A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [137]
Two months after the oil stopped flowing, currents and oil-eating microbes continue steadily dissipating and degrading the oil. NOAA’s Dr. Steven Murawski says that even to the most sensitive instruments, the oil deep in the open Gulf is fading to levels barely detectable, making the underwater plumes “harder and harder to find.” The oil is becoming, Murawski says, “like a shadow out there.”
In the last week of September and the first week of October, NOAA will reopen fishing in almost 17,000 square miles of Gulf federal waters. BP ends its boat employment, and Jane Lubchenco’s agency—in an unusual move—opens fishing for the hugely popular red snapper as a boost to tourism and to anglers who’ve missed a whole spring and summer’s fishing. If fish could think, they might find themselves feeling nostalgic for the summer of pax petroleum.
Those fish that got a few months’ peace—oil notwithstanding—remain to be caught in numbers anglers are not accustomed to. “Red snapper are unbelievable right now,” says one fisherman. “You could put a rock on the end of a string and they’ll bite it.”
What are scientists finding?
“It’s not what you would have guessed,” says Dauphin Island Sea Lab senior marine scientist John Valentine. “You would have expected something horrible, but that’s not what we’re seeing.” Ironically, the blowout’s most powerful environmental effect seems to be both indirect and positive: the fishing closures. Fishing is designed to kill things living in the sea, and it does so effectively. It’s been by far the major agent of change in the world’s oceans until now. And if all of us use petroleum, most of us also eat seafood. Valentine’s finding about three times as many fish now compared to before the blowout, and they’re bigger.
Likewise, Sean Powers of the University of South Alabama finds that even some coastal Alabama shark populations have tripled in number, and a lot of that comes from this year’s young. Normally, shrimp nets kill a lot of small sharks. “It’s just been amazing how many more sharks we are seeing this year,” he says. “I didn’t believe it at first. What’s interesting to me,” he adds, “we are seeing it across the whole range, from the shrimp all the way up to the large sharks.” Ken Heck, also of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, says species whose young live in sea-grass meadows also appeared robust. “It’s quite amazing. Everyone speculated that an entire year class of larvae and young might have been lost, smothered in oil,” Heck says. “That hasn’t happened.”
Oddly, this seems almost troubling to researchers wishing to understand the effects of oil itself. “The problem with the fishing closure is, that impact is so large it is probably going to swamp any impact of the oil spill,” Powers says. “We’re not saying we didn’t lose any fish to the spill. We’re saying it is going to be harder to detect any smaller changes due to oil spill contamination. We’ll have to look carefully.”
Valentine notes, “This was the first time we’ve ever seen such a large-scale cessation of fishing.” I note, nature’s resilience is truly magnificent.
Well, what does all that tell us? It tells me that restoring a healthy ocean must also involve mixing fishing into the big-picture strategy. An oil lease is a piece of seafloor specially set aside for oil extraction. Why don’t we also set aside other places, to restore a better ocean? If it’s in the national interest to produce oil and gas, it’s as much in the national interest to protect other social and economic and living interests. There are more than eight thousand active oil and gas leases on America’s outer continental shelf. In addition to setting those places aside for taking oil and gas, why don’t we insist on setting special places aside for protection? Right now, less than 1 percent of all federal waters of the United States have been protected as national marine sanctuaries or any other safeguarded areas.
In an e-mail to various folks, the indefatigable Dr. Sylvia Earle exhorts:
To compensate