MOBILE, Ala. — Cold water may have killed the dolphins washing up in Mississippi and Alabama, scientists with the Dauphin Island Sea Labsaid Wednesday.
They point to an apparent correlation between large pulses of chilly water that flowed into Mobile Bay during January and February and the subsequent discovery of dozens of stillborn dolphin calves in area waters.
Data on water temperature and river flows show periods in each month when bay waters dipped into the 40s for days at a time.
h/t to Marc Morano
Warmcold can be a terrible thing! Can almost be worse than coldcold.
http://ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=8268 evolution must be stopped
POOR Flipper! 🙁
Natural during the cooling phase of the ocean atmosphere weather patterns!
Yes, but what happened to the land sharks?
That is by far the lamest hogwash at this sight to-date. Our Village People government does not compute.
Village People government
OMG, LOL!!!!
Just curious…so this has nothing to do with the BP oil spill in the Gulf?
What is happening along the along the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, 37 stillborn calves that have washed ashore, has certainly concerned scientists in this field of study. I think it’s important to remember what happened last year, and it would not surprise me if toxins from the oil spill are related to the dead dolphins. Of course this is not my field of expertise so I leave it to the experts who study dolphins to determine the cause, but it seems from what I’ve read they are seriously looking into the toxic effect of the spill and its cleanup on species such as dolphins. It’s amazing sometimes to me how easily we forget toxic events such as the BP oil spill and we don’t expect there to be any environmental consequences afterwards.
It may have been the cold too.
Are you opposed to petroleum to begin with? It’s just a question. I’m not insinuating.
Amino I use petroleum every day, just like most everyone else.
I am opposed to environmental damage from extraction of fossil fuels, and while I know that the US has enough coal to keep us going on our current level of consumption for at least another 400 years, I am opposed to extracting all that out of the earth because I’m not too keen on seeing the tops of my mountains shaved off to get to that coal. We have taped most of the easily accessible fossil fuels available to us, and to get to the rest poses serious risks to our environment and our health. Imagine a spill like what just happened in the Gulf in the Arctic. The US only has 1 icebreaker at the moment and could not even begin to deal with cleanup in the Beaufort Sea for example if a similar spill were to occur there. Nor do we even know if it’s possible to use the same methods to clean up a spill in ice-covered waters. There were lots of resources available to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf and yet it still took an incredible amount of time to deal with that spill. None of that infrastructure exists in the Arctic.
To me moving away from fossil fuels is not so much about the increase of GHGs in our atmosphere, it’s about all the other environmental damage/pollution/deaths from coal mining/etc. that make moving to renewables sensible. Yes, we have enough fossil fuels to continue on our path for a long time to come, but to me it’s not worth the damage it causes to extract those resources.
If only O’sputternik had allowed in all the skimmer vessels who offered to help. That would have kept oil contamination to a minimum, and flipper’s kids might still be with us today. Instead, month after wretched month, flipper gagged as he wrote letter upon letter to the white house begging for help….
I wouldn’t say toxins from the oil spill, but maybe the toxins from Corexit that they used to hide how bad the spill was may be the culprit here. Maybe just maybe they should have not used that chemical, Hey! Maybe they would have been better off skimming all that oil, then they could have processed it into a usable product, instead of homogenizeing it in with the water.
I agree. I actually know some folks who were down there filming a documentary showing the use of the toxins they were applying to clean up the oil spill.
It is typical. Often, man’s solutions to perceived problems create larger and more tangible problems. I wonder if we can draw some lessons from this?
Nope, we won’t. Our management of the flora and fauna at places such as Yosemite never seems to be grasped.
If the gulf waters cooled by 50 degrees scientists would just say, “an interesting anomaly” but if it warmed by .5 degrees then catastrophe would be upon us, all life in the sea coulda, shoulda, woulda, be annihilated.