SCIENTISTS BRING IDEAS TO OIL-SPILL SYMPOSIUM

By NATALIE PHILLIPS
Daily News reporter

ANCHORAGE- Deep below the surface, in the genes of fish, in the brains of birds and the livers and kidneys of sea otters, the Exxon Valdez oil spill played havoc. And finally, scientists can talk about it.

* Herrings were born mutants with twisted spines and deformed jaws.

* Harlequin ducks quit reproducing.

* Murres began nesting a month late, meaning their immature offspring are being swept off their cliffside nests and washed away by the early winter storms.

* Perfectly preserved, toxic crude oil remains trapped under mussel beds, in some places more than a half-foot deep.

* And still unexplained is: Did the spill have anything to do with the disappearance of 13 of the 36 killer whales in Prince William Sound's well- studied AB pod? And why have the dorsal fins of two males collapsed?

Scientists have been prohibited from discussing these and other findings for the past four years because of the federal and state governments' lawsuits against Exxon and Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. But with these suits recently settled, they are now free to talk.

In a special edition of "Alaska Wildlife," published by the state Department of Fish and Game this month, many of the findings are spelled out. And Tuesday, nearly 500 scientists and lawyers from across the country will gather at the first public forum on the spill.

The first day of the four-day symposium at the Egan Civic and Convention Center is free and designed to give the public an overview of the spill's impact. It costs $110 to attend the next three days of seminars, which are more technical and geared for scientists. More than 100 papers will be presented during the conference.

"This is it," said state biologist Sam Patten. "Everybody is going to put their cards on the table. Everything is going to come out."

Though invited, Exxon scientists won't be there. An Exxon spokesman said last fall that company scientists will present their work at a conference this spring in Atlanta.

The governments' chief spill scientist, Robert Spies, said Exxon might not agree with some of the governments' findings.

"You are always going to get different stories," said Spies. "The resource people are going to paint a black picture; Exxon will paint a white picture."

It appears most of the harm was short term; not a single species was lost because of the spill. Most scientists said they expect all the species to recover and genetic damage to be mitigated within a few generations, leaving the spill just a blip in the Sound's evolution.

Fishermen and environmentalists still have lawsuits pending against Exxon for the damage caused when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, dumping 11 million gallons of oil into the Sound. And some of the study findings may end up as evidence in court.

That's where the state and federal governments were headed when they settled out of court in 1991 for $1.2 billion. The settlement specifies that the bulk of the money go to restoring damaged resources. Spill trustees meet monthly and are looking to the same scientists and studies to figure out how to do that.

LACK OF STUDIES

Scientists began the journey of assessing damage empty-handed. With the exception of a few isolated studies, the only complete census and study of wildlife in the Sound was nearly 13 years old. And that study was done by two underfunded biologists who had to borrow a friend's boat to do their work, according to Karen Laing, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist.

"There are weaknesses in our knowledge about almost every injury," said chief scientist Spies. "A lot of that is due to the fact we did not have the baseline data before the spill. We weren't prepared for cleanup and we weren't prepared for damage assessment."

In some cases, biologists had to find untainted areas of the Sound to calculate what would be normal breeding and feeding patterns for some species.

In late spring 1991, scientists were coming up with several different, unrelated observations, said Malin Babcock, a National Marine Fisheries Service biologist. That's when they started looking at mussel beds as the link.

While storms and wave action washed most visible oil off the beaches, nothing touched the crude oil trapped below mussel beds, which may explain lingering injury to harlequin ducks and juvenile sea otters, which feed on mussel beds.

FISH AND SHELLFISH

For months following the spill, biologists and Exxon officials said repeatedly that fish and shellfish were not in harm's way because oil floats and the fish could easily swim away from it.

That was not always the case.

Spawning fish and oil met in the intertidal areas, producing mutant herring larvae and club-tailed wild pink salmon. Nearly all the wild pinks in the southwest part of the Sound were oiled, some twice, according to Samuel Sharr, a state biologist.

About 50 percent of the streams in the southwest Sound may have gotten oil, Sharr said. So eggs and fry produced in those streams got oiled there, then again migrating out.

Oil did not appear to diminish their food supply, but the extra metabolic energy it took for the juveniles to detoxify the water-soluble fractions of oil may have stunted their growth and limited the number that survived to be adults, according to state Department of Fish and Game biologists.

The wild pink salmon's clubbed tails and the twisted spines seen in herring had disappeared by this fall, Spies said. But pink salmon mortality rates are still high.

The wild pink salmon "are in jeopardy all right," he added. But there is much debate over whether the oil spill or the growing commercial hatcheries are to blame.

Oil experts were surprised as evidence began to accumulate about the depth at which the oil sediments were being washed down underwater slopes, eventually reaching 60 to 700 feet below sea level and into crab, shrimp and rockfish habitat. But biologists also point out that long before the oil got there, commercial fishing had been taking an undocumented toll on these species.

Rockfish, which live to be 100-plus years old and dwell near reefs at depths of 30 to 1,800 feet, were the only adult fish that turned up dead following the spill. Concentrations of hydrocarbon metabolites were found in their bile. State Department of Fish and Game biologists found that "without question, rockfish were exposed to oil, some at lethal levels."

Kenai River red salmon also are suffering nearly four years after the spill.

BIRDS

There are 100 species of birds in the Sound, according biologist Laing. And most of them escaped spill injury. Or, like bald eagles and marbled murrelets, felt the effects of the spill only the first year.

Other species that were relatively rare before the spill, like the harlequin ducks, seem still haunted by the onslaught of oil and cleanup workers.

"There is a large difference between sea birds," said biologist Spies. Some sea birds, like mallards, can ingest oil without so much as a burp. Others, like the harlequin, react to just a couple of drops on their feathers.

In all, roughly 36,000 bird carcasses were found and scientists estimate that 300,000 to 645,000 birds were killed during the first months after the spill, with Alaska Gulf common murres suffering the highest mortality.

Early 1970s data showed 6,000 to 10,000 harlequins living in the Sound. Biologist Patten calculates 2,000 of them were living in the path of the oil. About 400 were reported killed and those remaining are simply not reproducing.

What's amazing about harlequins is that before the 1989 spill, no harlequin nests had ever been found anywhere in world except Iceland. And that was in 1966.

"They are hard to study, kind of flighty and very secretive," Patten said.

Since the spill, Alaska biologists have found six nests in low, dense vegetation upstream in the western part of the Sound.

The colony of common murres that nest in the Barren Islands also are still suffering nearly four years after the spill. And at least one biologist fears the bad habits they developed during the spill could lead their colony to extinction.

Their problem doesn't seem to be with food, but confusion that started in early April 1989, when the wave of oil wiped out a raft of tens of thousands of common murres. Data suggest that the oil killed up to 80 percent of the local population, or about 10 percent to 20 percent of entire northern Gulf of Alaska population.

"The timing of the oil surrounding the Barren Island could not have been more devastating to the murres," wrote biologist Michael Fry of the University of California Davis.

Murres, which live to be 15 to 20 years old, produce only one egg annually. Some scientists theorized that the wave of oil mostly killed the experienced breeders, leaving young, inexperience murres to carry on the mating and nesting rituals. Each spring since the spill, the survivors have been nesting a month later than they should.

Their tardiness has resulted in increased predation of eggs and chicks by gulls and ravens. And the winter storms have swept more than 100,000 chicks off the cliffs to their deaths every fall since the spill.

"Murres appear to be in real danger of becoming permanently entrained to late breeding," Davis writes. "If this is permanent, the prospects for these colonies is poor because a breeding failure will lead to the eventual decline and extinction of these colonies."

MARINE MAMMALS

Though the Exxon spill was the first really big spill in the coastal, chilly waters, according to biologist Spies, the lack of baseline data limited how much was learned.

Previous, sporadic studies showed that 20 percent to 30 percent of the sea otters or about 4,000 in the Sound were killed by oil, Spies said. Workers recovered 781 carcasses.

The oil destroyed the insulating quality of sea otter's fur. As they attempted to clean their fur, they ingested large amounts of oil. Necropsies found high incidences of pulmonary emphysema, gastric erosion, hemorrhaging and liver and kidney damage. The oil seemed to take a toll mostly on middle- aged otters and pups.

"We don't know exactly why they are suffering," said Brenda Ballachey, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist. Mussels are a source of food for pups, which seem to have a high mortality, so scientists are looking at that.

The debate continues over whether sea otters are coming back and whether the rehabilitation centers set up to rescue otters after the spill did any good, Spies said.

Before the spill, harbor seal numbers were on the decline, according to biologists with the state Department of Fish and Game.

Oil-spill workers didn't find many harbor seal carcasses after the spill, though scientists estimated 50 percent to 100 percent of the seals living in the spill area were oiled. An estimated 200 died, but only 19 carcasses were found because harbor seals sink.

Harbor seals, known to be skittish around people, allowed spill workers to approach them. They were lethargic and sickly. Biologists later found debilitating lesions on their brains and that exposure to aromatic hydrocarbons had caused swelling and degeneration of their nervous system.

Scientists had data for killer whales. Craig Matkin, a Homer biologist, had been studying them since the early 1980s. So biologists knew one particular pod quite intimately.

The AB pod had 36 members the year of the spill. Within the next three years, 13 disappeared and two of the remaining males' dorsal fins had collapsed.

"That doesn't happen very often in the wild," said Marilyn Dahlheim, a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration biologist. "Nobody knows why it happens. It might be a nutritional problem, it might be injury to the fin."

Dahlheim said biologists have not been able to find a "real clear cause and effect" between the spill and the missing whales or fin damage.

"There is a legal term, 'preponderance of evidence,' " Dahlheim said, "but no proof."

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