Most of Prince William Sound’s animal populations will someday recover from the lingering effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. One, however, will not: a community of killer whales unlike any other in the world.
“It’s a separate population. Their genetics, their acoustics, are different from any other killer whales that we see in the north Pacific,” said Craig Matkin, director of the North Gulf Oceanic Society, who has studied the region’s whales for three decades.
Known to researchers as the AT1 pod, the whales’ home range fell within the 11,000 square miles of crude oil dumped by the ship when it ran aground on March 24, 1989. Nine of the pod’s 22 whales subsequently died, likely from oil ingestion — a blow from which the group, already struggling to cope with pollution and declining populations of the seals on which they rely for food, never recovered.
“It was the last nail in the coffin,” said Matkin.
Daily Archives: March 26, 2009
This is about as interesting as watching corn grow
In fact, it IS watching corn grow!
Changing of the birds …
…The reason people think that Robin Red Breast is a sign of spring is that we believe that robins fly south for the winter and north for the summer, so when we see them, it must be getting near summer. The fact that many robins don’t migrate at all, but simply become reclusive for the winter, is not widely known….
The best thing on the internet today
The following blog post is now required reading for all my students. The comments, in particular.