It's been almost a year hasn't it and I haven't written about Deep Water Horizon in months. But this is a headline that one cannot miss, it's one of those fears that so many had worried about. It's not just about the damage that's been done to the ecosystem, or the animals that survived but to the future generations of species to come. And now that we are heading into another spring the news is worse than anyone could have imagined.
Baby dolphins, some barely three feet in length, are washing up along the Mississippi and Alabama coastlines at 10 times the normal rate of stillborn and infant deaths, researchers are finding.
The [Biloxi, MS] Sun Herald has learned that 17 young dolphins, either aborted before they reached maturity or dead soon after birth, have been collected along the shorelines. [...]
Source
Now granted, I must give the update, they don't know why this is happening and there is already a push back that we can't assume the two are connected.
According to the linked article I cite:
UPDATE (2/22): I asked Dr. Doug Inkley, the National Wildlife Federation’s senior scientist, for his take on the dolphin deaths:
Until necropsies are performed, we won’t know the cause of death, and even then may never know. As we have learned from recent mass mortality events of mallards and blackbirds, they are not all that uncommon and most often the cause is disease. It wouldn’t be surprising for disease to be a factor in this case. Another possibility is poor nutritional status of the pregnant females, causing them to abort the young or give birth to weak young. Certainly, the oil spill through exposure to toxics could make the dolphins more vulnerable to disease, or lead to starvation if food sources become scarce. There could also be sublethal effects of the oil on adults that inhibit successful reproduction.
Ultimately, much of this could be traced back to either the spill itself, the growing dead zone in the Gulf and climate change.
According to Dr. Solangi, director Institute of Marine Mammal Studies who is conducting the necropsies, “But this is more than just a coincidence,” he said.
“For some reason, they’ve started aborting or they were dead before they were born,” Solangi said. “The average is one or two a month. This year we have 17 and February isn’t even over yet.”
It’s the most that Solangi has seen in the two states and he’s been watching the Gulf for 30 years, recording dolphin data in Mississippi for 20. The institute has collected 13 infant dolphins in the last two weeks and three more on Monday along the Gulfport and Horn Island beaches.
Source
Lets hope this is a short lived phenomenon and isolated. If I learn more I will update.