A month after an explosionon a deepwater oil-drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico unleashed the biggest oil spill inUnited States history, the oil began to creep
into Louisiana’s coastal marshes. It threatened crabs and oysters. It lapped against the stalks of marsh grass, choking off the roots’ oxygen and threatening the lifeblood of this richly pro- ductive ecosystem. Dead jellyfish bobbed offshore, their clear globes stained with oil. And as pelicans dive-bombed for fish, they emerged with a coating of sludge.Watching one bird struggle unsuccessfully to fly, yet display enough strength to evade rescuers, Robert J. Barham, head of the Louisiana Department ofWildlife and Fisheries, said, “It’s heart-rend- ing—a blow to the pit of your stomach.”
An army of more than 20,000 peo-
ple tried to hold back the dark tide, shoveling tar from beaches and laying down millions of feet of oil booms. They were fighting not just millions of gallons of oil but also long odds. The grim lesson from past spills: The techniques used to corral and skim up oil are mostly just “public relations,” says Robert Howarth, ecology profes- sor at Cornell University and a vet- eran of the 1989 Exxon Valdez and other spills. “The physical methods almost always don’t work,” he says.
NWF ON SITE
COMBATTING THE GULF OIL SPILL Within days of the Deepwater Hori- zon explosion, NWF wildlife experts were on the Gulf of Mexico observ- ing effects on wildlife both on land and sea. NWF also has been deploy- ing volunteer teams of local birders, hunters and anglers in key places around the gulf to report on imper- iled wildlife and to track the spread of oil. While urging that the federal government, not BP, should be moni- toring the disaster and determining the extent of damage, NWF has cre- ated a formal science team to exam- ine spill issues such as the use of dispersants and the potential impacts on wildlife. The organization also is campaigning for a permanent ban on drilling in critical polar bear habitat in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, where drilling may be even riskier than in the gulf. To learn more and find out how you can help, visit www.nwf.org/oilspill.
| 32 | NATIONAL WILDLIFE Doug Inkley, NWF senior scien-
tists, calls an oil spill a Humpty Dumpty situation. “Once the oil is in the water, you are never going to recover even 10 percent of it.” Those odds will leave it mostly up to nature’s cleaning crew,microbes. By the second month of the spill, oxygen levels in the deep gulf were dropping—evidence that bacteria were already on the job, burning oxygen as they munched on oil. “The microbes have to save us again,” says University of Georgia marine scientist Samantha Joye, who was out at sea tracking the oil plumes. In the open water, bacteria are capable of consuming the oil in a few months. But in sediments and marshes, where oxygen is scarce or absent, the process slows dramatically. Forty years after a spill from the barge Florida off Cape Cod, and 21 years after Exxon Valdez, oil is still buried inmud and gravel. The long life of spilled oil is one
reason the eventual environmental and economic toll of the current disas- ter is hard to predict, scientists say. Complicating the assessment further, no previous spill took place in such deep water, and none involved the use of so many hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals to disperse the oil. “Unfortunately, this will be the biggest experiment that we’ve ever had in oil-spill research,” says biologist Carys L. Mitchelmore of the Univer- sity of Maryland Center for Environ- mental Science, whose own work shows that even small amounts of dis- persant chemicals harm corals. If there was one sliver of good news
in this huge environmental and human tragedy, it was the effort mounted to save birds and other ani-
mals affected by the oil. In an indus- trial building turned wildlife rescue station in Fort Jackson, Louisiana, for example, workers clad in blue slickers and long yellow gloves sprayed a dilute solution ofDawn detergent on a brown pelican covered in oil. Using their hands, swabs and Q-tips, they delicately washed the bird from beak to toe. “It’s almost like shampooing your hair,” explained Jay Holcomb, executive director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, which was working with Tri-State Bird Res- cue and Research (under contractwith the U.S. Fish andWildlife Service) to save oiled animals. By mid-June, res- cuers at four wildlife rehabilitation centers in the gulf had cleaned, nour- ished and released several dozen peli- cans, northern gannets and herons. Even this seemingly successful
operation is not without controversy. “It’s a humanitarian effort that shouldn’t be confused with really making a difference to the birds and their populations,” warns Oregon ornithologist and biological consultant Brian Sharp, who helped determine the number of birds killed by the Exxon Valdez spill. Consider the bleak track record.
Biologist James Estes, of the Univer- sity of California–Santa Cruz, calcu- lated that each sea otter washed and released after Exxon Valdez cost $80,000—and two-thirds of themdied within two years anyway; biologists estimate that natural annual mortality for the species is about 6 percent. An estimated 375,000 to 700,000 birds were killed by the Exxon Valdez spill, Sharp says, compared with 800 res- cued (at a cost of $41 million)—and