The Gulf Oil Spill: One Year Later And The Effect On Animals

Thousands of square miles of the Gulf of Mexico are contaminated with chemicals killing many species but leaving scientist still questioning how much damage has been done one year after the BP Oil Spill. One thing that scientist are aware of is the effect on the bottlenose dolphin. In the last year, high numbers of bottlenose dolphins have been dying in the Northern Gulf waters. Since 2010 many different types of bottlenose dolphins have washed ashore from the Northern Gulf waters and they range from premature to newborn calf’s.

According to scientists, the BP oil spill is one of the main suspects of these bottlenose dolphins’ deaths, but they also think there could be other unexplained reasons. The coordinator of the Southeast Marine Mammal Stranding Network, Blaire Mase, revealed this information this March. Only a handful of these bottlenose dolphins have come ashore covered in oil. There was a recent study from the University of British Columbia saying that the number of whale and bottlenose dolphin deaths from the BP oil spill could actually be fifty times higher than the official tallies results putting these bottlenose dolphin deaths into the thousands.

I believe that this current event topic relates to our course because of the human interaction causing an ecosystem to be disrupted. The whole point of this course is to study the effects on ecosystems after they have been disrupted by a foreign influence. Possibly thousands of bottlenose dolphins have been killed and thousands of ecosystems have been disrupted due to the BP oil spill. If it was not for the human interference in this aquatic environment, this ecosystem would not be disrupted and thousands of species would not have been altered.

I believe that the BP oil spill will have serious long-term effects on this aquatic environment and could possibly disrupt our ecosystem as well. I think that BP was right to step up and take responsibility for this issue but they will have to do a lot more to fix the damage that has been done. In my opinion, it will take years of oceanic cleaning to get anywhere close to the way this environment was before BP stepped in and began this major problem. I believe we should also take this disaster as a lesson to learn to prevent future aquatic disasters.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/04/pictures/110420-gulf-oil-spill-anniversary-animals-birds-science-nation/