When self-interest calls, it is easy to park our brains in delusion’s soothing space
My guess is that I could ask a beach-living 10-year old whether she thought that humans would be able to recover every carcass of deceased dolphins and whales in the Gulf of Mexico, and get the appropriate “no” response.
Cetacean carcasses (like human, and everything else I can think of) do not necessarily strand or float long enough to be seen.
As such, “oiled” carcasses detected subsequent to the Deepwater Horizon/BP event are expected to represent a small fraction of total mortality in the Northern Gulf of Mexico.
© 2011 Rob Williams, Shane Gero, Lars Bejder, John Calambokidis, Scott D. Kraus, David Lusseau, Andrew J. Read, and Jooke Robbins, Underestimating the damage: interpreting cetacean carcass recoveries in the context of the Deepwater Horizon/BP incident, Conservation Letters, DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2011.00168.x (early online publication, 30 March 2011)
“Common sense, what’s that?”
Apparently common sense does not belong to those who generated reports of mild post-oil spill cetacean mortality after 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill:
The Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the largest in the U.S. history, but some reports implied modest environmental impacts, in part because of a relatively low number (101) of observed marine mammal mortalities.
We estimate historical carcass-detection rates for 14 cetacean species in the northern Gulf of Mexico that have estimates of abundance, survival rates, and stranding records. This preliminary analysis suggests that carcasses are recovered, on an average, from only 2% (range: 0–6.2%) of cetacean deaths.
Thus, the true death toll could be 50 times the number of carcasses recovered, given no additional information.
© 2011 Rob Williams, Shane Gero, Lars Bejder, John Calambokidis, Scott D. Kraus, David Lusseau, Andrew J. Read, and Jooke Robbins, Underestimating the damage: interpreting cetacean carcass recoveries in the context of the Deepwater Horizon/BP incident, Conservation Letters, DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2011.00168.x (early online publication, 30 March 2011) (paragraph split)
What we would like to be true, and what’s real, are probably different
When it is in our interest to cover our oily tracks across the landscape, how motivated will we be to look for truth, when it can so conveniently be disregarded with a little help from the concealing volume of the sea?
Tagged: Andrew Read, BP, cetacean mortality, David Lusseau, Deepwater Horizon, dolphin, Gulf of Mexico, John Calambokidid, Jooke Robbins, Lars Bejder, rob Williams, Scott Kraus, Shane Gero, Underestimating the damage, whale