A Mental Organizer for Ecological News from the Gulf

I’d never thought much about brown pelicans until the explosive wipe-out of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Now I want to rescue them (turns out you need to have training to rescue oiled wildlife). No question, I feel bad for the fishermen and others suddenly out of work and struggling with economic loss—but I worry more about the fate of the wildlife and have been moved to tears by media coverage showing oil-drenched marshes and dead and dying creatures. Still, the majority of mass media reports seem to focus on the present and typically on one angle. Missing is a "big picture" schematic to outline both current and future deleterious impacts.

In an article posted on Deep Sea News, Miriam Goldstein, a doctoral student in biological oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, identifies the five leading impacts of an oil spill on wildlife and habitat—direct oiling, indirect oiling, reproductive failure, habitat destruction, and long-term chronic effects—explaining in layman’s terms what each one is and why it is critical to keep in mind. Goldstein calls her article an “anatomy” and this is apt because she offers a structural framework with which the ecological reverberations can be more fully understood. Her own area of research on the impact of plastic particulates on marine invertebrates—the largest garbage dumps on earth are actually floating at sea—attunes her to the challenges associated with studying vast, ever-changing, complex events with multiple causes and consequences.