26 baby dolphins whose carcasses have washed ashore along the U.S. Gulf Coast this year, the bulk of them since last week, researchers said on Tuesday.Scientists have found four more dead baby dolphins on Horn Island in the Mississippi Gulf of Mexico and another on Ono Island off Orange Beach, Ala., adding to the unusually high number of dead.
The alarmingly high number of dead young dolphins are being looked at as possible casualties of oil that fouled the Gulf of Mexico after a BP drilling platform exploded in April 2010, killing 11 workers and rupturing a wellhead on the sea floor.
An estimated 5 million barrels (205.8 million gallons) of oil spilled into the Gulf over more than three months.
The bodies of 26 infant and stillborn dolphins have been discovered since January 20, on islands, in marshes and on beaches along 200 miles of coastline from Louisiana east across Mississippi to Gulf Shores, Alabama, officials said.
The remains of about 10 adult dolphins, none of them pregnant females, have also been found so far this year.
BP cleanup crews found some of the carcasses. Others were discovered by park rangers, police and passersby.
"What makes this so odd is that the dolphins were spread out over such a large area," Solangi said.Dolphins encountering oil on the surface of the water would face serious health consequences, Solangi said.
"We take short breaths. These animals take a huge breath at one time and hold it. And when they take it, the fumes stay in the lungs for a long period of time and they cause two types of damage, one of which is immediate to the tissue itself. Second, the hydrocarbons enter the bloodstream," he said.
None of the carcasses bore any obvious outward signs of oil contamination. But Solangi said necropsies, the equivalent of human autopsies, were being performed and tissue samples taken to determine if toxic chemicals from the oil spill may have been a factor in the deaths.
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