Is
Fukushima Radiation Causing the Epidemic of Dead and Starving Sea
Lions In California?
George
Washington
31
March, 2013
Associated
Press reports:
At
island rookeries off the Southern California coast, 45 percent of the
pups born in June have died, said Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist
for the National Marine Fisheries Service based in Seattle. Normally,
less than one-third of the pups would die.
It’s
gotten so bad in the past two weeks that the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration declared an “unusual mortality event.”
That will allow more scientists to join the search for the cause,
Melin said.
***
Even
the pups that are making it are markedly underweight ….
***
Rescuers
have had to leave the worst of them in an effort to save the
strongest ones, she said.
***
Routine
testing of seafood is being done by state and federal agencies
and consumer safety experts are working with NOAA to find the
problem.”No link has been established at this time between these
sea lion strandings and any potential seafood safety issues,” NOAA
said in a statement.
Given
that the FDA has refused
to test seafood for radiation,
we’re not that confident that the government is looking that hard
to see if Fukushima fallout is the cause.
From
the beginning of this year through last Sunday, 948
sea lion pups came ashore in Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles,
Orange and San Diego counties, according to figures from NOAA.
“There
really isn’t an oceanographic explanation for what we’re seeing,”
Melin said. “We’re looking at disease as a possibility and also
at the food supply, and it could be some combination.”
This
is an unprecedented crisis for the species in this state says the
Pacific Marine Mammal Center.
***
“So
we are seeing exponentially higher numbers” [Keith Matassa, who
runs the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach said].
***
When
you say off the charts, this is what you’re talking about.
”They’re
very sick,” said Keith Matassa, who runs the Pacific Marine Mammal
Center in Laguna Beach. His team is nursing 115 sea lions back to
health. “A normal sea lion at this age — 8 to 9 months old —
should be around 60, 70 pounds,” said Matassa.
“We’re
seeing them come into our center at 20 to 25 pounds, and really they
look like walking skeletons.”
Biologists
knew last spring that this year’s supply of anchovies and sardines
could be limited,
Boehm said.
“These
two species of fish are an extremely important part of California sea
lions’ diets, and females simply may not have been able to nurse
their young sufficiently, resulting in abandonment, premature weaning
and subsequent strandings,” he said.
Besides
anchovies and sardines, sea lions also eat squid and other ocean
creatures.
Few
people want to see the ocean’s anchovy stocks wiped out by
radiation either. That’s just the scenario that seemed to be
developing, however,
when reports coming out of Japan revealed that elevated
levels of cesium-137 had been found in anchovies in the waters off
Chiba,
near Toky0—a direct result of the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima
Daiichi power plant.
***
In
the big-fish-eats-little-fish way of the ocean, the radioactive
contamination eventually gets passed up the food chain, concentrating
in fats which get consumed and stored, until the isotopes finally
come to rest in the very largest creature at the top of the food
chain ….
Huge
die-offs of sardines
were also reported in the Chiba area of Japan after Fukushima.
Moreover,
the Vancouver Sun reported in January 2012 that 94
per cent of the anchovies and 92 per cent of the sardines
sold by the Japanese to Canada contained radioactive cesium. Some of
the fish were caught in Japanese coastal waters; but others were made
many hundreds of miles away in the open ocean.
(Note:
there may be additional
reasons
for fluctuations in the numbers of anchovies and sardines other than
radiation.)
Moreover,
radiation from Fukushima was directly deposited into the kelp off the
Western coast of North America … especially
in Southern California.
Fish
that eat the kelp have also
gotten exposed to the radiation
… as have the animals that eat those fish.
Sea
lions … feed on the fish that live in kelp forests.
There
are numerous other routes in which the Fukushima radiation could be
getting to the sea lion pups. We noted
last year:
A
1955 U.S. government report concluded that the ocean may
not adequately dilute radiation
from nuclear accidents.
In
10 years, peak radioactive cesium levels off of the West Coast of
North America could be 10
times higher
than at the coast of Japan.
As
we’ve previously noted, Reuters reports that Alaskan
seals are suffering mysterious lesions and hair loss:
Scientists
in Alaska are investigating whether local seals are being sickened by
radiation from Japan’s
crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
Scores
of ring seals have washed up on Alaska’s Arctic coastline since
July, suffering or killed by a mysterious disease marked by bleeding
lesions on the hind flippers, irritated skin around the nose and eyes
and patchy hair loss on the animals’ fur coats.
***
“We
recently received samples of seal tissue from diseased animals
captured near St. Lawrence Island with a request to examine the
material for radioactivity,” said John Kelley, Professor Emeritus
at the Institute of Marine Science at the University of Alaska
Fairbanks.
“There
is concern expressed by some members of the local communities that
there may be some relationship to the Fukushima nuclear reactor’s
damage,” he said.
We
reported yesterday that a new scientific paper shows that the
Fukushima radioactive plume contaminated the entire Northern
hemisphere during a relatively short period of time
….
Radioactive
fish
are also being found off the West Coast.
And
West Coast residents have also been exposed to Fukushima radiation
from the air. See this,
this
and this.
Unfortunately,
the nuclear accident is nowhere near contained. Japanese
experts say that Fukushima is currently releasing up to 93
billion becquerels of radioactive cesium
into the ocean each day, the reactors have lost
containment,
and groundwater
is flooding into the stricken reactors
(delaying clean-up).
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