Infant Dolphin Deaths are up on Gulf Coast

I no longer ask why the mainstream media doesn't cover these stories, but it's sad.  Very sad.

GULFPORT -- Four baby dolphins lay dead in the sand on the south side of Horn Island and one on Ono Island off Orange Beach, Ala., Tuesday.

That’s more dolphins dead in one day than all the dolphins, of any age, found dead in Alabama in 2008.
And those that are washing up this week along the shores of Mississippi and Alabama are all babies, either stillborn or very young. The total is 19 calves from mid-January to present, nine of those in just the last 10 days.

“With some, we’re not sure if they actually took a breath,” said Dr. Delphine Shannon. Shannon handles strandings for the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies, the agency that collects data on dolphins and sends daily reports to NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries division.

This is all happening early in the birthing season, which gets into full swing in March. The early deaths indicate something is wrong, said Moby Solangi, director of the institute.

With the Coast living in the shadow of the BP oil spill, the deaths bring an acute awareness to the situation. But scientists aren’t laying any blame until test results come back, and tissue samples haven’t even been sent to a laboratory yet.

The spike in infant dolphin deaths has the attention of both NOAA and the state Department of Marine Resources.

“Our antennas are up,” Solangi said. “I believe we’re going to see a correlation with something. This is too big a shift.”

So far, four calves in January and 15 in February have been found dead along Mississippi and Alabama shores. Compare that with the two years before the oil spill, when one death each was reported in Mississippi -- both in February.

The numbers for carcasses of all ages of dolphins found in the two states by year, according to Solangi and Marine Fisheries data, is 29 in 2006, 13 in 2007, 21 in 2008 and 45 in 2009. Then 89 were reported in 2010, and 28 in just the first two months of this year.

Blair Mase, NOAA’s stranding coordinator for the region, said her agency is watching the situation and comparing previous years’ data, “trying to find out what’s going on here.”

“We’re trying to determine if we do in fact have stillbirths,” Mase said.

The BP oil spill spewed more than 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf during dolphin mating season in 2010 and through months of the early gestation period, which is about a year. Thousands of gallons of dispersant was used to break the oil into droplets and suspend it in the water column.

But scientists are not jumping to conclusions.

I believe we all know "what's going on here" but the scientists are afraid of blow-back or risk future funding for their work if they cross BP's line.

Photo caption: Intern Rhiannon Blake, left, and research assistant Jamie Klaus with the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies take tissue samples from a dead dolphin calf while a BP cleanup crew works in the background on Horn Island on Tuesday.


Makes me sick. Read the rest HERE.

And so it goes.
*