Dead dolphin stranded on the Port Fourchon Louisiana coastline in July 2012
following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
A
new study has linked the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to lung and adrenal lesions in bottlenose dolphins that died in the Gulf of Mexico between June 2010 and December 2012. The researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who conducted the study say the "unusual mortality event" is continuing.
The study compared 46 carcasses of dolphins that died in the unusual mortality event with 106 "reference" dolphins that died out of the area of the oil spill. It was published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE and confirms what previous investigations have concluded about mass bottlenose dolphin deaths in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi since the disaster.
But Nicholas St. Fleur of The New York Times reports:
The study was criticized by BP, which owned the well that blew out. It issued a statement saying that “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.”
Of course not. How could there possibly be a connection between the largest oil spill in history and these dead dolphins?
Here's Fleur again:
Damaged adrenal glands cannot properly produce essential hormones, and can cause fatal problems in dolphins, according to Kathleen Colegrove, a veterinary pathologist at the University of Illinois and an author of the study. She said that there had been many reports of adrenal complications leading to death in mink after exposure to oil.
“This was an unusual abnormality to us that has not been previously documented in the literature,” Dr. Colegrove said of both the lung and adrenal lesions. “That evidence is very striking and indicative that the adrenal lesions we are seeing is consistent with oil exposure.”
“These dolphins had some of the most severe lung lesions I have seen in the over 13 years that I have been examining dead dolphin tissues from throughout the United States,” Colegrove said.
A summary of the study published on the NOAA website states:
“This is the latest in a series of peer-reviewed scientific studies, conducted over the five years since the spill, looking at possible reasons for the historically high number of dolphin deaths that have occurred within the footprint of the Deepwater Horizon spill,” said Dr. Teri Rowles, veterinarian and one of 22 contributing authors on the paper, and head of NOAA’s Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program, which is charged with determining the causes of unusual mortality events, also known as UMEs. “These studies have increasingly pointed to the presence of petroleum hydrocarbons as being the most significant cause of the illnesses and deaths plaguing the Gulf’s dolphin population. This study carries those findings significantly forward.” [...]
Barataria Bay, Louisiana, was one of the most heavily oiled coastal areas from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the new study shows that half of the dead dolphins examined from Barataria Bay that stranded between June 2010 and November 2012 had a thin adrenal gland cortex, indicative of adrenal insufficiency. One in every three dolphins examined across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama had this lesion. In comparison, only 7 percent of the dead stranded reference dolphins, collected from other coastal regions outside the Deepwater Horizon oil spill area and time frame, had a thin adrenal cortex. [...]
In addition to the adrenal lesions, the scientific team discovered that more than one in five dolphins that died within the Deepwater Horizon oil spill footprint had a primary bacterial pneumonia. Many of these cases were unusual in severity, and caused or contributed to death.
But BP didn't cause this. Had to be something else, right?
These guys have been lying about every aspect of the blow-out since five minutes after it happened. No reason to expect they're going to change their tune.