OIL POISONS THE TIDE POOLS

By CHARLES WOHLFORTH
Daily News Reporter

GREEN ISLAND- Little worlds are silently dying in the crevasses of this rocky shore. The tide pools of Prince William Sound are being poisoned by oil spilled two weeks ago by the Exxon Valdez.

At low tide Thursday, around noon, the sun reflected warmly off the water. There were no clouds, there was no wind. The sulfur smelling silence of the oily shore had the texture of an aborted spring.

A raven cried and the voices of a group of press photographers, clambering over the rocks in search of dead animals, resonated weakly. The shore itself seemed to speak loudest. Uncovered, exposed to the sun and painted with black oil, a rock wall clicked and popped. Probably barnacles drying under the tar.

Green Island is about 50 miles from where the tanker went aground, but it was washed heavily with oil several days later, and biologists have found many dead birds here. A carcass lay in a patch of grass Thursday, its flesh hollowed out by scavengers till all that remained was a cage of white bone and a splayed black pattern of oily feathers.

The western shore is a lovely, home spun lace of tiny islands and inlets. Each island has a gray turret of rock topped with a few trees like upturned lances. At low tide, the turrets are surrounded by narrow seaweed necklaces where people can walk if they're careful.

This is the sort of place where, in better times, a group with a pot and a bottle of wine could quickly pick a bucket of mussels and steam open their bank vault shells over a driftwood fire. After dinner, they could entertain themselves all afternoon looking through the glass surface of the tide pools at the unearthly creatures in the tiny worlds below.

Thursday, it wasn't necessary to steam the mussels; fingernails opened them easily. But no one would want to eat these mussels. There are no longer shades of pink inside. The mussels' guts are all black except for a few fibrous strands of pink spanning from shell to shell.

John Karinen of the National Marine Fisheries Service said mussels and other such shelled creatures have started to die, and will keep dying.

But scientists haven't fully measured the devastation to intertidal areas of the Sound. Nature is too various for their generalizations.

The problem is scale. The Sound is a vast gathering of tiny mysteries. Green Island is a walnut on a wall map of the Sound, and its ragged western edge is a minor feature on the island. And among the folds of that area, a single inlet is just a wrinkle. Yet around that single inlet, each tide pool has a slightly different story.

One seems to live, its grass still green, its flowerlike sea anemones still able to wrap around a finger. One is gone, bombed out by a footthick layer of brown oil sludge which smells like rotting death when you kick it with your boot. And on one, the glassy surface is stained glass, a thin oil sheen that kills slowly.

In this pool, a sea anemone is dead and brown, like a wilted flower. Limpets and snails don't grasp the rocks anymore. Under floating grasses that are partly bleached by oil, tiny animals so unassuming they have only Latin names lie dead, filling the cracks on the bottom.

The tide begins to come in again. Swirls of shimmering oil ride the water back into the tide pools. A starfish painted with oil and draped over a rock still has a little pull left in its suction cups, and the water returns to keep it alive until the next cycle. The ocean slowly hides oilcovered rocks, beading up at the edge.

The rocks are ancient and leathery down by the water. Above the tide line they jut upwards at a shattered angle, but down by the water they have been worn to sensuous roundness.

Offshore, a seal surfaces through the oil and looks around, a sharpedge figure in the undulating slick. Then it dives again and becomes a ghostly figure below the sick water.

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