Affects on Marine Life in the Gulf

From the NOAA incident news (http://www.incidentnews.gov/attachments/8220/527747/DeepH20web_26May.pdf)

 

Marine mammals and turtles (effective May 25):

Sea Turtles

The total number of sea turtles verified from April 30 to May 25 within the designated spill area is 223. The 223 includes three entirely oiled sea turtles that were captured alive during dedicated on-water surveys last week: two small Kemp's Ridley and a larger sub-adult Loggerhead turtle. They were taken to the Audubon Aquarium where they are undergoing de-oiling and care and are doing well. In addition, 207 dead and 13 live stranded turtles (of which three subsequently died in rehab) have been verified. None of the dead or alive stranded turtles have had visible evidence of external oil.

 

Dolphins

From April 30 to May 25, there have been 22 dead dolphins verified within the designated spill area. The dolphin collected on May 24 is being evaluated. The other 21 dolphins have had no visible evidence of external oil.

Oil Plume in Gulf

From AP

 Marine scientists have discovered a massive new plume of what they believe to be oil deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, stretching 22 miles from the leaking wellhead northeast toward Mobile Bay, Alabama.

The discovery by researchers on the University of South Florida College of Marine Science's Weatherbird II vessel is the second significant undersea plume recorded since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20.

The thick plume was detected just beneath the surface down to about 3,300 feet, and is more than 6 miles wide, said David Hollander, associate professor of chemical oceanography at the school.

Hollander said the team detected the thickest amount of hydrocarbons, likely from the oil spewing from the blown out well, at about 1,300 feet in the same spot on two separate days this week.

The discovery was important, he said, because it confirmed that the substance found in the water was not naturally occurring and that the plume was at its highest concentration in deeper waters. The researchers will use further testing to determine whether the hydrocarbons they found are the result of dispersants or the emulsification of oil as it traveled away from the well.

The first such plume detected by scientists stretched from the well southwest toward the open sea, but this new undersea oil cloud is headed miles inland into shallower waters where many fish and other species reproduce.

The researchers say they are worried these undersea plumes may are the result of the unprecedented use of chemical dispersants to break up the oil a mile undersea at the site of the leak.

Hollander said the oil they detected has dissolved into the water, and is no longer visible, leading to fears from researchers that the toxicity from the oil and dispersants could pose a big danger to fish larvae and filter feeders such as sperm whales.

"There are two elements to it," Hollander said. "The plume reaching waters on the continental shelf could have a toxic effect on fish larvae, and we also may see a long term response as it cascades up the food web."

 

Quotes

April 27, 2010
“I am going to say right up front. The BP efforts to secure the blowout preventer have not yet been successful, If we don't secure the well, yes, this will be one of the most significant oil spills in US history." Rear Admiral Mary Landry – U.S. Coast Guard

April 29, 2010
"I've asked several times over the last few days for a detailed plan in terms of a quantifiable number of people and resources that will be deployed to help clean up and protect our coast. We haven't gotten those plans yet," Bobby Jindal – Louisiana Governor

April 30, 2010
It is of grave concern, I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling." David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

"They lied to us. They came out and said it was leaking 1,000 barrels when I think they knew it was more. And they weren't proactive. As soon as it blew up, they should have started wrapping it with booms." Cade Thomas, a fishing guide in Venice

"While BP is ultimately responsible for funding the cost of response and clean-up operations, my administration will continue to use every single available resource at our disposal, including potentially the Department of Defense, to address the incident," President Barack Obama

"As it gets into the wildlife management area it is going to kill us. It's the worst-case scenario for shrimpers, oyster harvesters, crabbers — all the commercial fisherman," Brent Roy-charter boat captain, referring to Louisiana's $2.4-billion-a-year fishing industry.

May 1, 2010
"These people, we've been beaten down, disaster after disaster," They've all got a long stare in their eye," he said. "They come asking me what I think's going to happen. I ain't got no answers for them. I ain't got no answers for my investors. I ain't got no answers." Matt O'Brien of Venice, whose fledgling wholesale shrimp dock business is under threat from the spill.

"These next few days are critical. Our focus is to mitigate the damage on the coast." Bobby Jindal - Louisiana Governor

May 2, 2010
"The oil industry is constantly given free rein in Louisiana," said historian Douglas Brinkley. "It's been treated as a third world society out there in the Gulf of Mexico; it's almost laughed at by oil executives - 'You can do what you want in the Gulf.'

"We should have started the cleanup while we were still watching that rig burn," said Billy Nungesser - President, Plaquemines Parish

“And we're going to do everything in our power to protect our natural resources, compensate those who have been harmed, rebuild what has been damaged, and help this region persevere like it has done so many times before.” Barack Obama

May 3, 2010
“The sky is not falling,” said Quenton R. Dokken, a marine biologist and the executive director of the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, a conservation group in Corpus Christi, Tex. “We’ve certainly stepped in a hole and we’re going to have to work ourselves out of it, but it isn’t the end of the Gulf of Mexico.”

May 4, 2010
"It's too much oil, too fast, not to have a pretty big impact on generations of wildlife that's in the water column. Birds eating shellfish getting sick and dying, marine mammals, land mammals getting sick and dying. You have birds feeding oiled fish to their chicks, the chicks have stunted growth," Riki Ott, a toxicologist who wrote two books about the Exxon Valdez spill.

"It wasn't our accident, but we are absolutely responsible for the oil, for cleaning it up, and that's what we intend to do," BP CEO Tony Hayward

"We will absolutely be paying for the cleanup operation. There's no doubt about that," Hayward told NPR. "Where legitimate claims are made, we will be good for them."

May 5, 2010
"Oil spills are ecological events, not human health events. Themost dangerous gases that come off the hydrocarbons in crude oil, benzene and toluene, will disperse as they come up through 5,000 feet of ocean water and then into the air, she says. And as the entire event "is happening in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, they won't have much effect on people on land.” LuAnn White, a toxicologist and director of Tulane University's Center for Applied Environmental Public Health

"This is another sad milestone in a disaster unfolding in slow motion. This massive oil slick is churning around in the Gulf and emulsifying into a thick, deadly 'mousse' that will extinguish life and destroy habitats. Seabirds like the Northern Gannet and an array of marine life have already been hit and now, many more victims are now likely to succumb. We may never know the full extent of the damage to the creatures that spend their lives beneath the waves or suspended between sea and sky. Millions of birds migrate across the Gulf at this time of year, returning from their winter homes in South America.” Frank Gill, president of National Aububon Society

May 9, 2010
“I wouldn’t say it has failed yet. What I would say is what we attempted to do last night didn’t work.” Doug Suttles - BP spokesman (after the containment dome failed to stop the oil flow)

May 13, 2010
"We would much rather fight the oil," one worried fishermen told Coast Guard, Environmental Protection Agency and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration representatives.

May 16, 2010
"We have no idea where the oil that isn't reaching the surface is going," James Cowan Jr., an oceanography professor at Louisiana State University, to the Los Angeles Times. "It could go everywhere.”

May 18, 2010
BP CEO Tony Hayward told Britain's Sky News on Tuesday morning that he didn't think the spill would seriously hurt the Gulf ecosystem. "Everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environmental impact will be very, very modest," he said.

"We are nowhere close to the finish line, oil has already been found along 29 miles of the state's coast Oil continues to pour into the gulf and hit our shores." Bobby Jindal – Louisiana Governor

May 19, 2010
"In the use of dispersants we are faced with environmental trade-offs," acknowledged Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson at a Senate hearing Tuesday. She noted, "I'm amazed by how little science there is on [these chemicals]."

"The heavy oil is here. This was the day everybody was worried about, everybody was concerned about. That day is here, that heavy oil is in the marshes. This was not the weathered, the emulsified oil,it wasn't tar balls. This wasn't sheen. ... This is oil that is going to be very, very difficult for them to clean up. More than 30 miles of the coastline has been oiled " Bobby Jindal - Louisiana Governor

May 21, 2010

"It's so sad when you look around here and you just think of what was here, what's happening to it now and what's gonna happen to it," says P.J. Hahn, the director of the Parish Coastal Zone Management Department. "Unless we stop that oil out there, it's just going to continue to keep coming in here and wipe out everything we have. ... I think we're just starting to see the first wave of what's really coming — and what's really coming I think is going to be devastating."


May 22, 2010

"Oil in the marshes is the worst-case scenario," said Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the head of the federal effort to contain and clean up the spill.

"I'm tired of being nice. I'm tired of working as a team," Billy Nungesser - president of Plaquemines Parish

"The government should have stepped in and not just taken BP's word," declared Wayne Stone of Marathon, Florida, an avid diver who worries about the spill's effect on the ecosystem.

"Work to disperse and burn the oil offshore was making good progress. Our near-shore activities were also quite successful yesterday. . . . We're quite fortunate; we have only had oil show up on seven locations onshore." Doug Suttles – BP Spokesman

"They ought to all lose their jobs, because none of them gives a rat's ass about this marsh," said Nungesser. "Something stinks here. It was too good of a plan (building of sand berms). Everybody was on board and all they did was take four or five days to rip it apart. And, I'm sorry Coast Guard, you got B.S. excuses. There was nothing you told me that's a reason we don't have dredges out there pumping today."


May 23, 2010
"We are 33 days into this effort, and deadline after deadline has been missed. If we find they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, we'll push them out of the way appropriately." Ken Salazar – Secretary of the Interior

"As we talk, a total of more than 65 miles of our shoreline now has been oiled," Bobby Jindal – Louisiana Governor

“This is an absolute tragedy, where are the leaders in the Corps? In the Coast Guard? In BP? All we’ve heard from them is excuses. I am so disappointed in these agencies.” Billy Nungesser – President of Plaquemines Parish

“The lesson learned by Katrina, Rita, and later, Gustav and Ike, is if we wait, we will die. I don’t have a crystal ball, but if I were a betting man I’d bet the plan was to let us die, then come back and do $75 million worth of cleanup.” Craig Taffaro – President of St. Bernard Parish

“This is the danger of not acting. We’re fighting a war here against this oil, and we’re going to do everything it takes to protect our coasts.” Bobby Jindal – Louisiana Governor

May 24, 2010
"We failed at preventing the spill. Now, we're failing in the response simply because we'd never gotten ready. Nobody has invested in these technologies." Richard Charter, oil spill expert for conservation group Defenders of Wildlife

"It is clear we don't have the resources we need to protect our coast. We need more boom, more skimmers, more vacuums, more jack-up barges that are still in short supply. Let's be clear: Every day that this oil sits is one more day that more of our marsh dies." Bobby Jindal – Louisiana Governor

“BP in my mind no longer stands for British Petroleum - it stands for Beyond Patience. People have been waiting 34 days for British Petroleum to cap this well and stop the damage that’s happening across the Gulf of Mexico What we need to tell BP, is excuses don’t count anymore. You caused this mess, now stop the damage and clean up the mess. It’s your responsibility.” Sen. Richard Durbin

May 26, 2010
"There's definitely some confusion about who's in charge," says G. Paul Kemp, a coastal ecologist with the National Audubon Society. "We hear from shrimpers that they're under contract (to help) but they're not, they don't know what they're supposed to be doing or whether they're going to be doing anything, and this is at a time when it would seem we need pretty much everybody working round the clock on this."

"The Obama administration's response is "dysfunctional, there's no chain of command, no one's in charge," Billy Nungesser - President Plaquemines Parish

"We have yet to see a plan from the Coast Guard, a plan from BP, a plan to keep it from coming in, a plan to pick it up," Billy Nungesser said of the oil. “"There's no wildlife in Pass a Loutre. It's all dead”

May 27, 2010
“National Guard is at Port Fouchon hauling sand to the beach” call into WWL radio

"BP is not the equal of the United States government. This president needs to tell BP 'I'm your daddy, I'm in charge, you're going to do what we say. You're a multinational company that is greedy and you may be guilty of criminal activity.' It's time that we understand, BP does not wish this thing well. They have been negligent. They need to whip out their checkbook and start moving into action and the president needs to push them." James Carville - American political consultant

“Fishermen near the spill are getting sick from the working on the cleanup, yet BP is assuring them they don't need respirators or other special protection from the crude oil, strong hydrocarbon vapors, or chemical dispersants.” Riki Ott, a toxicologist who wrote two books about the Exxon Valdez spill.

It's all dead

Anderson Cooper's piece on May 26 taking a tour of oil soaked Pass a Loutre, Louisiana

James Carville on GMA

don't get stuck on stupid

Russel Honore's view of this BP spill:

(CNN) -- It's interesting how many people have swallowed the BP public relations' bait to call the explosion from Deepwater Horizon oil rig the Gulf oil spill. We need to call it what it is: the BP oil spill. The federal government needs to take control and take punitive action against BP and any negligent government regulators immediately.

As a concerned citizen, preparedness speaker and author, and former commander of federal troops in disaster response, I watched with interest as BP brought out its big PR guns to protect its brand and its platoon of expert engineers, paid by BP to talk about how it happened and how they intended to fix it.

BP's reaction was much like Toyota's when it was confronted with safety issues. It, too, focused on PR to protect its brand, versus telling the truth, and sent out its engineers to talk about the problem and the fix.

The U.S. Coast Guard was the first responder. The Coast Guard's priority always is to save lives. They spent days looking for the 11 missing men. Meanwhile, BP took advantage of this time to make itself the authoritative voice in the news about the spill and blame other companies.

The No. 1 rule when dealing with disaster is to figure out which rules you need to break.

--Lt. Gen. Russel Honore
The U.S. government response was based on laws and rules that were created after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. After Valdez, the law changed to make the offending company responsible for the cleanup. A fund was created that all oil companies contributed to. If there was an emergency oil spill, a company could draw up to $75 million from this fund to fix the problem. But the fund was meant to help small wildcat operations, not huge conglomerates like BP.

Sticking to that regulation was part of the problem. The No. 1 rule when dealing with disaster is to figure out which rules you need to break. Rules are designed for when everything is working. A democracy is based on trust. BP has proved it can't be trusted.

iReporters share views on oil spill response

The government needs to change the game and make this a punitive effort. The government has been too friendly to oil companies.

The government should immediately freeze BP's assets and start to charge the corporation -- say $100 million -- each day the oil flows. The money could be held in a fund that U.S. government draws on to take care of the people along the Gulf Coast and pay the states for doing the cleanup.

Next, BP and the government bureaucrats who broke a law and put the public at risk need to go to jail.

The latest curse going around in southern Louisiana today is, 'BP you.'

--Lt. Gen. Russel Honore


Video: BP: '24 hours before we know' RELATED TOPICS
BP plc
Deepwater Horizon
Exxon Valdez
Hurricane Katrina
Oil Spills
I remember when we were evacuating New Orleans on Saturday following Katrina. We pushed the survivors to the airport and a major called and said the pilots refused to fly the plane without a manifest and there was trouble with weapons scanners.

I told him to direct everyone to put the people on the planes as fast as possible, and we would to do the manifest en route or on landing. As a result, we flew 16,000 people out of NOLA airport in less than seven hours.

The priorities of the response to the spill must be to stop the flow of oil, prevent the oil from getting into the shoreline as much as possible, mitigate the effects of the oil in the ocean, and take care of the people who have lost their source of employment, such as fishermen and those in the tourist industry.

BP's job is to focus on stopping the flow of oil. The government needs to provide more military "command and control" of the situation. As BP works to stop the gusher, the government must address the problem of the oil coming ashore and take care of the people affected, possibly retraining them in other jobs. The government could do this by using the Stafford Act to fund the states so they can protect their shoreline and clean up the oil. Then, the long-term effects of the spill must be mitigated.

The people of the Gulf Coast, particularly South Louisiana, are still recovering from Katrina. They've been through hurricanes Rita, Gustav and Ike.

They know hurricane season is right around the corner and this BP oil spill has the potential to get much worse. And they don't trust BP.

In fact, the latest curse going around in southern Louisiana today is, "BP you."

Punitive action must start immediately, with BP supplying the money, from fines, to help the Gulf Coast get over this catastrophe.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Russel Honoré.

Help Needed

Call this fool and ream him out:
From The Lens
And to those worried restaurateurs facing rising prices for shrimp and oysters? In the words of BP rep Randy Prescott: “Louisiana isn’t the only place that has shrimp.”


His office number is 713-323-4093. Email: randy.prescott@bp.com

Scenes of Frustration

From the Lens blog, a recap of a meeting in St. Bernard Parish with representatives of BP, the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, covering an array of topics.

History of the Oil Spill

By Tampa Tribune, Fla.

May 25--The sluggish, inadequate response by both oil giant BP and the federal government to the uncontrolled oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico has allowed a tragic accident to become an environmental catastrophe.

It is BP's responsibility to stop the leak, control the spreading slick, and clean it up.

But more than a month after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, the governor of Louisiana is pleading for containment booms and skimmers after oil coated 65 miles of shoreline. State and federal governments, and the oil industry, were unprepared to react to a major spill with enough manpower and equipment to protect the coast.

BP now hopes to plug the gushing well with mud and cement, and will try later this week, although it warns that it has never attempted the procedure in water so deep.

The scientific befuddlement is infuriating, given the industry's pre-spill claims to have mastered techniques and equipment that made offshore drilling absolutely safe.

After the rig exploded April 20, BP sounded no environmental alarm. Coastal communities were reassured that the well had not been in production. If BP suspected an undersea blowout, it didn't share its fears.

The next day, Coast Guard officials said crude oil could be leaking from the sea floor, but then changed their minds and announced there was no leak. BP promised to mop up whatever flotsam littered the area around the sunken rig.

On April 25, coastal communities were shocked to learn that up to 42,000 gallons of oil a day could be spilling, enough to threaten Louisiana, Alabama and possibly Florida.

BP asked for government help. Then the news broke that the spill was five times larger than first thought and had the potential to destroy fishing in a huge area of the fertile Gulf. But Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry said, "It's premature to say this is catastrophic."

On May 3, BP reported that it would pay for all the cleanup costs even as oil continued to pour into the Gulf. Gov. Charlie Crist was among the first officials to lose his patience, saying, "It's not a spill; it's a flow."

On May 4, President Barack Obama finally called it a "massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster." Yet he still did not take command of the operation, as authorized in the Clean Water Act should a spill threaten public health or welfare.

On May 15, BP's chief executive reassured the Gulf states not that it knew how to immediately stop the oil geyser, but that "the Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." He said that before the drifting sludge had reached shore.

On May 18, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prohibited fishing in an area of the Gulf about the size of Pennsylvania.

After BP rigged a pipe to siphon a fraction of the oil at its source on the ocean floor, it soon was collecting as much oil as it had said the spill was producing. It conceded it may have underestimated the size of the leak.

By May 20, the spill was reported to be big enough to require testing of Gulf seafood for perhaps decades to come.

On May 21, a White House spokesman said, "We are facing a disaster, the magnitude of which we likely have never seen before, in terms of a blowout in the Gulf of Mexico."

Now the spill is affecting a coastal area 150 miles wide, from Dauphin Island, Ala. to Grand Isle, La. Heavy oil has gone deep into some marshes.

BP has revealed its response to the disaster be largely experimental.

The federal government has revealed it doesn't have an oil response strategy other than to hope the oil company's scientists and engineers can figure out what to do.

 

 

 

A summer of tears

by Mike Roberts

The boat ride, out, from Lafitte, Louisiana, Sunday, May 23, 2010, to our fishing grounds was not unlike any other I have taken in my life, as a commercial fisherman from this area. I have made the trip thousands of times in my 35 plus years shrimping and crabbing. A warm breeze in my face, it is a typical Louisiana summer day. 3 people were with me, my wife Tracy, Ian Wren, and our grandson, Scottie. I was soon to find out, how untypical this day would become for me, not unlike a death in the family. This was going to be a very bad day for me.

As we neared Barataria Bay, the smell of crude oil in the air was getting thicker and thicker. An event that always brought joy to me all of my life, the approach of the fishing grounds, was slowly turning into a nightmare. As we entered Grand Lake, the name we fishermen call Barataria Bay, I started to see a weird, glassy look to the water and soon it became evident to me, there was oil sheen as far as I could see. Soon, we were running past patches of red oil floating on top of the water. As we headed farther south, we saw at least a dozen boats, in the distance, which appeared to be shrimping. We soon realized that shrimping was not what they were doing at all, but instead they were towing oil booms in a desperate attempt to corral oil that was pouring into our fishing grounds. We stopped to talk to one of the fishermen, towing a boom, a young fisherman from Lafitte. What he told me floored me. He said, "What we are seeing in the lake, the oil, was but a drop in the bucket of what was to come." He had just come out of the Gulf of Mexico and he said, "It was unbelievable, the oil runs for miles and miles and was headed for shore and into our fishing grounds". I thought, what I had already seen in the lake was enough for a lifetime. We talked a little while longer, gave the fisherman some protective respirators and were soon on our way. As we left the small fleet of boats, working feverishly, trying to corral the oil, I became overwhelmed with what I just saw.

I am not real emotional and consider myself a pretty tough guy.You have to be to survive as a fisherman. As I left that scene, tears flowed down my face and I cried. Something I have not done in a long time, but would do several more times that day. I tried not to let my grandson, Scottie, see me crying. I didn't think he would understand, I was crying for his stolen future. None of this will be the same, for decades to come. The damage is going to be immense and I do not think our lives here in South Louisiana will ever be the same. He is too young to understand. He has an intense love for our way of life here. He wants to be a fisherman and a fishing guide when he gets older. It is what he is, it is in his soul, and it is his culture. How can I tell him that this may never come to pass now, now that everything he loves in the outdoors may soon be destroyed by this massive oil spill? How do we tell this to a generation of young people, in south Louisiana who live and breathe this bayou life that they love so much, could soon be gone? How do we tell them? All this raced through my mind and I wept.

We continued farther south towards Grand Terre Island. We approached Bird Island. The real name is Queen Bess Island, but we call it Bird Island, because it is always full of birds. It is a rookery, a nesting island for thousands of birds, pelicans, terns, gulls etc. As we got closer, we saw that protective boom had been placed around about two thirds of the island. It was obvious to me, that oil had gone under the boom and was fouling the shore and had undoubtedly oil some birds. My God. We would see this scene again at Cat Island and other unnamed islands that day. We continued on to the east past Coup Abel Pass and more shrimp boats trying to contain some of the oil on the surface. We arrived at 4 Bayou Pass to see more boats working on the same thing. We beached the boat and decided to look at the beach between the passes.

The scene was one of horror to me. There was thick red oil on the entire stretch of beach, with oil continuing to wash ashore. The water looked to be infused with red oil, with billions of, what appeared to be, red pebbles of oil washing up on the beach with every wave. The red oil pebbles, at the high tide mark on the beach were melting into pools of red goo in the hot Louisiana sun. The damage was overwhelming. There was nobody there to clean it up. It would take an army to do it. Like so much of coastal Louisiana, it was accessible only by boat. Will it ever be cleaned up? I don't know. Tears again. We soon left that beach and started to head home.

We took a little different route home, staying a little farther to the east side of Barataria Bay. As we approached the northern end of the bay, we ran into another raft of oil that appeared to be covering many square miles. It was only a mile from the interior bayous on the north side of Barataria Bay. My God. No boats were towing boom in this area. I do not think anyone even knew it was there. A little bet farther north, we saw some shrimp boats with boom, on anchor, waiting to try and protect Bayou St. Dennis from the oil. I alerted them of the approaching oil. I hope they were able to control it before it reached the bayou. We left them and started to head in.

My heart never felt so heavy, as on that ride in. I thought to myself, this is the most I've cried since I was a baby. In fact I am sure it was. This will be a summer of tears for a lot of us in south Louisiana.

You can find Notes From The Louisiana Bayoukeeper here

Helpless Victims of the spill

from money control dot com

Over 300 dead birds are likely Gulf spill victims
Source : Reuters

More than 300 sea birds, nearly 200 turtles and 19 dolphins have been found dead along the US Gulf Coast during the first five weeks of BP's huge oil spill off Louisiana, wildlife officials reported on Monday.

The 316 dead birds collected along the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida — plus 10 others that died or were euthanized at wildlife rehabilitation centers after they were captured alive, far outnumber the 31 surviving birds found oiled to date.

The raw tally of birds listed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as dead on arrival at wildlife collection facilities include specimens obviously tainted with oil and some with no visible signs of oil contamination.

But all are being counted as potential casualties of the oil gushing since April 20 from a ruptured wellhead on the floor of the Gulf because of their proximity in time and space to the spill, said Jay Holcomb, who directs a rescue center for birds in Fort Jackson, Louisiana.

The same is true of nearly 200 sea turtles found dead and dying along the Gulf Coast, and 19 dead dolphins verified in the region since the oil drilling blowout on April 20.

Tissue samples collected eventually will be analyzed to determine more conclusively if the animals were contaminated with oil from the BP spill.

Holcomb, director of the California-based International Bird Rescue Research Center, said mortality for sea birds, many of them in the midst of their breeding season, is expected to climb sharply, especially if hurricanes move into the region and sweep more oil ashore.

"The potential for this being catastrophic is right there because there's a massive amount of oil in the water, and it's still pouring out, and there's a lot of nesting birds and a lot of birds using the coast," he told Reuters. "If the tropical storms take that oil and move it, that's when you're going to see the real impact, I think."

The size of BP's disaster in the Gulf could eclipse the scale of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound, in which an estimated 250,000 sea birds perished.

Diving birds hardest hit so far

The birds hardest hit by oil in the Gulf so far are those that feed by diving into the water for fish, including the Louisiana state bird, the brown pelican, removed last year from the US endangered species list, and the northern gannet, Holcomb said.

But shorebirds, wading birds and songbirds will increasingly be put in harm's way as more oil washes onto beaches and into marshlands.

Oil impairs the insulating properties of birds' feathers, exposing them to cold and making it difficult for them to float, swim and fly. Chemicals in the petroleum also can burn their skin and irritate their eyes. They also end up ingesting the oil when they preen, damaging their digestive tracts.

Other wildlife at immediate risk in the Gulf are sea turtles and marine mammals.

To date, 209 sea turtles have been found dead or debilitated along the Gulf Coast, about double the number reported late last week, a tally that wildlife officials said then could be considered normal for this time of year.

The latest figure includes 194 that washed ashore dead and 12 that were found stranded alive, two of which later died in rehab, said Dr. Michael Ziccardi, a veterinarian and professor at the University of California at Davis who is overseeing sea turtle and marine mammal rescue teams in Louisiana.

Three remaining turtles in the latest tally were found heavily oiled at sea but have survived, he said. Those three are the only ones with outward signs of oil contamination.

Necropsies, the animal equivalent of autopsies, have been performed on 40 turtle carcasses found intact, and a majority of the findings pointed to drowning or the aspiration of bottom sediments as the cause of death, Ziccardi said.

Although the results are "inconsistent with oil exposure as a primary cause of death," lab tests of tissue samples are still pending, so less visible factors remain to be determined, he said.

Nineteen dolphin deaths also have been confirmed since the spill began, but none of those animals showed any obvious external or internal signs of oiling, Ziccardi said.