SOUND OIL SPILL RESEARCH RAISES NEW QUESTIONS
DECLINE IN SOME SPECIES DEFIES EASY EXPLANATIONS

By NATALIE PHILLIPS
Daily News reporter

ANCHORAGE- Seven years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, scientists have discovered that a well-studied killer whale pod in Prince William Sound still is losing members.

''We don't know what is involved yet,'' said Robert Spies, chief scientist for the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council.

Scientists suspect that oil toxicity is not to blame. Instead, they think the problem is related to a breakdown in the pod's social structure caused by the 1989 spill, said Craig Matkin, a Homer-based marine biologist who has been studying the pod since the early 1980s.

The pod lost 13 of its 36 members immediately after the spill. Since 1993, the pod has lost another five whales and has gained only one.

Of the five recent deaths, two were calves orphaned at the time of the spill; one was a mature male whose fin collapsed seven years ago; one was a female that lost most of her close relatives seven years ago; and the final one was a calf less than a year old, Matkin said.

The killer whale study, seabird studies, salmon and herring studies and dozens of others will be discussed during a three-day workshop that starts today at the Hotel Captain Cook. The workshop will bring more than 200 scientists and resource managers together to discuss findings from the $19.2 million worth of studies conducted in 1995 and funded by the trustee council.

''We've found in previous years a major benefit of the workshop was the opportunity for researchers working in different fields to talk to one another,'' said Molly McCammon, the trustee council's executive director. ''There aren't many opportunities to do this and the data one person has collected can often turn out to be useful to someone working on a different problem.''

Exxon officials said they had no comment about the studies being conducted with the $900 million the oil company paid to settle state and federal government claims for damage. Since the 1991 settlement, the trustee council has allocated roughly $80 million of that $900 million for studying the effects of the spill.

Research has found some recovering species.

Murres, seabirds that suffered the highest mortality during the spill, ''are now producing within normal bounds,'' Spies said.

But most scientists are still looking at problems.

Oil can still be found in some of the spill area, which stretches from the center of Prince William Sound to beyond Kodiak Island.

''We know a lot of problem areas are the northwest-facing bays,'' Spies said. ''It's in small proportions, but you can turn over cobble or mussel beds and they can be heavily oiled.'' He said he didn't think the oil posed a toxic threat, but ''in the minds of the people who live there, they are unsure of it. They certainly don't like to look at it.''

Spies said about 50 mussel beds are still contaminated, most near the heart of the spill, at Knight Island in Prince William Sound. The beds trapped and preserved the oil. In 1993, workers peeled back a number of mussel beds and removed oil.

Harbor seals, with numbers dropping before the spill, still are declining about 6 percent every year, Spies said. About 300 of the Sound's 2,000 harbor seals were lost the year of the spill.

''Nobody knows why,'' he said. ''It doesn't appear that there is disease.'' Instead, harbor seals are not surviving past the juvenile state.

And the number of sea otters in the Knight Island area is still depressed, Spies said.

Much of the study money for 1995 was spent on ecosystem studies, Spies said. Data from as far back as the 1970s is being examined in an effort ''to figure out how things work,'' he said, ''and under what conditions. What effect does climate have? How does predation work?''

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