Coast Guard personnel who had been in contact with the oil. Kaitlin Frasier remembers the day in that her Ph. The Gulf of Mexico is home to 21 species of marine mammal, most of which humans rarely see—so scientists have to listen. The sounds these animals emit can reveal which species are still active many years after the spill, and which have declined. One species Frasier hears less and less these days is the pantropical spotted dolphin. The visual observers called them rats because they were crawling all over the Gulf.
And now, we just get way fewer encounters on our acoustic data. For many species, results are not this clear. Marine mammals are important indicators of the overall health of the ocean , so studying them can tell scientists a great deal about their environment. After the spill, scientists found that half of those coral colonies—colorful, fan-shaped creatures called gorgonian octocoral— surveyed had been injured to some extent. The ones we found to be injured are on the order of decades to hundreds of years old.
Corals are important habitat for species such as shrimp, crabs, grouper, and snapper. Now, his team is preparing for future disasters, mapping deep-sea corals and developing a coral database with more than , records so far. The team also has a seven-year plan to help coral rebound, which includes traveling to the seafloor using divers or a remotely operated vehicle and cloning or transplanting a few hundred coral from one spot to another.
The Gulf of Mexico is home to five species of sea turtle , all of which are protected under the Endangered Species Act. The move resulted in new protections for nesting beaches in Texas and Mexico, and requirements that shrimp fisheries in the Gulf use excluder devices to prevent the reptiles from being captured in trawls.
Birds were among the hardest-hit animals immediately after the spill, says Erik Johnson , director of bird conservation for Audubon Louisiana. See photos of birds and other wildlife coated with oil. Also affected: Up to 32 percent of laughing gulls and up to a quarter of all brown pelicans. Learn how nature can bounce back from an oil spill. But just as birds overall were most devastated, in some cases they seem to be showing some of the strongest recovery.
What was a bust for birds turned into a temporary boon for some fish: Scientists think that the lack of birds in the skies over the Gulf of Mexico is one reason some populations of fish exploded after the spill. There were twice as many Gulf menhaden , for example, in the years following the spill as in four decades before, likely because so many fish-eating birds were absent. Other fish species have shown evidence of having been harmed by oil, including nearly two thirds of all Gulf sturgeon, a threatened species.
Studies of the economically valuable spotted seatrout and red drum found that fish in oiled areas showed reduced reproduction, and that even years after the spill, oil remaining in the environment is still toxic to fish larvae. Read how some fish deformities have been linked to the spill. Recent research that tested 2, different fish across the Gulf found evidence of oil exposure in all 91 species sampled, suggesting that the impacts of the spill are widespread and ongoing.
The Unified Command Wildlife Branch relied heavily on the existing stranding network in the Gulf to respond to stranded, distressed, and injured marine mammals, as those organizations already were federally authorized to conduct marine mammal response activities under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Aerial surveys to assess the extent of oil contamination also provided a platform for opportunistic sightings of injured and dead marine mammals. It characterized research efforts, highlighted the overall need to improve assessment and monitoring of marine mammals in the Gulf, and outlined priorities for future research and restoration efforts, stressing the importance of long-term monitoring studies of both individual marine mammals and marine mammal populations.
In April , the Commission and several federal agency, academic, and non-governmental organization partners convened the Gulf of Mexico Marine Mammal Research and Monitoring meeting in New Orleans. The objectives of the meeting were to:.
View the meeting summary and copies of presentations. In January , Commission staff facilitated a virtual workshop focused on enhancing conservation of bottlenose dolphins in Mississippi state waters.
Bottlenose dolphins in Mississippi and throughout the Northern Gulf were significantly impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and tracking recovery will require long-term monitoring and an ability to identify and minimize ongoing threats. Workshop participants from the National Marine Fisheries Service NMFS , Mississippi-based marine mammal research and stranding network facilities, and Mississippi state agencies discussed current capabilities and research activities within the state and current knowledge regarding the status, stock structure, and major threats to bottlenose dolphins in Mississippi state waters.
Discussions focused on critical uncertainties and opportunities for enhancing collaborations and expanding partnerships within the state and beyond to advance conservation efforts. The Commission continues to work with scientists and managers across the Gulf to refine and promote recovery and restoration strategies for marine mammals. We have outlined our priorities for restoration and long-term monitoring, as well as concerns regarding potential impacts of some large-scale restoration projects on marine mammals, in letters see letters section below to the Deepwater Horizon Natural Resource Damage Assessment NRDA Trustees and the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council.
We have also submitted restoration project ideas to the Trustee Implementation Groups through the various federal and state portals, and commented on draft restoration plans.
The development and refinement of scientifically robust mitigation and monitoring measures to minimize impacts of offshore oil and gas and renewable energy activities on marine mammals, including impacts from oil spills, was identified as a Strategic Objective in our Strategic Plan. NOAA regulations implementing the Oil Pollution Act specify three phases for conducting damage assessments: 1 pre-assessment, 2 injury assessment and restoration planning, and 3 restoration implementation for more information, see the diagram of phases involved in a Natural Resource Damage Assessment under the Oil Pollution Act of That determination initiated the next phase of the process: injury assessment and restoration planning.
Movements and numbers of sperm whales were tracked after the spill using satellite tags and passive acoustic monitoring. Photo taken under NOAA permit Injury assessments conducted under NRDA involved quantifying the impact on either a specific type of resource e.
Marine mammal injury assessment studies were conducted from to and included:. Assessing oil spill-related impacts to marine mammals was complicated by the occurrence of a cetacean unusual mortality event in the northern Gulf that began before the spill occurred, in March An analysis of bottlenose dolphin stranding patterns before and after the spill indicated that strandings from March to May were likely associated with exposure to cold and freshwater in and around Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana.
However, the majority of increased marine mammal strandings in the northern Gulf from to overlapped in space and time with the oil spill footprint. In addition, NRDA-related studies documented a myriad of adverse health issues in stranded and live-captured dolphins found within the affected area, such as persistent reproductive failure, adrenal disease, lung disease, and poor body condition.
Many of those studies were compiled and published in a Special Issue of Endangered Species Research: Effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on protected marine species Volume 33, A comprehensive bibliography of both NRDA and independent Deepwater Horizon oil spill-related marine mammal research and monitoring can be found here.
To date, GOMRI-funded projects that have focused on investigating the impacts of the oil spill on marine mammals include the following:. In April , the U. Additional funds are reserved for natural resource conditions and adaptive management needs that may be identified in the future. The proposed restoration approaches are focused on restoration of marine mammal stocks determined to have been directly or indirectly impacted by the spill, particularly bottlenose dolphins, with some activities e.
The plan identified three preferred alternatives for restoration of marine mammals, including 1 voluntary modifications to commercial shrimp lazy lines to reduce dolphin entanglements, 2 reducing impacts on dolphins from hook-and-line gear and provisioning through fishery surveys, social science, and collaboration, and 3 enhance marine mammal stranding network diagnostic capabilities and consistency across the Gulf of Mexico.
A fourth alternative, enhancing capacity, diagnostic capability, and consistency of the marine mammal stranding network in the Gulf of Mexico, was identified as not preferred. The Commission recommended funding all three preferred alternatives, and suggested additional actions that could be taken to improve the effectiveness of each alternative see comments below.
Thousands were put out of work in fisheries, tourism and energy. In the end, it would prove to be 12 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill in , the previous record holder. The Deepwater Horizon disaster signaled the risks of drilling for oil in one of the most culturally significant, ecologically diverse places in the world. Take, for instance, the fish — which researchers at the University of South Florida say are still contaminated with hydrocarbons.
Take the size of the spill itself, which a recent study has found to be far more extensive than initially thought, reaching as far as the southernmost tip of Florida.
Oil on Gulf waters after the Deepwater Horizon spill. Credit: Jonathan Henderson. Take, too, the continuing impact the spill had on human health. According to a government health study published seven years after the spill, tens of thousands of workers who first responded to the study are still wrestling with respiratory illnesses brought on by Corexit, the chemical used to disperse the spill.
And take that many of those who were affected by that chemical — mostly lower-income fisherman — are still ill, or have gone on to die. The more time that passes, the worse the spill seems to become, begging the question — could something like this happen again?
As oil drilling moves farther offshore and deeper at sea, they say, the risk only increases. Some 17 percent of the oil produced in the United States comes from the Gulf of Mexico. Over 1, platforms are connected to refineries along the shore through more than 41, kilometers of pipelines. Leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused oil prices to plummet, Gulf production continued to be remarkably robust. In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the US interior department restructured in a bid to allow a new division of the agency, the bureau of safety and environmental enforcement, or BSEE, to focus on safety.
The move was meant to separate safety regulators from government officials who might be more motivated by the money coming in from taxes on drilling. Crucially, the Obama administration also beefed up safety rules for the offshore oil industry, including checks on blowout preventers like the one that failed on the Deepwater Horizon. But those rules have been weakened under the Trump administration.
Checks by the BSEE have been reduced as well. According to a study by the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy institute, the number of safety inspections the agency has conducted on rigs, platforms, pipelines, and other facilities during the last three years of the Trump administration decreased by 13 percent.
The same study showed that enforcement actions against offshore drillers had fallen by 38 percent. Meanwhile, offshore drilling is only going deeper and getting more dangerous.
The Deepwater Horizon reached a depth of 1, meters. Now, studies show that more than half of the oil produced in the Gulf is coming from wells even deeper than that.
All of this despite a study , which found that for every feet or Such accidents have been on an upswing under the Trump administration. There were also nearly 50 fatalities over that time.
Lingering oil slick in the Mississippi Delta off the coast of Louisiana on May 24, Leaks are a constant state of affairs. One oil well off the southeastern coast of Louisiana, owned by Taylor Energy, has been leaking since , spilling between and barrels per day.
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