Ratusan Ikan Lumba2 Mati d Peru
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10203959
Peru investigates deaths of hundreds of dolphins
AP foreign, Friday April 20 2012
LIMA, Peru (AP) — Scientists and Peruvian officials are investigating a mass die-off of hundreds of dolphins along the South American country's coast. A total of 877 dolphin carcasses have been counted recently along the shore in the northern regions of Piura and Lambayeque, Deputy Environment Minister Gabriel Quijandria said Thursday. Officials have been studying possible factors in the dolphins' deaths including a virus or seismic oil exploration that has recently been carried out off northern Peru. An analysis of the beached dolphins' internal organs hasn't found the sort of symptoms that experts have seen in other cases when dolphins have been affected by seismic tests, Quijandria said in a radio interview.
He said experts are studying whether the animals could have succumbed to a virus. "So far, it's the most probable hypothesis, and it isn't the first time it's happened. There have been cases in Peru, in Mexico, the United States," Quijandria said. He said the seismic tests produce underwater noise that can harm dolphins. But he also said that in Peru it's the first time such dolphin deaths have coincided with seismic work and that the dolphins began dying before the tests started. Carlos Yaipen, who leads the non-governmental organization Orca, said the beached dolphins began appearing in January. Dolphins have had broken bones in their ears and some of their organs have been collapsed, suggesting that shock waves generated by the seismic tests could have killed them, Yaipen said.
However, Patricia Majluf, the government's deputy fisheries minister, said that based on the available evidence officials haven't been able to pin down any relationship to oil exploration. Government officials have said scientists are carrying out further studies that they expect to finish in about two weeks.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/322052
Hundreds of dead dolphins wash up along the coastline in Peru
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/322052#ixzz1sZkdJ3iz
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/322052#ixzz1sZkdJ3iz
Chiclayo - Hardy Jones, co-founder of BlueVoice.org is reporting that over 600 dolphins have mysteriously washed up on the north coast of Peru.
Details are still surfacing over a shocking and unexplained mortality event (UME), which has claimed the lives of hundreds of dolphins along the Peruvian coastline. Jones who is currently in Chiclayo investigating the deaths, said he arrived in the country on Tuesday in response to an email alert from Dr. Carlos Yaipen Llanos, the Lima-based director of the marine mammal rescue organization, ORCA Peru.
Yaipen's email informed Jones that as many as one thousand dolphins had possibly stranded themselves on the Peruvian coastline. "Lest there be any doubt," Jones said in a statement today at The Voice of the Dolphins, "stranded means dead in virtually all cases."
Jones was already on high alert after rumors described a similar event in the same area last month, when media reports claimed 264 bottlenose dolphin had died on a 66-mile stretch of coastline 500 miles north of Lima. At the time of the event, the dolphin deaths were attributed to contaminated anchovies, or the impact of off-shore oil exploration and drilling in the region. [Video above].
Yet, said Jones, "after some authorities dismissed the report. I backed off the story." But Yaipen's email announcement disturbed the BlueVoice co-founder:
"If the numbers were even close to accurate this would be perhaps the greatest dolphin mortality event ever recorded. I called Dr. Yaipen. He had a man on the ground north of Chiclayo who confirmed large numbers of dolphins stranded along 200 kilometers of the coast."
Jones flew to Peru on Tuesday determined he said, to find evidence of the 1,000 dolphins. "We were told the greatest concentration was three hours drive north," Jones added, but only a few hundred yards into their trip, the crew began to spot dead dolphins.
Sporadic sightings at first revealed dolphins either in various stages of decomposition, or freshly stranded. "All were dead," Jones said, including, "a new born common dolphin, umbilicus still attached." Yaipen, he added, conducted necropsies on several of the dolphins, and took samples for laboratory testing.
Jones, Yaipen and his assistants, continued to count dolphins until the rising tide forced them of the beach. Jones reported the devastating final tally via Facebook:
"To date we have found 615 dead dolphins on 135 kilometers of beach N of San Jose, Peru. This tragedy is unspeakable. BlueVoice is working with Dr. Carlos Yaipen Llanos of ORCA Peru. Tissue samples have been obtained and will be analyzed. Never heard of this level of UME. This must be investigated."
BlueVoice board of directors member, Jeff Friedman, told Digital Journal that Jones has confirmed the "primary species [...] found, was long-beaked common dolphin." Jones and Yaipen are currently in a Lima lab testing samples taken from the dead dolphins. Long-beaked common dolphins are usually found in groups averaging from 100-500 animals, but have been occasionally seen in larger herds of thousands of individuals. BlueVoice.org hopes to release video, images and further information shortly, said Friedman. Update, April 03: BlueVoice.org has just released this video of the catastrophe in Peru
Hardy Jones added:
"Carlos and I went hunting for vendors of dolphin meat but found none, not surprising as the practice is illegal and we are obvious outsiders. But children on the beach told us it was common to sell dolphin meat. The way it is done is horrific. The dolphins are netted offshore and brought to shore alive, then bludgeoned to death." Read more at BlueVoice.org.
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/322052#ixzz1sZksCvKC
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/322052#ixzz1sZksCvKC
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=massive-dolphin-die-off-in-peru-may-remain-a-mystery
Massive Dolphin Die-Off in Peru May Remain a Mystery
Thousands of dead or dying dolphins have washed ashore in Peru since January, a marine mystery potentially caused by a combination of stress, pollution and disease
| April 6, 2012
LIMA, Peru -- When a retired fisherman called to report that about 1,500 dolphins had washed up dead on Peru’s northern coast, veterinarian Carlos Yaipén’s first reaction was, “That’s impossible.”
But when Yaipén traveled up the coast last week, he counted 615 dead dolphins along a 135-kilometer stretch of coastline.
Now, the death toll could be as high as 2,800, based on volunteers’ counts. Peru's massive dolphin die-off is among the largest ever reported worldwide.
The strandings, which began in January, are a marine mystery that may never be unraveled. Experts say the causes could be acoustic impact from testing for oil or perhaps an unknown virus or other pathogen. Little marine research takes place in Peru, and even in the United States, of 55 marine mammal strandings since 1991, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has classified 29 as “undetermined.”
All of the 20 or so animals Yaipén has examined showed middle-ear hemorrhage and fracture of the ear's periotic bone, lung lesions and bubbles in the blood. To him, that suggests that a major acoustic impact caused injury, but not immediate death. Most of the dolphins apparently were alive when they beached, or had died very recently.
“The animal would become disoriented, would have intense pain, and would have to make a great effort to breathe,” he said of the injuries.
Other experts say there is not enough evidence to draw a conclusion.
Stress or toxic contaminants can make marine mammals more vulnerable to pathogens such as viruses, according to Peter Ross, a research scientist at Canada’s Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia.
In a mass die-off, “there might be a smoking gun, but often we find that it’s two or three or four factors,” said Ross, who is one of the world’s leading experts on the effects of toxic contaminants in marine mammals.
Persistent organic pollutants, such as polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, the pesticide DDT, dioxins and flame-retardants accumulate in fish, and the concentrations are magnified as they move up the food web to top predators such as dolphins, seals and sea lions.
Laboratory studies of rodents and cells harvested from marine mammals show that PCBs and dioxins “are very immunotoxic,” Ross said. “The immune system is exquisitely sensitive to exposure to environmental contaminants.”
Animals with weaker immune systems could be more vulnerable to stress from noise or climate change, or to diseases such as leptospirosis, brucellosis or distemper, Ross said.
Scientists say that immune suppression from PCBs and DDT contributed to several marine mammal die-offs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including dolphins along the Atlantic Coast and in the Mediterranean Sea, and harbor seals in northern Europe.
Yaipén, founder of the Lima-based Scientific Organization for the Conservation of Aquatic Animals (ORCA), knows of no studies of pollutants in Peru’s marine mammals. He has stored tissue samples from some of the beached dolphins but ORCA – a largely volunteer organization – has not yet been able to arrange for analysis.
Peru’s entire coast is a desert, its sandy beaches punctuated by peninsular cliffs and dotted with tiny fishing villages. On one trip up the coast, Yaipén said he initially counted a few dolphins every 150 meters, then every 10 or 20 meters.
The first account of 24 dead dolphins came on Jan. 21 in Piura -- on the north coast, just south of the border with Ecuador -- the same region where the 1,500 were reported by the staff of a marine coastal reserve on March 10. Another 416 were counted in Piura on March 21. More than 870 were spotted in February and March on beaches in the Lambayeque region, south of Piura.
Since it's ongoing, it may wind up being the largest dolphin die-off ever reported.
In 1987 and 1988, about 700 bottlenose dolphins died along the Atlantic coast from New Jersey to Florida. That may have depleted the coastal stock by more than 50 percent. Scientists concluded that the dolphins, which had bacterial and viral infections, were immune-suppressed.
Then, in the early 1990s, large numbers of striped dolphins – estimated at several thousand -- died in the Mediterranean Sea, starting in Spain. Infection by a morbillivirus was apparently the cause, but immune suppression was suspected, too, since the dead dolphins had higher concentrations of contaminants than ones that survived.
In Peru, two species have been stranded. About 90 percent are long-beaked common dolphins (Delphinus capensis), which swim close to the surface and have probably migrated south from Central America to feast on the abundance of fish in the nutrient-rich Humboldt Current that sweeps Peru’s coast.
The rest are Burmeister’s porpoises (Phocoena spinipinnis), a deepwater species that moves closer to the surface to calve. All the Burmeister’s porpoises Yaipén has recorded have been pregnant or lactating females or calves.
Yaipén worries that pathogens or contaminants in the dolphins could pose a health risk for residents of fishing villages along the coast, who have been cutting meat off the carcasses for food.
If they avoid the blubber, they will avoid most of the toxic chemicals, Ross said, but if the strandings are due to disease, they could be at risk of infection.
After sick and dead bottlenose dolphins washed up on the Louisiana coast recently, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) ordered an oil and gas exploration company to suspend seismic testing – which uses air guns to map hydrocarbon deposits on the ocean floor – until May, when calving season ends.
Several oil leases under exploration are located off the coast or Peru where the dolphin strandings occurred, but it was not clear if seismic testing was under way. The offices of Savia Peru, which holds the leases, were closed Thursday, a national holiday in Peru.
A spokesman for Houston-based BPZ Energy said the company has been doing seismic testing since early February in an offshore lot several hundred kilometers north of where the dolphins were found.
Air guns can have “myriad impacts ... on marine mammals,” said Michael Jasny, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that has urged BOEM to restrict seismic testing.
Air guns can have “myriad impacts ... on marine mammals,” said Michael Jasny, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that has urged BOEM to restrict seismic testing.
Although there has been more analysis of the impact of sonar than seismic testing, studies have linked loud ocean noises to ear and organ damage in marine mammals. Sounds can also change behaviors such as dive patterns – which can result in decompression sickness or “the bends” – or drive them closer to shore, where they could beach if they were disoriented.
“Lots of sound in the wrong place at the wrong time can lead to mass stranding,” Jasny said.
Environmental groups have gone to court several times to challenge the U.S. Navy’s use of sonar in military exercises, arguing that it can change marine mammal behavior and lead to strandings. There has been no information available on whether sonar has been used off Peru’s coast.
If noise is to blame in Peru, sonar could be a more likely culprit than seismic testing, according to Brandon Southall, former director of NOAA’s ocean acoustics program. He said the characteristics of the Peru strandings would be “atypical, but not impossible” for an acoustic-related stranding.
Even if sonar were a factor, the injuries may not be due directly to the impact of the sound. “Animals may react in a way that has a cascade of physiological effects,” Southall said.
This article originally ran at Environmental Health News, a news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit media company.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/dolphin-deaths-mystery-as-almost-1000-dolphins-800433
Dolphin deaths: Mystery as almost 1,000 dolphins wash up dead along South American coast
Scientists investigate whether deaths are due to a virus or seismic oil exploration
Scientists have been left baffled after almost 1,000 dolphins washed up dead along the South American coast.
A total of 877 dolphin carcasses have been counted recently along the shore in the northern regions of Piura and Lambayeque, Deputy Environment Minister Gabriel Quijandria said. Officials have been studying possible factors in the dolphins' deaths including a virus or seismic oil exploration that has recently been carried out off northern Peru. An analysis of the beached dolphins' internal organs hasn't found the sort of symptoms that experts have seen in other cases when dolphins have been affected by seismic tests, Mr Quijandria said in a radio interview.
He said experts are studying whether the animals could have succumbed to a virus."So far, it's the most probable hypothesis, and it isn't the first time it's happened. There have been cases in Peru, in Mexico, the United States," Mr Quijandria said. He said the seismic tests produce underwater noise that can harm dolphins. But he also said that in Peru it is the first time such dolphin deaths have coincided with seismic work and that the dolphins began dying before the tests started.
Carlos Yaipen, who leads the non-governmental organisation Orca, said the beached dolphins began appearing in January. Dolphins have had broken bones in their ears and some of their organs have been collapsed, suggesting that shock waves generated by the seismic tests could have killed them, Mr Yaipen said. However, Patricia Majluf, the government's deputy fisheries minister, said that based on the available evidence officials have not been able to pin down any relationship to oil exploration.
Government officials have said scientists are carrying out further studies that they expect to finish in about two weeks.
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