A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [125]
So what is the main observable effect to date, and what has taken the biggest hit—marshes, fishes, birds, water quality? It doesn’t seem that way. Many Gulf Coast beaches are now free of both oil and tourists. The tourism industry projects losses in the $20 billion range. Both the tourism and the seafood industries see themselves as battling negative perceptions more than actual oil at this point, and perception may turn out to be the most costly of consequences.
There’s still a lot of oil out in the Gulf. The twin fears for deep-sea oil plumes have been that billows of toxic hydrocarbons would roll through plankton communities, causing massive damage, and that the dissolved oil and gas would trigger a population explosion of oil- and gas-eating microbes that would burn up most of the surrounding oxygen, strangling nearby life.
NOAA and the EPA now report on dissolved oxygen at some 350 sampling stations. Bottom line: no oil-caused dead zones developed; none are expected. The average normal oxygen level in the Gulf at plume depths is 4.8 milliliters per liter. The average in-plume level was 3.8. The depressed oxygen level indicated bacteria eating oil.
But for the water to be a dead zone, the level would have to be below 1.4. Modeling indicates that dead zones have not developed because of oil mixing with nearby water. In other words, it’s a relatively small amount of oil in a big ocean.
“We’re seeing very few, if any, moderately or heavily oiled turtles,” says sea turtle biologist Blair Witherington. Until the blowout was capped, the floating mats of sargassum weed that young turtles must spend years in had collected their own mats—of oil. Many young turtles must have perished unaccounted for. But the sargassum habitat is revitalizing, the oil dissipating from it. The blackened sargassum of early summer is being replaced by clean new growth teeming with crabs and other recovering creatures, and accompanied by turtles either clean or so lightly oiled that they can be cleaned on the spot and released. Says veterinarian Dr. Brian Stacy, “I personally didn’t anticipate such a dramatic change so quickly.”
Louisiana State University professor emeritus Edward Overton observes, “The Gulf is incredible in its resiliency and ability to clean itself up. I think we are going to be flabbergasted by the little amount of damage that has been caused by this spill.”
But remember the oil and dispersant droplets in the larval crabs, showing that the spill was already climbing up the food chain? A pretty explosive find. Yet we haven’t heard more about it. So a reporter from the Orlando Sentinel followed up, asking one of the scientists about it.
“That was a mistake,” she said.
But what about the droplets seen in the crab larvae?
“We don’t know what it is,” she said. “It could be natural.”
The owner of a bait-and-fuel dock peers into the marina’s clean-looking water and says, “The spill isn’t as bad as the media has suggested.”
A charter boat captain who’s been fishing several times a week since his area reopened says, “The perception is, everything down here is absolutely slap covered in oil. But that’s not true. You could drive around all day and not find it.” He’s back to catching redfish and speckled sea trout.
Even in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay, where two months ago gruesome scenes of oil-clotted pelicans horrified America, by mid-August green shoots began appearing in oil-blackened grass and mangroves and cane started to regrow. The Gulf region does indeed appear to have escaped the most dire predictions of spring. It could have been a lot worse.
Of the oil that reached the coast, most was stopped by the marsh itself. Marshland closest to the Gulf took the worst of the spill, absorbing oil more thoroughly than all the boom in BP’s checkbook, and preventing it from moving farther into thousands of square miles of marshes. Estimates of how much of Louisiana’s vast marshes have been affected are remarkably small. The Associated Press calculates that, over hundreds of miles of Louisiana coastline,