster killed:

1. Compare abundance before the disaster to abundance after�but since we don't know the population size of whale and dolphins species in the Gulf before hand we're unlikely to notice anything short of "the most catastrophic decline" and maybe not even that.
2. Count the number of carcasses recovered�knowing that many will evade our count, having sunk, decayed, been scavenged, or drifted away. So adjust the counts upward to estimate total mortality. This approach is used to estimate bird deaths at power lines, where, in at least one instance, we now know that bird body counts underestimate total actual deaths by a whopping 32 percent.
   

The authors worked the two methods as best they could and added something more.

Given the magnitude of the spill and complexity of the response, quantifying the ecological impacts will take a long time. To contribute to this effort, we examined historical data from the Northern Gulf of Mexico to evaluate whether cetacean carcass counts in this region have previously been reliable indicators of mortality, and may therefore accurately represent deaths caused by the Deepwater Horizon/BP event.

(Sperm whale. Photo courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.) 

Their methods and analysis suggest that an average of 4,474 cetaceans died in the northern Gulf every year between 2003 and 2007 from all causes, human and natural. Yet since an average of only 17 bodies were found in those years, the body count represented only ~0.4 percent of total deaths.
 

Consider, for example, one sperm whale being detected as a carcass, and a necropsy identi?ed oiling as a contributing factor in the whale�s death. If the carcass-detection rate for sperm whales is 3.4%, then it is plausible that 29 sperm whale deaths represents the best estimate of total mortality, given no additional information. If, for example, 101 cetacean carcasses were recovered overall, and all deaths were attributed to oiling, the average-recovery rate (2%) would translate to 5,050 carcasses, given the 101 carcasses detected.

Those are chilling numbers. Period. But also in light of the relatively tiny populations of cetaceans in the Gulf. Especially since most if not all cetaceans are highly social, and since oil and chemical dispersants likely injured, sickened, or killed entire clusters, schools, pods, matrilines, or groups at the same time�and may still be doing so.

The authors describe the near-lethal affect of the Exxon Valdez disaster on one well-known and well-studied pod of killer whales in Alaska.

In the ?rst year after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, the AT1 group of "transient" killer whales experienced a 41% loss; there has been no reproduction since the spill. Although the cause of the apparent sterility is unknown, the lesson serves as an important reminder that immediate death is not the only factor that can lead to long-term loss of population viability.

(Pilot whale mother and calf. Photo by Clark Anderson via Wikimedia Commons.)

The paper:

Rob Williams, Shane Gero, Lars Bejder, John Calambokidis, Scott D. Kraus, David Lusseau, Andrew J. Read, & Jooke Robbins (2011). Underestimating the damage: interpreting cetacean carcass recoveries in the context of the Deepwater Horizon/BP incident Conservation Letters : 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2011.00168.x

HOW TO CATCH A MULLET

This short video is an excerpt from the BBC Life series showing the amazing cooperative hunting technique of bottlenose dolphins working Florida Bay in pursuit of mullet. This video was published on their new website, Life Is, which will release monthly embeddable videos from the entire BBC catalogue of nature programming. I'm glad to hear it.

The research behind this film was published in a 2005 paper: A division of labour with role specialization in group�hunting bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) off Cedar Key, Florida. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2004.2937 Proc. R. Soc. B 22 January 2005 vol. 272 no. 1559 135-140. 

From the abstract:

Individual role specialization during group hunting is extremely rare in mammals. Observations on two groups of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in Cedar Key, Florida revealed distinctive behavioural roles during group feeding. In each group, one individual was consistently the �driver�, herding the fishes in a circle toward the remaining �barrier� dolphins. Aerial fish�capture rates differed between groups, as well as between the driver and barrier dolphins, in one group but not in the other. These differences between the two groups may reflect differences in group stability or in prey school size.

(Mullet from here.)

I wrote about mullet living in the waters around the atoll of Rangiroa�and a different way of catching them�in my book The Fragile Edge. Here's an excerpt:

The littlest ?sh are less than six inches long, and their schools are sleek and whippy as cat-o�-nine-tails. They are behaviorally circumspect, skittering only through the protected water around the dock�s pilings. In contrast, the schools of the larger mullets, with individuals reaching more than a foot in length, parade aggressively under the dock, around the pilings, and out into the open water, their pectoral ?ns ?ipping open and closed like golden fans
as they root out the diatomaceous and detrital scum of the sandy bottom. As one of the few species of ?sh that feed almost exclusively on single-celled plants�diatoms, dino?agellates, and phytoplankton�vegetarian mullet have a taste unlike any other ?sh, or so I�m told. 

Sucr� et huileux (sweet and oily), says the Tahitian woman who has joined me on the dock with her hand-?shing line. She has settled onto the pier not far from me, her bare legs and feet dangling over the edge, the sunset square in front of her, where all sunsets always seem to be in Rangiroa. Like many Tahitian women, her hair reaches past her waist, blue-black and shiny as the inside of a mussel shell, the long plait unfastened at the bottom, the hair holding the shape from habit alone. 

She cooks the mullet whole in a pan with just salt, no oil, she says, since the ?sh are oily enough. Sometimes she adds milk. I recognize her from the hotel, where she works as a maid, and this dock is apparently one of the perks of her job because I�ve seen her ?shing here most evenings. She seems relaxed and happy at the end of her workday, carrying nothing of the emotional and psychic exhaustion of a Western worker at shift�s end�and this is one of the many miracles not only of Polynesia but of French Polynesia, where the Gallic embrace of the sensual allows time for the enjoyment of life as it comes.

It's possible this video (the Oprah-Winfrey-narrated version) will stream only on computers based in the US. Sorry if that's true. Copyright Is, too.

(Photo by Endless Vacation on Flickr)