[MARINE_BIOLOGY_INTERNATIONAL] Gulf of Mexico whale research shows no ill effects from oil spill... maybe.

(Maine Public Broadcasting)

USM Whale Researchers Find Little Oil in Gulf of Mexico
11/23/2010 Reported By: Josie Huang
In July, we brought you on board the research vessel "Odyssey" as faculty and students with the Maine Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health at the University of Southern Maine prepared to set sail for the Gulf of Mexico. The BP oil well had exploded in the spring, and the group wanted to study its impact on whales and other marine life. Well, the crew recently returned from nearly four months of collecting whale tissue samples along the Gulf, from Key West to Corpus Christi, Texas. They were surprised by what they found--or in this case, didn't find.

USM Whale Researchers Find Little Oil in Gulf of Mexico

(PHOTO: John Wise, Jr. uses a dart to retrieve a blubber sample from a sperm whale during a research expedition to the Gulf of Mexico.)

"It was shocking to me that the oil was gone," says John Wise, director of the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health. "We sailed within a couple of miles of the epicenter of the accident, and there was no oil there either, it was just all gone."

Wise is now back at work at his laboratory at USM in Portland. He says the absence of oil suggests that the chemicals used to break up the spill were doing their job.

But, he says, there are more questions to be answered. "We're more concerned about the dispersant and the dispersant mixed with oil--the dispersed oil, if you will--than we are about the crude oil itself."

Tests conducted in recent months by Wise's lab, using human cell lines, show that dispersants cause cell death and DNA damage, which has been linked to cancer and reproductive problems. Wise says he's worried that dispersant is being consumed by krill, squid and other marine life that whales eat.

"If only a handful of whales can't reproduce because of broken DNA, the whole population will be doomed because it's so small--not doomed tomorrow, but doomed over a period of decades," Wise says. "The population estimates suggest if you lose three to five adult sperm whales, you lose that population. It takes them a long time to reproduce, they don't have a lot of young."

The next few months in the laboratory will be critical to seeing whether Wise's concerns hold true. Researchers have already started to grow whale cells from the blubber samples taken from four different species: the sperm, fin, Bryde's and Humpback whales.

Graduate student Carolyne Lacerte holds a plastic flask that appears empty except for a reddish liquid that feeds the whale cells inside. "I put about 750,000 in here on the 18th, and so in probably another five days, I'll take them out and seed them in experiments, or seed them in other flasks so they can grow and we can basically build a population."

The cell lines are coming from 40 different whale samples biopsied mostly by Wise's son, Johnny, a senior at USM who works in his father's lab. The blubber samples were collected by darts shot into the whale with a crossbow. Blubber would catch on the dart, which would be retrieved.

"Like 90 percent of the times, the whales did not react to the dart hitting them," John Wise Jr. says. "When they did react is when we missed. Their acoustic animals, so if they hear the 'zze' right behind their head, it'll freak them out a little bit--and pretty much all it means is they do a shallow dive."

The samples were processed right on the Odyssey, believed to be the only sailboat in the world equipped with a state-of-the-art cell culture laboratory.

That's where Matthew Brown, another USM student, spent much of his time. He remembers the day he processed samples from 18 whales. "It was exciting for everyone on deck. They were seeing hundreds and hundreds of whales. So I was hearing all this commotion over the radio, just down there, just worrying that they were going to rush me down more samples and that I was going to be so busy that I'd never finish down there."

Also on the boat were staff from the Ocean Alliance, the environmental group that co-sponsored the voyage. Wise says the plan is to go back to the Gulf each summer for the next five to 10 years and monitor the long-term impact of the oil well blowout. He's still trying to finance the next trip and may have to work with universities along the Gulf that are receiving funds from BP.