Reflections on Gulf Sea Life, Ocean Trash, and Oil

heart-shaped oil deposit we found on the beach at Grand Isle, LA

This past weekend my husband and I spent a couple of nights on Grand Isle, Louisiana, where we walked the beach and the mosquito-infested trail in Grand Isle State Park and toasted our 34th wedding anniversary over a dinner of shrimp and flounder. (The shrimp was so-so, my husband's flounder the better choice.) Except for the occasional balls of oil we found on the beach and the oil platforms we could see from the beach, nothing much reminded us of the huge BP oil spill of two years ago.

Every morning the public beach is mechanically swept clean, and a person in a motorized cart picks up the larger pieces of trash that might otherwise clutter the sweep of sand where folks set out their towels and beach chairs and unfurl their umbrellas and aluminum-poled sunshades. And BP is doing its part to lure tourists to the Gulf states, assuring us all that everything is just wonderful on the coast.

On the surface, things don't look so bad. A closer look provides a more disturbing view.

On strolls behind the mechanically-swept beach, we noticed hundreds of small pieces of plastic and swaths of the terribly invasive water hyacinth that clogs bayous, rivers, and lakes, and, when washed out to sea, dies in the salt water that then deposits the stuff on beaches. In the state park one morning, we watched some guy on a tractor disk the beach and pile the water hyacinth in drifts of sand behind the reach of surf and tide, and on the public beach, we watched plastic water bottles, Styrofoam, and a huge plastic bag wash up in the surf in a matter of minutes. In the debris behind wind-deposited sand, we noted hundreds of colorful plastic bottle caps, faded by salt and sun, and occasional tar balls.

On the beach in the state park, Tom and I were glad to see dolphins cavorting in the surf just beyond the rock jetties. But then I spied something large, gray, and fleshy protruding from the shallow water between the beach and the rock jetties, near where people were setting up their fishing lines. A closer look with binoculars indicated a dead sea mammal, probably a dolphin.

In March of this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report that describes "'unprecedented' harm to dolphins in the area of the 2010 spill, a vast stretch of the Gulf south of the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coasts and the Florida panhandle," according to an article on the environment in National Journal. The article provides some of the horrifying statistical details:

Carcasses of 675 dolphins were recovered in the region between February 2010 and February 2012, or roughly 337 each year, the report said; the average number of “strandings” annually in the northern Gulf from 2002 to 2009 was 74.  And the 159 carcasses recovered in Louisiana waters after the spill was eight times higher than the historical average, the NOAA scientists reported.

In addition, nearly all of the 32 live dolphins captured and studied in Barataria Bay, one of Louisiana’s hardest-hit areas during the spill, were underweight, anemic, and suffered from liver or kidney disease, and half had abnormally low levels of hormones, the study said. The symptoms “are consistent with those seen in other mammals exposed to oil,” the scientists said.

Other damages to sea life have been observed, as well, including "horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp," according to an investigative piece on Al Jazeera's website.  We're being told, of course, that Gulf seafood is safe to eat, but the impact of BP's Gulf oil spill of April 2010 won't be fully known for years. For instance, scientists have also found higher concentrations of heavy metals in oysters, but they "don't yet know how trace metals like those found in the oysters move through food chains, or what effects they could have on high-level consumers, including people."

Tom loves oysters, and I know he will be unhappy to learn that other threats beside oil spills may be taking oysters off the menu. We focus on local and regional threats such as the BP Gulf oil spill, but that oil spill is just one horrific drop in the ocean. Climate change is affecting ocean acidification and threatening oyster reproduction, coral reefs, and other kinds of ocean life.

Our throw-away lifestyle threatens ocean life, as well. I am currently reading Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them," which is full of astounding bits of information, such as the following:

Depending on where they sample, oceanographers have found that between 60 and 95 percent of today's marine debris--the preferred bureaucratic term for flotsam and jetsam--is made of plastic. Despite the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, according to a 2004 EPA report, the United States still releases more than 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm runoff every year, and in that sewage are what the Environmental Protection Agency charmingly calls "floatables"--buoyant, synthetic things: Q-tips, condoms, dental floss, tampon applicators. [I spied two pieces of pink plastic tampon applicator pieces on the beach at Grand Isle.]

and

Globally, we are currently producing 300 million tons of plastic every year, and no known organism can digest a single molecule of the stuff, though plenty of organisms try.

When Tom and I toasted our 34 years of marriage at The Lighthouse on Grand Isle, I added a hopeful wish for 34 more years of married life. I wonder what a stroll on the beach will be like in 34 years. Will there still be a beach at Grand Isle? Will oysters be on the menu?

other links:

"'Hug the Monster: Downplaying the Climate Threat Won't Work as a Survival Strategy," by Joseph Romm, at grist.org, 7 May 2012.

"Afloat in the Ocean: Expanding Islands of Trash." by Lindsey Hoshaw, for The New York Times, 9 November 2009.

"Fish Consumption Advisories," for the state of Louisiana, on the website of Louisiana's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.