An oil-covered dolphin swims in a Louisiana bay.
Heartbreaking. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill is now proven to be linked to bottlenose dolphins dying in unprecedented numbers in the Gulf of Mexico. Dolphins with lung lesions and damaged adrenal cortexes have been found and the cause, a new study says, is the
polluted water they've been swimming in.
In a new peer-reviewed study, researchers say that the symptoms associated with this unusual mortality event — defined under the Marine Mammal Protection Act as a significant die-off of any marine mammal population that demands immediate response — are caused by swimming in oil-contaminated waters.
“This mortality event has lasted longer than any other mortality event in the Gulf of Mexico on record,” says Kathleen Colegrove, the study’s lead veterinary pathologist based at the University of Illinois. “With the oil spill occurring in the early months of the mortality event, it naturally raised questions about whether the oil spill could’ve caused the poor health and the deaths that we were seeing in the dolphins.”
Even many of the northern Gulf of Mexico's dolphins that are alive have
severe health problems:
In addition to these alarmingly high numbers, researchers have found that bottlenose dolphins living in those areas are in poor health, plagued by chronic lung disease and failed pregnancies.
Not shockingly,
BP begs to differ.
Though [Scientist Kathleen] Colegrove says that the dolphins studied had some of the most severe lung lesions she’s seen in her 13 years examining dead dolphin tissues, BP disagrees with this research. “The data we have seen thus far, including the new study from NOAA, do not show that oil from the Deepwater Horizon accident caused an increase in dolphin mortality,” the company said in a statement.
Gee, it's hard to figure out who to believe—the scientists who have done years worth of research, or the oil company responsible for the 2010 spill.