Posts
Climate
Change, Algae Blooms, Anoxic Waters and Dead Dolphins: What’s
Killing East Coast Dolphins? Morbillivirus? Or Something
More Ominous?
Oily
algal sheen of red, black, and green visible from Cape Hatteras to
New Jersey in MODIS satellite shot on August 12, 2013.
Robertscribbler,
21 August, 2013
Because dolphins sit at the top of most ocean food chains and due to their sensitivity to healthy or unhealthy ocean states, they have been called “the sentinels of ocean health” by oceanographers around the world. So, when East Coast dolphins are dying at their fastest rate in 26 years, and with scores of these majestic creatures washing up on beaches from Virginia Beach to New York, we should sit up and pay attention.
****
I
remember the 1987 East Coast dolphin die-off well. Why? Because I can
clearly recall paddling through the ugly, murky red-stained waters in
my almost daily surfing quest for decent waves as a Virginia Beach
teenager. It was early September and school was just beginning. The
tropical Atlantic was unloading its guns, firing off the tropical
storms and hurricanes that provided the lovely swells I hunted with
so much passion.
But
walking down the beach didn’t provide its usual pleasure. The air
was chill and the ocean ugly. Plunging into the water, I noticed it
was filled with what appeared to be a reddish mud. Even knee deep, I
couldn’t see my feet. Paddling out through the dark, rust-red
waters was strange, eerie, like entering a distant land or the
seascape of another time. The water was cold and nutrient-rich from a
large upwelling event as well as from the annual run-off from farms
and lawns. Distantly, I knew these things from news reports and from
the discussions of family members who were, even then, heavily
involved in the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s efforts to preserve the
health of marine environments local to my area.
But
paddling through those ugly waters, I was more concerned about what I
couldn’t see. About what was concealed beneath all the darkness and
murk. Where had the crystalline waves of my early youth gone? And
what of the azure waters full of rich, white foam? Now turned to a
kind of brownish scum.
The
waves that day were large, dark, bullies filled with a biting
ugliness. Angry brutes capped with rusty foam. One held me under for
longer than I liked and I turned to paddle home. Settling in front of
the TV glow with my family, I learned the news. “Largest Red Tide
on Record. Massive East Coast Dolphin Deaths. Health Risk. Advised to
Stay out of Red-Brown and/or Murky Water.”
My
family kind of laughed it off. There’d been red tides before. But
none like this one. That year the red tides were exceptionally strong
and over a ten month period more than 700 dolphins died.
***
These
events of long ago remain clear in my mind because they had ominous
implications for my favorite sport — surfing — which in itself
was rooted in a joy for the glory of nature. I had often felt that
the great symphony of life and beauty I found in the ocean while
surfing contained far more majesty and spirituality than any
land-bound church. The great blue vault of heaven and the starry
night that came behind contained all the awe and adoration, for me,
that so many others associated with God. My worship was a dance
across the beautiful face of nature, my only remaining contact with
the human world — the opalescent surf board beneath my feet.
But
with the red tides the beauty and the awe was ripped away, revealing
a dark and ugly underbelly. A soulless place of lost life and beauty.
I didn’t want to plunge myself into ugly and potentially harmful
waters, nor did I find much appeal in those new, dark, blood colored
waves. They had lost their grace, becoming rough, brutish things and
the water I was paddling through was death. Along with the dolphins,
fish, crabs, every sort of sea life suffered and perished. The
catches of fishermen dwindled. It was a bad year, but only a shade of
things to come.
***
Silence
and an incapacity to communicate or understand what is wrong is often
the most brutal form of suffering. During my middle-school and high
school years, I suffered numerous bouts of bronchitis and general
weakness. During late high school, I went through a six month period
when I experienced terrifying episodes of shortness of breath, with
no other symptoms. Doctors couldn’t discover anything wrong, so I
continued on as I could. The summer after my senior year, I was sick
with a fever of 100+ for a month straight. The doctors tested me for
mono and found nothing. Shrugging their shoulders, they proclaimed it
was a ‘mono-like-virus.’ Whatever had caused these symptoms left
my organs inflamed and my doctors advised me to ‘avoid any kind of
strenuous sport or heavy lifting’ lest it cause an organ rupture.
For more than a year, I required 10 hours of sleep to maintain any
level of energy. Eventually, though, the health troubles and symptoms
faded.
***
Thunderstorm
over Jane Island.
I
come from a place that relies on the life of the ocean and the
waterways that feed her. And my experiences have taught me to be
sensitive and to pay attention to my surroundings. Often, the media
cannot be relied upon to tell the whole story. Such was the case with
the camping trip I took to Jane Island with my wife this summer.
The
Jane Island campground is a thin strip of coastal pinewood carved
into a cluster of sites for campers, RVers and wildlife enthusiasts.
It is managed by the park service and sits adjacent to a sprawling
wetland called Jane Island. The island is, itself, a testiment to the
ravages of human caused climate change. More than a hundred years
ago, the island hosted a fish cannery, and a number of farms. But the
low lying land, like so many Chesapeake Bay Islands, has steadily
been reclaimed by rising water. Now all that remains are a few copses
of pine trees and a vast wetland filled with channels deep enough to
kayak through. At high tide, the majority of the island is now
submerged.
Kayaking
Through the Wetlands of Jane Island (My Sister and Bro-in-Law in this
Shot)
The
nearby town of Crisfield had its own tale to tell. Dilapidated and
abandoned houses lined the road leading into a town filled with
closed store fronts covered in peeling or salt-stained paint. The
architecture there appeared to have frozen sometime between the late
80s and late 90s. Everywhere could still be seen the icon of
Crisfield — images and silhouettes of Chesapeake Bay blue crabs
displayed everywhere from flags bearing school mascots (“Go
Crisfield Crabs!”), to flags displayed outside dilapidated real
estate offices, to paintings on the sides of buildings, to signs on
the dwindling number of bay side restaurants. A ferry that
transported tourists and sightseers to Tangier Island, which is also
steadily being reclaimed by the Bay, lies roped off and idle, blocked
by large orange traffic cones.
The
scene is one of a town that is descending into a post apocalyptica,
one more likely to be featured in a gritty novel or Hollywood movie
than as a destination spot for vacation goers.
What
had pushed Crisfield so far down the road to disintegration? One need
look no further than their iconic blue crab. Crisfield is a town
almost entirely supported by its crab and oyster fishing industries.
But over the past 26 years, both crabs and oysters have suffered from
a series of disasters. Red tides, algae blooms, anoxia, invasive
species, and chemical dumps from industries along rivers feeding the
bay all exacted their awful toll. The result was numerous deaths and
high toxicity levels in these sensitive bottom dwelling animals that
either made them unsellable or substantially reduced their
populations for extended periods. And, in Crisfield, this devastation
of ocean bottom dwelling life took a terrible and visible toll on
human life there as well.
***
Why
Context is So Important to Understanding Climate Change
In
understanding the damage resulting from human caused climate change,
context is everything. Because climate change is so large, we have to
look at the big picture in order to understand it. All too often, we
look at a long, thin, bushy, tufted thing, or a padded stump-like
thing, or a spear-like protrusion of ivory and see only strange,
isolated, and seeming in-congruent features. But when drawing back,
what we find is an elephant.
And
this is why I’m sharing with you my experience of the health of the
waters surrounding the Chesapeake Bay, a set of waters I have had
intimate contact with for most of my life, intimate enough to know
that the life there is in severe crisis. So when scores of dolphins
begin washing up dead on shores adjacent to the Chesapeake Bay and
nearby ocean, one does not immediately jump to conclusions without
investigating the larger context.
So,
before we continue on a broader investigation, I’d like to call
your attention once again to the satellite image at the top of this
blog post and ask you to engage your senses. What do you see there?
And does it look normal to you?
Morbillivirus
or Failing Ocean Health?
Earlier
this summer odd reports were emerging that Manatees were dying in
unprecedented numbers along Florida waterways. Widespread red tides
had expanded through Florida estuaries, coating the grasses Manatees
consume in paralytic toxins. These toxins, when consumed in large
enough amounts cause the Manatees muscles to seize up, making it
impossible for the Manatees to reach the surface to breathe. From
NPR as of March 28th:
More
than 200 manatees have died in Florida’s waterways since January
from an algae bloom called red tide, just as wildlife officials try
to remove the marine mammal from the endangered species list.
In
a separate incident during early June, reports had emerged that a
large algae bloom was covering some East Coast beaches with an algal
foam that is implicated in increasing ocean anoxia. From
the Marine Institute as of May 27th:
The
Marine Institute is currently monitoring an algal bloom on
beaches on the east coast of Ireland as a part of its Phytoplankton
Monitoring programme.
The bloom was detected on May 27th using satellite images
and information provided by the Envirnomental
Protection Agency
and Wexford
County Council.
The
production of foam, and in some extreme cases anoxia, can result in
marine organism mortalities. Fish mortalities caused by this
particular species in previous Irish blooms have not been observed,
as wild fish tend to avoid the bloom. This may explain the low
catches reported by sea anglers on the east coast in recent weeks.
Several fishermen have also reported clogging of nets in recent
weeks, which may be caused by the decaying bloom sinking to the
seafloor.
In
yet one more incident, an estuary of the Chesapeake Bay called the
Lafayette River in Hampton Roads experienced yet one more dangerous
red tide event. The Chesapeake Bay foundation reported the event
which is under investigation by the Virginia
Institute of Marine Science.
The
findings match visual evidence of wide-spread algae blooms that can
be seen from satellite in this region of the East Coast. And algae
blooms can have numerous and devastating effects to marine
ecosystems. The organisms involved in algae blooms often produce
toxins which are directly dangerous to fish and marine wildlife. They
starve the waters by consuming oxygen, at which point the oxygen
consuming algae die and micro-organisms that thrive on anoxic
conditions multiply. These organisms produce and use hydrogen sulfide
as a means of cellular respiration increasingly as anoxic conditions
expand. Hydrogen sulfide is a fat-soluble gas that is toxic to all
forms of oxygen dependent life. It may become concentrated in both
fish, mollusks and crabs. In high concentrations in mammals hydrogen
sulfide is implicated in high fever, pneumonia like symptoms,
multiple organ systems stress (including liver and kidneys), and is a
potent neuro-toxin — attacking both nerve and brain function. LD 50
levels (the dose which is lethal for half the population) for most
mammals are around 5 grams per kilogram. Direct inhalation of
extraordinarily high levels of hydrogen sulfide acts similarly to
cyanide gas and is almost immediately lethal.
Both
anoxia and high hydrogen sulfide levels have been implicated in
numerous fish kills occurring around the world as both oceans and
inland waterways warm and become more favorable to large algae
blooms. Such a change in ocean and water states has been implicated
in numerous mass extinction events in the oceans and, in worst cases,
on land (see The
Deadly Climb From Glaciation to Hothouse, Why the Permian Extinction
is Pertinent to Human Warming).
Finally,
it is important to note that of the now 200+ dolphins that have
washed ashore dead, only 3 have tested positive for morbillivirus.
(Video
embed code isn’t working, looking for alternate source. Until then,
please follow link)
As
the above video shows, oceanographers and marine scientists at the
Virginia Institute of Marine Science aren’t buying the
morbillivirus explanation.
Perhaps
the most stark evidence for a non-virus related death source, an
indication of fat soluble toxins of the kind produced by large algae
blooms, is the fact that those individuals most vulnerable to toxins
are the ones that are seen to be dying at the most rapid rate.
According to Smithsonian institute scientist, Charlie Potter:
“Males
don’t have a mechanism for shedding contaminants. The females shed
significant amounts of their lipid-soluble contaminants through
lactation, so the calf gets a hell of a dose early on in life, and
some of the most outrageous levels of contaminants we’ve seen have
been in calves.”
Susan
Barco, also a scientist with the Smithsonian, noted that dolphins
were a key indicator of ocean health and that when dolphins are dying
in large numbers, something is seriously wrong:
“Bottlenose
dolphins are a higher-order predator. They’re often referred to as
‘ocean sentinels of health.’ So when our bottlenose dolphins are
healthy, it would probably indicate that we have a fairly healthy
ecosystem. When our bottlenose dolphins are not healthy, it may very
well indicate that our ecosystem is not healthy,” she said.
***
The
ongoing loss of ocean health is, to me, a defilement of the very
spirit of our world. As a child and teen, I was part ocean creature,
with so much salt water in my veins. My first memories of her include
my father joyfully tossing me into the, then crystalline, waves and
then swimming in after me, taking me to the depths to cup small black
fish in his hands as a gift of experience to my two-year-old self.
The
moment of the black fish, swimming in my father’s hands, me staring
at it, it looking back at me, so small, even compared to me, is still
with me. I remember being afraid for the fish cupped in the large
hands of my father. I remember thinking it might be hurt. Yet I also
remember the wonder of the moment we shared, and the joy I felt as my
father released it back to the waters.
I
realize now that the life of the fish and my own life are connected
and that they were never separate. The fish depends on me and my
human fellows to act responsibly, to work to restore a now terribly
sick world, to give it back the more healthy ocean of my childhood.
And we, both you and I, depend on the fish to live, to do its good
work in doing its own part to keep the oceans well, a safe place for
humans and ocean dwellers alike. For together we become a part of a
vibrant and self-reinforcing web of life. And, in breaking that web,
we come to die alone and with great suffering.
I
do not like this mass death of the dolphins whom we now know to call
to each other across the oceans by name and with voices that carry
through miles and miles of the still living, but greatly threatened,
waters. And I am growing deeply tired of a great number of humans who
obstinately fail to see the bigger picture, who continue to push for
the delivery of ever greater harm and yet deny its growing force and
violence. If the dolphins have names for one another, I wonder if
they also have a name for such creatures that live among us?
***
Destroyer
of oceans, destroyer of life, destroyer of worlds…
Links:
***
Interesting
fact: do a spell check on Morbillivirus
and what do you get?
***
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