Researchers have been going on dives into the Gulf of Mexico utilizing a mini-sub to take a gander at how the ecosystems are dealing with the recent BP oil fiasco.

It may seem like the Gulf of Mexico is a muddled mass of black goo and completely devoid of life, however that is not the case.

This past November, the three man mini-sub dove every day from the back end of the science boat Atlantis, which is the property of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Every day the Alvin came bearing gifts of mud from the seabed, red rock samples, and seawater.

However, one fine day, close to Thanksgiving, the Alvin brought up something amazing – Signs of life.

A professor of marine sciences with the University of North Carolina, Andreas Teske, really was astonished by the find.

He has described a scene you wouldn’t expect to see near ground zero of the BP oil fiasco. Mussel beds, white and orange carpets of bacteria, and even shrimp fish and sea cucumbers.

These survivors were all making their homes around an underwater lake, made of brine, which has been cleverly dubbed “Dead Crab Lake” due to the fact that anything that stays in too long gets pickled.

“You could see the surface of the brine pool just like the surface of a garden pond, totally clear,” Teske explains. “And in the brine pond, some animals that fell in got pickled — some crabs and others. So once they fall in, if they don’t manage to climb out quickly, that’s it!”

It’s good to see that nature once again proves that it will take more than a small little oil fiasco to take it down.

The official Federal Government Website, “Restore the Gulf”, has released its latest report on the effects that the BP oil spill fiasco has had on the poor animals of the area.

The group has put together some rough numbers from eyes on the ground, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

So, what exactly are the current numbers of dead as of the November 1st report?

The latest numbers are as follows: 6,104 deceased birds, 609 perished sea turtles, and 100 dead mammals, which include those lovable creatures, dolphins. The estimate is a count which tallies up the results from five different states: Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and of course, Texas.

Now, we must take a moment here, and say that these were the deaths recorded in the area, and upon first glance. Not all of the aforementioned deaths were necessarily because of the huge mess BP made in the Gulf Of Mexico. The final COD, cause of death, is going to be determined later.

When specimens are discovered, or trapped, they get their own very special ID numbers. After the initial counting, a more thorough autopsy will take place to look for things like black goo in the throat, mouth and eyes, as well as a necropsy to see if BP’s big mess is indeed to blame.

The report released also shows the numbers of live animals and birds which were observed to have been alive and well, if a bit gooey and black. The numbers don’t look good for BP. Of 535 sea turtles collected, 456 were visibly covered in the black goo…

So, looks like BP is going to have some more explaining to do!

A massive amount of fish have been killed off in the Bayou Chaland area of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana and something stinks. Plaquemines is the southernmost parish of Louisiana, where they are just now starting to get back on their feet after the BP oil spill fiasco. Among the fish that have been mysteriously turning up dead are pogie, redfish, shrimp, crabs, and even freshwater eels have not been able to escape the clammy grasp of death.

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries released a statement the day after the fish started turning up dead stating that the cause of death for the fish was low levels of oxygen, and was not related to to the BP oil Spill fiasco.

The director of the Coastal Zone Management Department, P.J. Hahn, has pointed out that the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries came to the conclusion without bothering to take any water samples, or fish samples in the affected area. This is where things get fishy. If you are testing things, and I’m no scientist, but you need to take samples, otherwise what are you basing your data on? The commentary of some dead fish?

P.J. Had this to say on the matter “ We had three fish kills in eight days, all in areas that were heavily oiled during the Deep Horizon Oil spill. The first was in Chaland Pass, the second near Bay Joe Wise and the third was in Bay Robinson. All kills covered areas approximately two square miles in size. I collected water and fish samples and turned them over to our DA’s office. Early independent testing results show the fish have oil in their gills and liver. Now a more detailed testing will indicate the fingerprint of the oil to see if it matches the BP Deep Horizons oil.”

Uh Oh.. Data Manipulation anyone? Conspiracy? Will BP now have one more nail in their coffin and be sent to sleep with the fishes?

With the black goo from the BP oil spill making its way to the once clean shores, Billy Nungesser, the President of Plaquemines, has pleaded with the U.S. Coast Guard to help finish mopping up the mess BP left behind, before beginning to restore the area.

“The Coast Guard’s role through this whole thing has been to get in the way of local government,” Nungesser said Wednesday. “We’re still fighting. They want to downsize.”

Nungesser has commented that thousands of gallons of the black BP goo is making its way into the Parish’s delicate marshes and swampland.

Paul Zakunft, the Rear Admiral of the Coast Guard as well as the federal governments on scene coordinator, commented on Wednesday that there is a lot of the BP goo left to mop up, and the Coast Guard won’t be backing down from the challenge of doing so.

Even though the BP fiasco supposedly ended when they capped the well over 2 and a half months ago, over 20,000 workers ae still mopping up the mess from 588 miles of shoreline as well as the marshlands of Louisiana, Zakunft explained.

Two of the areas which are in desperate need of a cleanup are Barataria Bay and Bay Jimmy, he added.

The blame has been laid on the bad weather and high tides in the month of June, for spreading the black goo to where it isn’t welcome.. Well, it’s time someone stopped making excuses, and started mopping!

Red snapper

Snapper fry are all over the place. There are also trout, grunt and grouper fry all over the place as well. The early tabulation of the annual count in the beds of grass spattered about the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico seems to suggest that the larvae of some kinds of fish have survived the BP oil fiasco, and what’s more, there are swarms of them.

“My preliminary assessment, it looks good, it looks like we dodged a bullet. In terms of the numbers of baby snapper and other species present in the grass beds, things look right,” commented a scientist with the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Science, Joel Fodrie, who has been actively involved in the study of seagrass meadows along the coast for the past five years.

Joel’s group has taken samples of the different sea life in the grass beds in Alabama, Mississippi, and the Florida Panhandle. They will be taking a sample from around Louisiana’s Chandeleur Islands come this Autumn.

Back at the height of the fiasco, when a seemingly endless stream of oil was floating about on the surface, researchers were most concerned as to whether the trillions of larvae which hatch each spring offshore would survive the severe contamination of the spill.
It’s looking like they did, and it’s a good thing too. It just goes to show you that mother nature is more resilient than we give her credit for. There is hope yet for the Gulf to make a full recovery, and that folks, is good news indeed.

Dwarf sea horse

There are tens of thousands of dwarf seahorses trying to survive in the oil infested Gulf of Mexico, and a researcher from the University of British Columbia is saying that their difficulties serves as a warning to not let BP to expand its operations to the West Coast.

Now the dwarf seahorse is at great risk of becoming extinct after the BP mess happened this past April, and it isn’t being helped any by the non-friendly methods for clearing up the mess, commented the director of the international project Seahorse conservation group, Amanda Vincent.

“We’re concerned that some lessons be learned for Canada from this fiasco,” Vincent commented during a press conference this past Tuesday.

“If we were to have an oil spill on this coast, either from tanker traffic or from drilling — if the moratorium were lifted — then we would also see them and everything else in their habitats severely affected.”

While a provincial, as well as federal, moratorium is in place against any kind of oil exploration on the north coast of British Columbia is in effect, the First Nations and other environmental organizations have cautioned of the dangers of putting in an oil pipeline.

And with what happened in the Gulf of Mexico who could blame them? We really need to step back, and force the big oil companies to take extra precautionary measures, before allowing to operate anywhere else in the world…

Photo by: Igor GOLUBENKOV

Researchers backed by the NSF (National Science Foundation) and in conjunction with the WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) have discovered a plume of hydrocarbons which is more than 3,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and is thought to be 22 miles long at minimum. This plume is the residue of the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.

The 650 foot high, and 1.2 mile wide, plume of trapped hydrocarbons was discovered in the midst of a ten day subsurface sampling effort which took place from the 19th of June, until the 28th of June this year near the wellhead. The results have given a clear indication of where the oil has gone as the slicks on the surface have been shrinking and disappearing.

“These results create a clearer picture of where the oil is in the Gulf,” commented Christopher Reddy, a WHOI marine geochemist and one of the authors of a paper on the results that appears in this week’s issue of the journal Science.

This investigation – which was made possible by three quick action grants from the chemical and oceanography program at the NSF, with additional money made available by the US Coast Guard and NOAA via the Resource Damage Assessment Program – has confirmed that a large flowing plume was discovered which had

“petroleum hydrocarbon levels that are noteworthy and detectable,” Reddy explained.

So it seems we have not yet seen the end of the dreadful BP Oil Spill. While there has been no talk about what to do about this potentially disastrous situation, they are hard at work on it, but it could be months before an answer is found.

The Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia have released a report which draws the conclusion that somewhere in the vicinity of 80% of the oil which was released into the Gulf Of Mexico from the BP spill has not been cleaned up, and is still a threat to the environment.

The report was written by five accomplished marine researchers, and strongly goes against the reports issued by the media, which state that only 25% of the oil from the BP spill is still out there.

“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” director of Georgia Sea Grant and professor of marine sciences in the University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Charles Hopkinson explains. “The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade. We are still far from a complete understanding of what its impacts are.”

The report was written in conjunction with Jay Brandes, the associate professor of the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography; Samantha Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the UGA; Richard Lee, professor emeritus at Skidaway; and Ming-yi Sun, a professor of marine sciences at the UGA.

This group of researchers have take a look at the data taken from the Aug 2nd National Incident Command Report, which estimated an “oil budget” which was widely interpreted as suggesting hat only 25% of the oil from the catastrophic spill remained in the waters.

Photographers are shooting photos of marsh grass and brushes of mangrove tree which are already showing a marked improvement, in a bay where just mere months ago, the same photographers were shooting images of dying pelicans smothered in the oppressie black oil from the Gulf Of Mexico oil spill.

Over a dozen researchers who were interviewed by The Associated Press have said that the marsh in the bay, as well as all along the coast of Louisiana, has begun to heal itself. This gives rise to the hope that the delicate wetlands might just pull through what is said to be the worst offshore oil spill in the history of the United States. Some marshland might just need to be written off, however the losses from the spill will seem laughable when compared to the large losses on the coast every year attributed to normal human development.

This past Tuesday, a small voyage through the Barataria Bay marsh revealed that there were thin shoots growing up through the mass of oily grasses. In other areas, there were still dead mangrove shrubs, no doubt killed by the oil, however even they showed signs of growth.

“These are areas that were black with oil,” explained, a temporary worker with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Matt Boasso.

It’s nice to know that when push comes to shove, mother nature still has a lot of shove left in her, and she won’t be letting a little thing like an oil spill get in the way of our planet’s ecology.

The warm, white sand beach stretches as far as the eye can see, and is as clean and flat as freshly laundered towels.

The light blue-green sea is so clear, you can see the sun gleam off the silver colored fish frolicking around..

Sounds nice doesn’t it? This is the scene at the Pensacola Beach, on the Gulf Coast of Florida.. But there is one thing missing… Where are all the tourists?

Normally, at this time of year, you would be hard pressed to get even standing room on the beach, but now the beach is almost like one of those private oasis’ you hear about on TV.

So, why are the tourists staying away? It all boils down to one chaotic day last June.. This was the day the Obama administration made the announcement that the BP oil spill was “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.” Well you know what happens next. News Networks from all over raced on down to the Pensacola Beach and quickly found what they were seeking – atrocious images of the famous white sandy beaches, smothered with gruesome black ooze, and apparently in dire straights.

This apocalyptic message was strengthened when interviews were conducted with locals of the area. “It’s damn near biblical. This place is done for!” commented Kevin Reed, a 36 year old man, whose family has had the pleasure of swimming and sunbathing in the area for years and years.

His sadness was entirely understandable.

Yet, as has been witnessed this past week, not only is the beach not “done for”, the exact opposite seems to be the truth. Not only that, but had the news crews bothered to go back just three short days after they originally raced down to the beach in the first place, they would have noticed that the black goo had already been removed by a group of the large team BP had put together to clean up the mess.

Now, the BP workers are still on site – however, they are using small instruments to sift out the tiniest particles of oil.

However, a nice clean beach after a “catastrophic” oil spill, doesn’t make for good news does it? I mean who wants to listen to that?

Not the compensation claimants and their sharks, not the politicians, and not even the green lobby tub-thumpers.
So, the going theory is that they made the whole thing up, to help bolster Obama’s image, and get the attention off things that were mainstream news not too long ago.. Remember the story that Obama was using a Fake Social Security Number? How about the other dirt that was brought into the light? True or not, those stories were very damaging to not only Obama, but to the administration as well..

So what better way than to have a “catastrophe” and then have Obama come out the hero?

You will of course need to draw your own conclusions.. But there are a lot of people who finds this scenario a bit fishy… We here at AC are happy just to conclude that it has been a disaster in its own right and see no need to quantify it.