Oil Spill 2010: Danger to Wildlife Considered "Terrifying"

Louisiana marsh, photo from USGS

This post is now on Google News. Also on Basilandspice.com which is partnered with Newstex, TOPIX, EIN McClatchy-Tribune News Service and other media outlets.

On Thursday April 29, the slick from the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico covered about 1,150 miles. By the end of the next day, the size of the oil slick had more than tripled to 3,850 miles. Said Hans Graber of the University of Miami, this rapid rate of expansion suggests that the oil is now spurting from the ocean floor much more quickly than it was.

The broken oil well that's spewing more than 200,000 gallons per day is a mile underwater, making efforts to shut it off extremely difficult. Crews are using at least 6 remotely operated vehicles to try to stem the flow, but so far have been unsuccessful. It may be weeks or even months before the gush is stopped.

Long term consequences to coastal ecosystems and fish

What are the long term repercussions of such an unprecedented volume of oil hitting our Gulf Coast, and perhaps the coasts of Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina as well? The Gulf spill is at the top of "the Loop Current," a part of the Gulf Stream that sends water around Florida and as far north as Cape Hatteras, NC.

Many people are focused on the impact to the fishing industry, which will indeed be hit hard. "Louisiana, after Alaska, is the second-largest seafood producing state," said Dr. Ralph Portier of Louisana State University. The wetlands of the Mississippi Delta are essential to much of that sea life. Many oceanic fish lay their eggs in protected estuaries and marshes, where the hatchlings are safer from predators and food may be more accessible. Crabs, shrimp, and oysters are also completely dependent on coastal wetlands. "Every crevice, creek, bayou, bay, where water flows in and out of coastal grasses - that's the habitat for all these coastal nurseries. If we lose it or it's impacted, we have a real long-term effect," said Dr. Portier of LSU.

Marsh grasses are naturally resilient, but the coastal ecosystem of Louisiana has already experienced a number of serious insults. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the hurricanes of 2005 turned about 217 square miles of marsh into water. If nature had been left alone, that marshland would be replenished by sediment flowing down the Mississippi River. But levees holding back the Mississippi River prevent the natural deposition of sediment. The marshes are chopped up by navigation channels and pipeline canals, too, which allow saltwater into freshwater marshes, slowly killing the marshes.

"Hanging by a fingernail"

"The trouble with our marshes is they're already stressed, they're already hanging by a fingernail," said Dr. Denise Reed of the University of New Orleans.

And yet it now seems possible that the influx of oil from the still-gushing well in the Gulf could deliver the killing blow to the whole coastal ecosystem. The volume of oil that now seems likely to wash up on the Louisiana coast could overwhelm the coastal grasses' ability to recover. If the roots die, the plants die and the ground underneath turns to mud and disappears into the sea within a year, said Dr. Irving Mendelssohn of Louisiana State University.

Even if the volume of oil does not increase dramatically, it is still likely to move through channels into the saltwater marshes. Then, even a minor tropical storm could send it farther inland to the freshwater marshes, which are more fragile and almost impossible to clean, said Mendelssohn.

Especially valued fish likely to be heavily impacted include the Atlantic tarpon and the overfished Atlantic bluefin tuna.

What about other wildlife?

The Gulf has four species of sea turtles and all of them are endangered. Turtles and marine mammals don't try to avoid oil slicks, said Jackie Savitz of the conservation group Oceana. Consequently they wind up eating the oil; it also blocks their airways.

Not only coastal birds, but migratory songbirds will feel the effects

Of course, thousands of shore birds and marsh birds breed in the coastal marshes of the Gulf Coast. That includes species such as white ibises, anhingas, purple gallinules, common gallinules, pied-billed grebes, wood ducks, king rails, clapper rails, black-necked stilts, killdeer, Louisana herons, black-crowned and yellow-crowned night herons, green herons, little blue herons, snowy egrets, great egrets, black skimmers, American coots, mottled ducks, and so on. But it's not just the shore birds and marsh birds that will be impacted by a heavy or steady influx of oil on the coast. Millions of North American songbirds migrate in spring from their wintering grounds in southern Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula to the Gulf shores, before flying on to their breeding grounds in the eastern U.S. and Canada. This phenomenon is called by birders the "Gulf Express." It includes tiny ruby-throated hummingbirds, many species of warblers, kingbirds, thrushes, orioles, cuckoos, and more - at least 55 species in all. The flight covers 500 or 600 miles of open water for birds that may weigh no more than two 25-cent coins. Even in good years, many of them don't make it. It all depends on good weather, physical conditioning, and luck. Thousands of birdwatchers converge on the Gulf coast and its barrier islands to witness the migratory spectacle each spring.

"If anything goes sour, the birds die"

In a very good year, the birds may arrive at the coast with enough energy to fly past the marshes, landing in forests 30 miles inland. But if the weather is unsettled, or the winds are from the north, the birds pile up along the coast. They're hungry, thirsty, and tired. As author and birder Scott Weidensaul said about this migration, "If anything goes sour, the birds die."

As of right now, many of the birds have already made the spring crossing, but not all. For those who haven't yet, this may be a spring when something "goes sour". And what about next fall, when they do the flight in reverse? And next spring - what if the marshes are all coated in oil, or the coastal grasses are all dead? Many of these bird species are already in serious trouble from habitat loss in Latin America and in the U.S.

Prospects are "terrifying"

None of us know right now the true long-term impacts of the rapidly expanding mass of toxic goo that's floating in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm not sure anyone has even calculated yet the potential damage to coastal estuaries and marshes of the Southeastern states. But as NY Times writers Leslie Kaufman and Campbell Robertson said, the prospects for coastal land, livelihoods, and wildlife are "terrifying everyone."

Sources:

Leslie Kaufman and Campbell Robertson. "Spill puts wetlands in peril." NY Times. Reprinted in Charlotte Observer. May 2, 2010.

Kirsten Valle. "Some fear oil from Gulf spill could reach N.C." Charlotte Observer. May 1, 2010.

Renee Schoof and Karen Nelson. "Oil spill is endangering a vast array of wildlife." Charlotte Observer. April 30, 2010.

Cain Burdeau and Holbrook Mohr. "Document: BP didn't plan for a major spill." Charlotte Observer. May 1, 2010.

Scott Weidensaul. Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds. North Point Press. New York. 1999.  Key words: Gulf oil spill BP oil spill fisheries coastal ecosystems shore birds migratory birds sea turtles

Some of my previous posts on coastal environmental issues:

10% of Louisiana underwater by 2100, says recent study

North Carolina's vital coastal breeding grounds vulnerable to rising seas

Copenhagen data confirm: 10% of Florida underwater by end of the century

10,000 pythons breeding in Florida, says new USGS report 

Key words: Gulf oil spill BP oil spill fisheries coastal ecosystems shore birds migratory birds sea turtles

The cheatin' hearts of male antbirds

The female (left) and male antbird. Courtesy of University of Oxford

Female songbirds sometimes raise their young alone, without help from the father - if they have evolved where food is abundant and a female can succeed at parenting alone. But in habitats where a second parent is needed to keep up with the brood's appetite, songbirds have generally evolved to be monogamous, and both parents stick around to raise the young. And not necessarily just for the season; some bird species mate for life.

In such cases, a mated pair may use songs to strengthen the pair bond between them, and to defend their breeding territory from rival pairs.

But it turns out, avian adultery is not uncommon. Both males and females in mated pairs may have a wandering eye.

Nathalie Seddon and Joe Tobias of the University of Oxford studied the role of song in the adultery of Peruvian warbling-antbirds. In their latest research, published in the journal Current Biology, they report that an antbird couple will sing a "simple, precisely coordinated duet" when confronted by an intruding rival pair. But if an unattached female enters the scene, the duet begins to break down as the antbird "wife" starts jamming or blocking out the notes of her mate. She interrupts her spouse with her own music, to his great frustration. Said Dr. Tobias, "Males then countered this strategy by changing their songs in an attempt to avoid interference, resulting in a more complex acoustic display."

Animal duets are often harmoniously coordinated, but there has been a long-running debate about whether they are purely cooperative, or whether they reflect conflicts of interest. The Peruvian warbling-antbird offers an ideal situation for studying this question because on one hand males and females sing together to defend shared territories, and on the other males sing ‘solos’ as part of attracting a mate.

Single females are a threat to paired females because they increase the likelihood that males will cheat on their existing partner, or abandon them in favor of a new one. As it turns out, 'divorce' is common in antbirds. And so, the presence of an unattached female leads to a kind of acoustic battle in which males and females have different priorities.

According to Seddon and Tobias, their findings demonstrate that animal duets can be cooperative or manipulative, depending on context. Their study also provides the first evidence that individuals in duets try to avoid being jammed, which can have the effect of increasing the complexity of duets. The research helps to explain the recurrent evolution of complex communication signals in many lineages of birds and social primates, and according the authors may provide a useful clue to the origins of human music.

By Sally Kneidel, PhD with quotes from the sources below

Sources:
Nathalie Siddon and Joe Tobias. Rainforest duets are a battle of the sexes. University of Oxford. March 12, 2009. http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_releases_for_journalists/090312_2.html

Song of the antbird reveals avian adultery. March 23, 2009. Morning Edition, NPR.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102229821&sc=emaf&sc=emaf

Keywords:: birds antbirds Peruvian antbirds songbirds bird behavior birdsong animal adultery Nathalie Siddon Joe Tobias University of Oxford

Animals making tools...what else are they capable of?

A pair of rooks. Photo by Christopher Bird, news.bbc.co.uk

Animals are at it again. Acting human. Or rather, exhibiting behaviors that we once thought were exclusively human. We once believed, I might say, that these behaviors defined humans as better, different, smarter than all other living things.

I'm talking about tool use. As it turns out, tool use has now been observed in dozens of nonhuman species, including otters, monkeys, chimps, and 39 species of birds!

The most recent study involves rooks, a crow-like European species common in folklore. They're in the same family as our American crows, ravens, jays, and magpies.

The rooks in this study, reported just today (May 28) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were given access to food that could only be obtained by pushing a small rock off of a ledge into a tube. They quickly mastered that task. Christopher Bird of the University of Cambridge and Nathan Emery of Queen Mary College, London, challenged the birds further by moving the small rock farther away. Before long, a female rook, Fry, figured out picking up the stone and carrying it to the ledge. Her mate, Cook, followed her actions, then a second pair did.

The birds mastered various other tasks involving tools such as sticks and wires. They even figured out how to bend a wire to fashion a hook necessary to retrieve items. Although wild New Caledonian crows have been observed fashioning hooks in the past, the authors assert that this is the "first unambiguous evidence of animal insight, because the rooks made a hook tool on their first trial we know that they had no previous experience of making hook tools from wire because the birds were all hand-raised." The New Caledonian crows were known to use tools in the wild.

I love research that shows how smart animals are, and how we're not the supreme beings we think we are. What else are animals capable of that we don't know about yet? They deserve more respect, more of the world's remaining resources, than they're getting from their human relatives.

My previous post about New Caladonian crows making tools.

All my previous posts about tool use (or making tools) in animals.

Sources:
Christopher D. Bird and Nathan J. Emery. Insightful problem solving and creative tool modification by captive nontool-using rooks. May 28, 2009. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Randolph E. Schmidt, Associated Press. Rooks figure out how to use tools. May 28, 2009. Charlotte Observer

Key words:: birds tool use rooks animal behavior making tools bird behavior animal intelligence

The road not taken.....musings on whooping cranes

Whooping Crane (photo courtesy of www.fws.gov)

Whooping cranes have taken up residence in South Carolina, at least for part of the year. That's a big deal. They're one of North America's rarest birds and haven't been in the Carolinas in probably a hundred years.

I almost got involved with Whooping Cranes a long time ago, and I wish I had. When I finished college, I wrote off to somebody (I forgot his name, Ray? Roy?) who was managing a Whooping Crane recovery project in another state. He and his cohorts were using Sandhill Cranes to raise Whooping Crane eggs. The researchers had found that if they removed eggs from Whooper nests and slipped the eggs into the nests of Sandhill Crane foster parents, the Whoopers would simply lay replacement eggs. Thereby doubling the production of Whooper chicks per year at this recovery facility. The researchers used gloves fashioned to look like crane heads when they tended the babies, so the cranes wouldn't lose their fear of humans.

I wanted to work for this project helping an endangered species. But as fate would have it, Ray or Roy or whoever had no money to hire anyone else, was making use of volunteer labor, and I decided to do something else. That's the proverbial road I did not take, as Robert Frost wrote of in his famous poem The Road Not Taken. That decision was probably a big mistake on my part, given the situation I find myself in at present.

But I digress. To cut to the chase....I've always been interested in Whooping Cranes. They're making a significant comeback, and the story is pretty intriguing.

Way before people fouled up almost everything outdoors, the range of Whooping Cranes extended from the Arctic coast into Mexico, and from Utah to NJ. Their range included wintering grounds in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Then, because of hunting and habitat destruction, their numbers dropped to only 16 birds in 1941, all in one little flock that nested in Canada and overwintered in Texas. But by the 1970's and 80's, recovery efforts were well underway. Those efforts included raising Whooping Cranes in captivity as I mentioned above. Sandhill Cranes played a big part, standing in as surrogate parents and even surrogate flocks. In 1998, scientist Kent Clegg figured a way to teach some captive-raised Whooping Cranes how to migrate from Idaho to New Mexico. He trained them to follow an ultralight plane, and when they got to New Mexico, he got them to mingle with a robust Sandhill Crane flock, so they wouldn't be alone and would learn flocking behaviors.

Due to these and other recovery efforts, the western flock of Whooping Cranes has now expanded to about 270 birds, according the USFW Service. A big increase!

Recent events in the East have caught my attention, and motivated me to write this post. In 2001, the USFW Service began trying to reintroduce Whooping Cranes to the eastern part of the country, which has had no birds at all for a century or more. The Whoopers have been taught with another ultralight plane to fly from breeding grounds in Wisconsin to overwintering grounds in Florida, and back. It's amazing that the plane gimmick works - just like in the fictitious movie, Fly Away Home (about geese following an ultralight plane). But cranes are programmed genetically to follow something flying (normally their parents) to learn the ancestral migratory route. Somehow a slow quiet small plane will suffice.

As I mentioned, Whooping Cranes used to overwinter in the Carolinas as well as Florida. But the newly expanded population has never been trained to come here. However.....in early 2004, one group flying up from Florida, en route to Wisconsin, hit some strong winds that blew them east and they settled down near New Bern, on the coastal plain of NC. My home state. Two males of the original seven that put down here in 2004, along with their mates, continue to return to the ACE basin in South Carolina. The individuals are known as 10-03, I, and WI-06. Don't know the fourth one. I, for one, am delighted to have them here.

The total Eastern migratory population is only 73 Whooping Cranes, including the ones that go to Florida. That's a lot, especially when you consider we now have 343 in the whole country. Compared to the 16 we once had.

The Carolina coast is wild in places. I went with a USFW biologist once to see some red wolves, who roam freely on the NC coast, in the Alligator River Nature Preserve. Turned out the only wolves we found were some that were in a pen awaiting inoculations from the USFW staff. But over 100 now run free throughout the preserve, so I guess cranes can live here too.

Frost begins his poem with "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood". Although I have regrets about the road I didn't take, as an aspiring biologist years ago, I'm thrilled that a few cranes turned left one year, and now seem to prefer South Carolina to Florida. Maybe, if we're lucky, they'll thrive here.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

By Sally Kneidel, PhD

Sources:
Jack Horan. Whooping Cranes: four of the rare birds, once almost extinct, have made a home on the Carolina coast. Charlotte Observer, January 25, 2009.

Robert Frost. "The Road Not Taken". www.bartleby.com/119/1.html

For more info: www.bringbackthecranes.org

Keywords:: Whooping Cranes endangered species birds recovery plan

Did your shopping list kill a songbird?

Bobolink, courtesy of http://dwrcdc.nr.utah.gov

The article below is by Bridget Stutchbury, Professor of Biology at York University in Toronto and author of "Silence of the Songbirds".

Though a consumer may not be able to tell the difference, a striking red and blue Thomas the Tank Engine made in Wisconsin is not the same as one manufactured in China — the paint on the Chinese twin may contain dangerous levels of lead. In the same way, a plump red tomato from Florida is often not the same as one grown in Mexico. The imported fruits and vegetables found in our shopping carts in winter and early spring are grown with types and amounts of pesticides that would often be illegal in the United States.

In this case, the victims are North American songbirds. Bobolinks, called skunk blackbirds in some places, were once a common sight in the Eastern United States. In mating season, the male in his handsome tuxedo-like suit sings deliriously as he whirrs madly over the hayfields. Bobolink numbers have plummeted almost 50 percent in the last four decades, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.

The birds are being poisoned on their wintering grounds by highly toxic pesticides. Rosalind Renfrew, a biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, captured bobolinks feeding in rice fields in Bolivia and took samples of their blood to test for pesticide exposure. She found that about half of the birds had drastically reduced levels of cholinesterase, an enzyme that affects brain and nerve cells — a sign of exposure to toxic chemicals.

Since the 1980s, pesticide use has increased fivefold in Latin America as countries have expanded their production of nontraditional crops to fuel the demand for fresh produce during winter in North America and Europe. Rice farmers in the region use monocrotophos, methamidophos and carbofuran, all agricultural chemicals that are rated Class I toxins by the World Health Organization, are highly toxic to birds, and are either restricted or banned in the United States. In countries like Guatemala, Honduras and Ecuador, researchers have found that farmers spray their crops heavily and repeatedly with a chemical cocktail of dangerous pesticides.

In the mid-1990s, American biologists used satellite tracking to follow Swainson’s hawks to their wintering grounds in Argentina, where thousands of them were found dead from monocrotophos poisoning. Migratory songbirds like bobolinks, barn swallows and Eastern kingbirds are suffering mysterious population declines, and pesticides may well be to blame. A single application of a highly toxic pesticide to a field can kill seven to 25 songbirds per acre. About half the birds that researchers capture after such spraying are found to suffer from severely depressed neurological function.

Migratory birds, modern-day canaries in the coal mine, reveal an environmental problem hidden to consumers. Testing by the United States Food and Drug Administration shows that fruits and vegetables imported from Latin America are three times as likely to violate Environmental Protection Agency standards for pesticide residues as the same foods grown in the United States. Some but not all pesticide residues can be removed by washing or peeling produce, but tests by the Centers for Disease Control show that most Americans carry traces of pesticides in their blood. American consumers can discourage this poisoning by avoiding foods that are bad for the environment, bad for farmers in Latin America and, in the worst cases, bad for their own families.

What should you put on your bird-friendly grocery list? Organic coffee, for one thing. Most mass-produced coffee is grown in open fields heavily treated with fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides. In contrast, traditional small coffee farmers grow their beans under a canopy of tropical trees, which provide shade and essential nitrogen, and fertilize their soil naturally with leaf litter. Their organic, fair-trade coffee is now available in many coffee shops and supermarkets, and it is recommended by the Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

Organic bananas should also be on your list. Bananas are typically grown with one of the highest pesticide loads of any tropical crop. Although bananas present little risk of pesticide ingestion to the consumer, the environment where they are grown is heavily contaminated.

When it comes to nontraditional Latin American crops like melons, green beans, tomatoes, bell peppers and strawberries, it can be difficult to find any that are organically grown. We should buy these foods only if they are not imported from Latin America.

Now that spring is here, we take it for granted that the birds’ cheerful songs will fill the air when our apple trees blossom. But each year, as we continue to demand out-of-season fruits and vegetables, we ensure that fewer and fewer songbirds will return.

Source:

Bridget Stutchbury. "Did your shopping list kill a songbird?" New York Times, March 30, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/opinion/30stutchbury.html

Keywords:: birds organic bananas organic coffee pesticides

Birds keep getting smarter....in some ways like primates

Magpie with a yellow mark on its neck

It's not really that birds are getting smarter, just that we're continuously gathering more evidence about how smart they really are. One of the smartest birds ever studied was Alex the African gray parrot. Irene Pepperberg of Brandeis University showed that Alex could count up to six items, and had more than 100 vocalizations for objects, actions, and colors. But Alex is not news, even though he's very famous. His accomplishments have been well-documented for years. He died not long ago.

But new research keeps turning up all the time. The latest buzz on bird intelligence comes from Germany, from Helmut Prior at Goethe University. It involves self-recognition, a capacity at one time attributed only to humans. In biology, the litmus test of self-recognition is to recognize that the image in a mirror is oneself.

We know now that a few nonhuman animals share this ability, but so far, the list of species is very short. The usual way behavioral scientists test for self-recognition is put a bright mark on an animal's face or neck, and then place the animal in front of a mirror. If the animal uses the mirror to inspect or touch the mark on itself, that's considered evidence that the animal recognizes the image as itself.

Up until now, only humans, apes, bottlenose dolphins, and elephants have been shown to respond to a mirror image this way. Other animals often react to their mirror image as though it's a different individual. I've seen male Anolis lizards make aggressive displays toward a mirror, as though the image was a different male making its own aggressive displays. The lizard sometimes gets madder and madder, when the "intruder" refuses to back down!

But Helmut Prior has just published research showing that magpies have joined the ranks of self-recognizing animals - the first birds to be included.

In the experiments, each of five magpies was given the option of entering a chamber with a mirror, alone. Three of the magpies preferred the mirror chamber to an adjoining chamber without a mirror, taking time to inspect the mirror image, looking behind the mirror, and moving around in front of the mirror.

Then the researchers marked each magpie with a spot of paint on the front of the throat (see photo at the top of this post). The three magpies that had previously inspected the mirror now used the mirror to carefully inspect the paint spot, turning their heads and tilting their necks close to the mirror. Two of them scratched off the the spots with their feet, while looking in the mirror. When the mirror was not present, these three magpies ignored the spot.

Illustration from the original PLoS Biology article by Helmut Prior et al.

(A) Attempt to reach the mark with the beak; (B) touching the mark with the foot; (C) touching the breast region outside the marked area; (D) touching other parts of the body. Behaviors (A) and (B) entered the analysis as mark-directed behavior; behaviors (C) and (D) and similar actions towards other parts of the body were considered self-directed, but not related to the mark.

What about the other two magpies? Throughout the experiment, the other two birds reacted as though the bird in the mirror were a stranger, jumping and running around the compartment, regardless of whether they had a paint spot on their neck or not.

Chimp studies have found that mirror self-recognition declines with age - this may be the case with these two magpies as well. Or maybe it's just individual variability in intelligence.

So what does it mean, that some magpies recognize their own image? This is important to me because it's evidence that we're not as special and entitled as some people think we are. Other animals are smart too. My hope is that, as we eliminate the capabilities that distinguish us from other species, we'll realize they are sentient, and as sentient beings, they deserve more consideration than we give them. Wishful thinking probably, but it makes sense to me.

by Sally Kneidel

Sources:
Bruce Bower. Magpies check themselves out: reactions to mirror image suggest self-recognition. Science News. September 13, 2008.

Helmut Prior et al. Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of Self-Recognition. PLoS Biology. August 19, 2008.