Pelagic Caribbean seabirds found in oil spill response

The US Fish and Wildlife Service has made the summary data available for seabirds that were found in the oil spill recovery. The report is available here: http://www.fws.gov/home/dhoilspill/collectionreports.html

Below is a tedious listing of the dead birds found. The interesting thing is that any of the pelagics were found at all. The recovery rate for a bird oiled 150 km out at sea and subject to burning and pick up in oil collecting boats could not be better than 3% and is likely less than 1%.

We should have been out there in a boat dropping marked bird carcasses but how were we supposed to know.

Especially for Masked Boobies and Audubon's Shearwaters, we should multiply their numbers by a factor of between 33 and 100 to get a minimum estimate of the number of actual dead birds. For the nearshore species, recovery probably mirrored that of Alaska during the Valdez spill where they estimated recovery at about 10%.

The other outstanding questions are where exactly were each of these birds found and did the birds that were found alive survive. I can't imagine a situation where you would catch one of these things alive unless it was injured or a young, starving fledgeling. One should be able to detect if it is a young of the year bird from date it was found, plumage, molt, and wing proportions, at least for a shearwater, but most of these carcasses may have already been destroyed.

For Caribbean seabirds, the results are as follows:

Bermuda Petrel and Black-capped Petrel - none found

Audubon's Shearwater: 3 total birds. One oiled, dead bird. One dead bird with no visible oil. One live bird with no visible oil. There were also 4 dead, unidentified shearwaters. Three had no visible oil. For the other, the Oiling status was not reported (?).

White-tailed and Red-billed Tropicbirds: none found

Brown Pelicans - 738 were found. 290 had no signs of oil (187 dead, 103 alive). 259 were oiled (111 dead and 148 alive). 189 were dead but oiling status was not reported. We don't have the data, but I assume most if not all were of the North American subspecies (Pelicanus occidentalis carolinensis) rather than the Caribbean subspecies (P. o. occidentalis).

Masked Boobies: Of the 3 breeding boobies in the region, only Masked Boobies were found. There were 8 total birds. 4 were dead and had no outward oil signs. 2 were alive without signs of oiling. 2 others were alive and oiled.

Magnificent Frigatebird: 7 were found one dead with no sign of oil, 2 dead with signs of oil, 2 alive with signs of oil, and 2 dead where the oiling status was not reported.


Laughing Gulls: 2654 - 1208 dead, no oil, 256 alive no oil; 704 dead, oiled, 201 alive and oiled; 285 dead, oiling status not reported)

Least Terns: 106 - 40 dead no oil, 5 alive no oil; 43 dead oiled, 6 alive oiled; 12 dead status not reported.

Royal Terns: 270 - 83 dead, no oil, 28 alive, no oil; 92 dead, oiled, 47 alive, oiled; 20 dead no report of oiling status

Sandwich Tern: 63-20, 6; 18, 10, 9

Roseate Tern - 0 (but there were 107 unidentified terns: 50, 1; 37, 1; 18

Sooty Tern - 0

Bridled Tern - 0

Brown Noddy - 0

Black Noddy - 0

Double - crested Cormorants - 18 - 10, 5; 0,1; 2

Oil settling to the bottom

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/17/scientists-toxic-oil-settling-on-gulf-floor/?hpt=T2

New evidence is confirming that the oil has not disappeared but is settling to the bottom and contaminating organisms there. 

The Aftermath

The oil has finally stopped flowing. We don't really know how much oil spilled, but its within the ballpark of 4.9 billion barrels, we're told. Some say it has been eaten up by bacteria, along with the dispersant. Conservatives say it's another environmentalist exaggeration, like climate change, evolution, and atomic theory. Some say it is dispersed throughout the Gulf and will continue to affect the wildlife in the deep ocean for a long time to come. I recommend reading this article from Julia Whitty of Mother Jones, who details some of the vulnerable wildlife of the Gulf ecosystem and points out that the glowy prognostications and public relations campaign by BP may not tell the whole story.

We lucked out in the Bahamas region because the winds all summer have been strong out of the East, pushing water into the Gulf and preventing large surface plumes of oil from entering the Gulf Stream. Our luck was apparently Texas' bad fortune, in that they had oil pushed onto their beaches and deeper waters.

I had an interesting discussion with a conservative friend this weekend who pointed out the standard talking point from conservative blogs (e.g. http://www.redstate.com/vladimir/2010/06/26/a-little-perspective-on-the-bp-spill/) that the amount of oil estimated to have spilled (4.9 million barrels = 206 million gallons; http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/bpspillstats/graphics/oilbudget-noaa/image_view_fullscreen) would only fill 17.7% of the Louisiana Superdome, while the Gulf of Mexico has a volume of water equal to 550 million Superdomes. While it's easy to break down that statistic for how deceptive it is (the spill happened in one small section of the gulf, one gallon of oil can pollute many thousands of gallons of water when dispersed into it or spread on top of it, organisms magnify the oil up the food chain, and so on), he went further and expounded that deepwater drilling might be a lot better than shallow drilling because a spill won't hit land as easily and can be dispersed throughout the ocean.Not wanting to have a pointless shouting match at a 3 year old's birthday party, I left it with a "we'll just see what happens as we learn something about the effects of the spill."

We still have almost no data about what this spill has done to the ecology of the Gulf by affecting important plankton and animal populations (whales, dolphins, manatees, sea turtles, seabirds, life at the deep scattering layer, Bluefin Tuna, and so on). Scientists will be studying this for decades, and I would be so happy if BP is right, but everything I've learned about chemistry, fragile ocean food webs, and sensitive long-lived animals at the top of those food webs tells me that this prediction that "the spill is over and everything will just go back to the way it was" sounds too good to be true. We can't go by what we see - beaches that are cleaned up or fish and shellfish that are still alive right now. The big question is what will there be in 10 years? Will parts of the food web fail or will certain species just disappear, like the herring in Prince William Sound did after Valdez? I can say with all honesty that I hope BP is correct, but I expect that they are almost exactly wrong.