The Cost of the Gulf Coast Oil Spill

This post will be updated regularly. There are links below to related articles, blog posts, and other resources on the flora and fauna affected by the gulf coast BP oil spill. If you know of other links or suggestions, please send them to me via email or in the comments below.

Bloggers, biologists, naturalists, science writers... I need your help. Life is about to get very bad for the inhabitants of the Gulf Coast, with the first waves of raw crude oil projected to reach shore in the coming days, if it hasn't already. While this will certainly have an impact on local economies and an even bigger impact on those who make their living from those waters, there will be a great many other living organisms and even entire ecosystems that will be utterly devastated by the spill.

So why don't more people seem to care?  While there is no single answer to that question , it is in part because pretty much every single person has absolutely no idea that most of the affected species even exist.  It's hard to fault someone for not caring about something they don't even know exists, and I'd bet most people would care if they only knew...  That, my friends, is where I need your help!

How you can help...

To help raise awareness of the environmental costs of the gulf coast oil spill, I'm asking others to take at least one of the follow actions to draw attention to particular species and ecosystems affected by the spill:

1. Share this post, and this request with others, and be creative about it -- encourage your local news paper's science writer to showcase the environmental costs of the spill, organize a public talk by local conservation groups, university or government researchers, and so on.  Check back now and then and share some of the posts below with your family, friends and coworkers.
2. If you have a blog, choose an organism -- plant, animal, or other -- and tell the rest of us about it. No blog? No problem... you can always write a guest-post for someone else's blog, or use other media outlets. You can make a video and post it on youtube, send some info you your local newscasters, do whatever you can think of!  Share pictures, natural history facts, economic value, whatever you can come up with to convey to the public why anyone should give a rat's tail about the demise of your chosen subject.  Once you've done that, if it's on the web, please send me the link and I'll include it below.
3. Stash some cash if you can, and consider donating to the recovery efforts.  I'll post more information below once I get the time to offer up suggestion.

Check back soon for updates!

 

Related Links...

Birds

• Bad Place, Bad Timing for and Oil Spill | Round Robin (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) 
• Gulf Coast Birds in Danger | Frank Gill, PhD. (CNN Opinion piece)

Mammals

• West Indian Manatee | The Obligate Scientist

General

• Impacts on Wildlife of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill | Ninjameys (Natural History Blog)
• Watching and Waiting | Living Alongside Wildlife
• Oil Spill Wildlife Rescue: Why Some Animals Receive Priority Care | Discovery News
• Pictures: Gulf Oil Spill Hits Land -- And Wildlife | National Geographic
• Photos related to the 2010 gulf coast oil spill | www.Flickr.com 
• Info on Methane Hydrates | The Obligate Scientist

News and Updates

• Gulf Oil Slick | Blog with great areal footage, environmental news
• NOAA's website on the Deep Water Horizon Spill, Gulf of Mexico | NOAA.gov
• USFWS wesbite on the oil spill response | FWS.gov
• EPA's website on the spill | EPA.gov
• Tracking the oil spill | CNN
• Cool Green Science | Nature Conservancy's Blogs

Other Links

• Gulf Coast Wildlife Workers Prepare For Worst | NPR's All Things Considered

No Child Left Inside on Earth Day 2010

Many will soon be celebrating the 40th anniversary of Earth Day (April 22, 2010) by participating in various events and educational opportunities.  The No Child Left Inside (NCLI) Coalition is working to get kids outside as part of their efforts to promote environmental education and awareness -- a fantastic idea! If you aren't familiar with the importance of getting kids outside and involved in hands-on learning experiences, check out this short video:

For more information about getting outside on the Earth Day 2010, check out their Go Outside for Earth Day tool-kit resources.

A central goal of the NCLI coalition is to ensure public school students are provided adequate environmental education so they can meet future environmental challenges with well-informed and effective solutions.  To this end, they are working to pass the No Child Left Inside Act, which you can read more about on their website -- http://www.NCLIcoalition.org/ -- and below...

Background: The No Child Left Inside Coalition is a national coalition of over 1600 business, health, youth, faith, recreational, environmental, and educational groups representing over 50 million Americans. The entire list of coalition members is available here. The Coalition was formed in 2007 to alert Congress and the public to the need for our schools to devote more resources and attention to environmental education.

Goal: The Coalition is working to support legislation sponsored by Rep. John Sarbanes of Maryland and Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island to ensure that every student achieves basic environmental literacy. The No Child Left Inside Act would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind) to include environmental education for the first time. The legislation would provide new funding for environmental education, particularly to develop rigorous standards, train teachers and to develop state environmental literacy plans. It also proposes giving states that develop such environmental literacy plans access to additional funds.

What will come of the wolf hunts in Idaho, Montana?

Last week marked the beginning of the first wolf hunts in the lower 48 states in decades, following their recent removal from the endangered species list.  Montana and Idaho are both selling permits, which is good news to a lot of ranchers, deer and elk hunters, and other livestock owners - and bad news to a lot of wolf lovers.  One big question both sides are interested in is what will the impact be on the wolf populations?

According to this LA Times article, wolves are by no means as abundant as they used to be. 

Protected under the federal Endangered Species Act since 1973, when they were nearly extinct in the continental United States, wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and parts of Idaho in the 1990s and have since formed a large number of hunting and breeding packs that are beginning to range as far as Oregon.

The federal government concluded that the wolves, which now number about 1,650, had recovered, and lifted the endangered-species protections this year.

In Idaho, licenses to hunt wolves have been on sale for just over a week now, with over 9,000 already sold.  And yes, that means there are literally thousands more wolf hunters in Idaho this fall than there are individual wolves in all of the western U.S!

So, like, no more wolves - right?  Wrong.

First, the number of licenses is only the number of folks who get the opportunity to try and hunt a wolf. Unlike rabbits or squirrels, wolves aren't so easy to find so the vast majority of hunters are going home empty handed.  Indeed, some of those buying wolf tags won't even try to hard to find wolves - instead having them just in case they come across wolves after their livestock or while hunting other species like deer or elk.

To clarify things, we really need consider the quota set by the state wildlife agencies...

In Montana, the Fish, Wildlife & Parks department set the quota at 75 wolves of their estimated 500 wolves.

Commissioners approved a harvest quota of 75 wolves across three wolf management units. For northwestern Montana, the commission approved a quota of 41, with a subquota of two in the North Fork of the Flathead River area; a quota of 22 was approved for western Montana; and a quota of 12 in southwestern Montana.

In Idaho, the quota was set at 220 wolves, based on the 2008 estimate of a minimum of 846 in the state. 

Idaho’s Fish and Game Commission voted 4-3 for the wolf-hunt plan, with the three dissenters holding out for an even more aggressive hunt to target 49 percent, or up to 430, of Idaho’s wolves. Chairman Wayne Wright, one of the dissenters, declared, “Now’s the time to do the right thing. … Neither our state’s economy, our ranchers, our sportsmen or our elk herds can wait any longer.”

For reference, that's over half of the the 1,600+ wolves in the northern Rockies south of Canada (which harbors over 60,000 wolves), especially if you take that 846 as a minimum. More on the Idaho Fish & Game Commission's August 2009 decisions regarding the wolf hunts can be found here.

Using the more optimistic estimate of 1,000 wolves in Idaho being claimed by others, this still seems like a high quota that at best looks like it would yield zero growth or a decline in the state's wolf population.  I'm suspicious as to how this level of harvest could be sustained for multiple seasons given that the growth of the wolf populations has been below 20% annually in these areas in recent years, but who knows.  Throw in unexpectedly low reproductive rates these next few years and some combination of illegal poaching and/or the hunts going over quota and it looks to look a little more risky - though still not catastrophic.

So what's going to happen to the wolf populations in Idaho and Montana?  Who knows, but optimistically (or pessimistically, depending on how you feel about wolves) the population seems like it'll be maintained at near their current levels, maybe with a small decline the next year or two.  On the other hand, while I doubt they'll hunt them down to near extinction, hunting pressure could reduce them down to near or maybe even below the population size necessary to maintain their delisted status, though I doubt it.

I guess like so many things - only time will tell.

Black Market Wildlife: Who Cares!?

Hopefully you do, and if you don't - let me explain why you should.

First, here is a press release from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation on a recent progress to stop the illegal trading of native reptiles and amphibians from New York state and nearby areas.

So why is the illegal trade of wild animals such a big concern? Not surprisingly, there are lots of reasons.

Lets begin with the most obvious reason: to ensure the health and persistence of existing wild populations. The demand for many wildlife species for food, pets, and/or for traditional "medicines" has lead to the drastic reduction in wild populations worldwide. There are countless examples of this happening all over the world. For example take the story of the Spix's Macaw (Wikipedia | birdlife.org) which went extinct in the wild in 2000.

For other examples, you can read more here from NPR and here at america.gov. To make a long story short - we humans do a pretty good job of wiping out wildlife unless we practice some restraint!

So what's our secret to being such efficient exterminators? Going back to the recent arrests in New York state, it's worth mentioning that these collectors endanger wild populations on a number of levels. The obvious harm comes from the removal of individuals from sensitive populations, which can lead to significant and long-lasting population declines. This is what we usually think of as the main problem. Additionally, however, the destruction of local habitat can also have a lasting negative impact on wild populations: see the results of this study for an example. Unfortunately, this fits a general pattern: overharvesting wild populations while at the same time reducing high quality habitat seems to be a great recipe for decimating a species.

Some people, perhaps you yourself, don't find this all that big of a problem - "so a few species go extinct - big deal!" Arguments against this sentiment can be found here and here, so I'll leave that issue alone for now. But even from this very extreme perspective, there is still more to be concerned about beyond species conservation alone!

Other big reasons to keep tabs on the trade of wildlife (reasons often overlooked in the public eye) are concerns about spreading disease and invasive species.

Wildlife can carry diseases that can be harmful to humans, livestock, and/or to the wildlife in other regions. Illegal trade in wildlife has a huge potential for the spread of costly diseases at a global scale - for example consider the recent worry about the global spread of bird flu, and the fact that SARS originated in bats or other wildlife before infecting humans. For more on wildlife and disease concerns, see this article and some of the other information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Invasive species can also cause a great deal of environmental, agricultural and economic damage, for examples see the impact of invasive species and check out the relatively new (2005) government website for the NISIC. For more on the invasive species side of the illegal trade in wildlife, check out the (more comical) hippos in Columbia, or the information available here.

Killing the competition: Cormorants

Today I came across a nice overview of the current problems surrounding Cormorants and the push to kill off large numbers to maintain or increase fishing yields. The article appeared as this months Natural History Magazine's featured article "To Kill a Cormorant" by Richard J. King.


If you haven't heard of this little conflict before, check out this New York Times article from 1998: The Slaughter of Cormorants in Angler Country. For a closer look at a Cormorant, click here, here, and especially here.

Why the conflict? The main causes are aesthetics and good ol' interspecific competition for resources - one of the big claims is that Double-crested Cormorants deplete populations of game fish. The validity of this claim is somewhat of a mixed bag: Cormorants indeed cause declines in commercial fish farms where fish are accessible and at high densities. In wild settings however, evidence is weak and their impact on fish populations seems to depend on the location and the fish species in question.

Competition for fish aside, Cormorants can also trash the small islands they decide to turn into breeding sites via a build-up of guano, which like most bird droppings is high in uric acid (the white stuff). This kills off vegetation, giving the combined result that these islands are as unpleasant to look at as it is to be downwind of them. As Richard King points out, historically those islands may have actually hosted Cormorants and their guano more so than the vegetation that took their place when Cormorant numbers dipped during the last couple of centuries. They can also compete for nest sites with various species of Herons and Egrets. This all adds up to a big public image problem - people don't like things that ruin scenic landscapes and push out more valued species.

So do Cormorants need to be controlled? Practically speaking, probably yes - but only in a few places, and hopefully with smarter controls than poorly regulated mass culling.

Are we going to avoid continuing on a "witch hunt" blaming these birds for our fisheries problems, or instead use good science to get at the root of this conflict? With the usual amount of patience and compromise, it seems a workable science based solution is quite possible.

In their Notice of Intent to Prepare a National Management Plan for Double-Crested Cormorants the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) mentions a court challenge against the USFWS for issuing permits to oil eggs in up to 10,500 Cormorant nests at two locations in the north east. Referring to that legal action, they go on to say that:

... the action highlights the need for scientific inquiry into the nature of the problems caused by double-crested Cormorants and an assessment of the utility of management actions most likely to resolve resulting conflicts.

By studying fish populations and the role Cormorants play in regulating them, along with the other problems caused by Cormorants, regulatory agencies can make effective and efficient management plans where necessary. Just as importantly, if not more so, the results of these studies will hopefully help the public to distinguish fact from fiction when it comes to Cormorants - good for the birds, and good for the people.

Related links:

• The USFWS Double-crested Cormorant page. Includes their final Environmental Impact Statement, which is worth skimming.
• EPA website search results.
• Derby and Lovvorn, Canadian Journal of Acquatic Science, 1997. Some might take this as evidence against Cormorants - but based only on the abstract it appears to conclude little more than They ate a lot of the fish we put in the river. This, is what you'd expect: Cormorants eat fish. This may be a good study to look at stocking efficiency, but for our purposes the important question is what is the impact on the fish population?
• That question is addressed, for example, in Engström, Ecography, 2009. The result? Despite large rates of consumption by Cormorants, there was no significant effect on the fish population.
• To contrast, here is some commentary on a study showing Cormorants can impact some fish populations (Perch, in parts of Lake Huron).
• Google scholar results for "cormorant fish".