All animals suffered in the Valdez spill to be sure but the impact on the total ecological picture of PWS is minimal.
I'm reminded of one of the video images that a lot of people have seen. It's of a man standing knee deep in tidal waters dressed in a 'mustang' survival suit < bright orange > holding up a dead otter by the hind feet. That image was splashed all over the news and Greenpeace publications, a very famous < rather infamous IMO > video clip...
As Paul Harvey would say, 'Now for the REST of the story'.
That otter was hauled in to Valdez for a post mortem exam and guess what? The final repot on it's death was from a .38 calibre projectile. Seems that the fishermen in Alaska on average kill about 400 otters a year. They calim that the otters voracious appitite ruins 'their' fishing grounds.
Seabirds are used for target practice on just about every fishing vessel that isn't under some corporate eye.
The calls of gloom and doom were perpetuated by interest groups that have more to gain with an alarmist attitude than not.
So, yes it was an ecological disaster but in the scheme of the total ecological health of PWS it was nothing more than a bump in the road. Infact, in the 6 years after the spill only one year was the salmon catch less than the average. All the other years were record years.
My take on that is that there wasn't all that much more fish but there were quite a few more boats launched because of the windfall profits that a lot but not all of the fishermen made...more boats = more fish taken yaknow.
I went on many seabird surveys, although there were great numbers lost to the spill, the overall impact was very minimal...there's gazillions of them there and recovery of the varrious species affected wasn't ever an issue scientificaly.
Green Island was impacted heavely in the first weeks of the spill. I stood knee deep in emulsified oil the second week of the spill. GI is a peniped haulout area, it recieved, as well as other designated pupping areas, intensive cleanup attention both mechanical and manual. The first images of workers cleaning up rocks with absorbant pads by hand were from GI.
I went on a shoreline survey of GI in '94, we dug up to 2 1/2 meters deep and found that the combination of mechanical cleanup as well as the biomediation techniques left little visual traces of oil. The resulting bloom in intertidal critters was attributed to the great increase of oleophilic bacteria, that was the goal of the technique.
I could go on for days about oil spills, I spent 15 years chasing them and one thing is constant in all of them...the junk science that results from special interest groups will ALWAYS make headlines while the true science is published in respected and scientificaly credible publications years after the story has lost interest.
