A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [107]
Of course, turtles, birds, fish, shrimp, crabs, shellfish, dolphins, and all their habitats have been affected. And creatures that range widely but funnel through the Gulf to migrate or to breed are of hemispheric importance. How many of these creatures, and what proportion of their populations, were damaged or spared? That, no one can say.
So far, the dead wildlife found and collected total about 500 sea turtles, 60 dolphins, and nearly 2,000 birds. It’s not at all clear that oil killed most of them. But it’s also not at all clear how many were killed by oil and never found. One dolphin’s ribs were broken—a boat strike. But dolphins are usually nimble enough to avoid boats. A necropsy found what looked like a tar ball in its throat. Affected by oil, then hit by a boat; it’s a reasonable conclusion. But not certain.
Every oiled carcass found may suggest ten to one hundred undetected deaths. Birders are reporting the disappearance of black skimmers, pelicans, royal terns, least terns, Sandwich terns, laughing gulls, and reddish egrets from several Louisiana islands, including Raccoon Island, Cat Island, Queen Bess Island, and East Grand Terre Island.
But it’s also true that there remain along Gulf shores and marshes many clean-looking pelicans, gleaming gulls, and egrets with no regrets. A silver lining for animals with gills is that they got a season’s break from fishing, which typically kills millions of adult fish, shrimp, and crabs, probably far more than this blowout did.
Some say the floating oil is blocking light needed by the plankton that are the base of the whole food web. Some say oil will settle on the bottom and continue washing up for years. Some say microbes will eat it. Some say those microbes will also rob regional waters of oxygen, killing nearly everything for miles. Some say no one knows what its effects will be, or how long they’ll last.
As a naturalist, I find that the effects on wildlife remain hard to grasp.
People, though, have taken deep and immediate hits. Closures have meant an end to fishing, the cessation of a way of life and of the way thousands of people understand who they are. No one knows whether the seafood and tourism and fisheries will be clean and healthy again next year or in a decade.
So even with the leak stopped, there’s hardly a sigh of relief.
“Just because they kill the well doesn’t mean our troubles go away,” says the crab dealer in Yscloskey, Louisiana. Another fisherman says, “As soon as BP gets this oil out of sight, they’ll get it out of mind, and we’ll be left to deal with it alone.”
“We’re not going anywhere” is the reassurance offered by NOAA chief Dr. Lubchenco. But official reassurances do little to dispel such deep anxiety. Many residents don’t know who to believe, or what to believe. Many simply believe that the oil isn’t going away anytime soon, whatever anyone says.
But they do believe that help is going away. During a public forum, Louisiana fishermen hear an Alaskan seafood spokesman describe how after the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident, the perception was that oil affected all seafood from the state. “It took ten-plus years to get out of that hole,” he says. “We put in a request directly to the oil companies to fund a marketing effort. They gave us zero, absolutely nothing.”
An estimated 45,000 people and 6,000 vessels and aircraft have by now been involved in the response. Now even the retreat of oil manages to become bad news for fishermen. For many fishermen idled by the oil, responding to the oil has become their livelihood. As the crude ebbs, many face being left with nothing to do but wait for the government to reopen fishing areas, and for consumers to show confidence in their seafood. And there are no guarantees that they will be able to resume fishing soon.
“This whole area is gonna die,” bemoans a fifth-generation fisher-woman in Buras, Louisiana. “Down here, we have oil and we have fishing,” she says. “We are water people. Everything we do