Sad Gift From The Sea

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August 2009

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FUTURE OCEANS

FUTURE OCEANS

Sad Gift from the Sea

BY JEAN-MICHEL COUSTEAU

PBDEs, or toxic flame-retardants may now be having an impact on all marine life, like this common dolphin. Of grave concern is the fact that PBDEs are concentrated in products found in our homes. Photo: © Carrie Vonderhaar, Ocean Futures Society/KQED

Occasionally, a whale or dolphin stranding offers a rare gift to ocean scientists to study in detail the anatomy of a creature so biologically close to us, yet so inaccessible. While sad to see life lost, their presence on our shores is a window into new understanding.

In the April 2009 issue of Environmental Pollution, researchers report findings from analyzing the brains of stranded short-beaked common dolphins and Atlantic white-sided dolphins from the western North Atlantic. Judging from this most recent report, they now carry a message that is urgent, and sad.

My first experience with dolphins was as a young boy at the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco when my father was director. I was asked to help a small group of common dolphins that were being rehabilitated in the aquarium pool, although at that time practically nothing was known about how to save them. My task was to gently hold one of the listless dolphins and slowly move it about the pool.

Several things became clear to me from this difficult experience: there was an awareness and an intelligence in the dolphins that I had never before experienced; and although we were trying to help, a concrete pool was no place for such a complex, open-ocean mammal.

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One of the animals swam furiously around the pool and then crashed head-on into the wall in an apparent suicide, but that may be giving a human interpretation to its desperation.

Many years later, in the mid 1980s while working with my father at The Cousteau Society, I created a program to support the National Marine Fisheries Service Marine Mammal Stranding Program at the Smithsonian. We had learned that a program to collect data on all marine mammal strandings had lost funding and was at risk of being shelved. Realizing how invaluable any marine mammal data is, I felt that every bit of information was part of a puzzle and needed to be protected and shared. With generous public support we raised enough money to keep the data collection going under the direction of Dr. James Mead as well as to buy shovels and gas money to get researchers to the beach when a stranding did occur.

On the California coast alone, more than 14,000 seals, sea lions and dolphins have stranded in the last decade, along with more than 650 gray whales. The concern has been that there is a ‘pandemic’ of infection from algae and bacteria that either kill the animals outright or compromise their immune systems. The conclusion is that these toxic algae blooms are the result of what we are dumping in the water. The most shocking story is of California sea otters sickened by bacteria found in disposable cat litter that has been flushed down the toilet.

As I described in the last issue of DIVER, we found other, more persistent and shocking contaminants in orcas during our investigation along the coasts of Canada and the United States for our two-hour special Call of the Killer Whale. Our greatest concern was the concentration of toxic chemicals known as PBDEs. Like the banned toxic PCBs, these toxic flame-retardants persist in the environment and bioaccumulate in the food chain.

We know that flame-retardants leak from electronics and household furniture and accumulate in dust and the air we breathe. We also know they are found everywhere. We have partnered in this campaign with the Green Science Policy Institute and its director, Dr. Arlene Blum, who has this to say about PBDEs: “In animal studies, these chemicals cause scrambling of brain development, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, reproductive abnormalities, diabetes, obesity and cancer.

These are the same conditions that are increasing in our children, who are highly exposed to these same flame retardant chemicals.”

Most of the animal studies cited have been on laboratory animals, like rats, but now, because of marine mammals strandings, we have evidence that PBDEs may be harming dolphins, seals and sea lions and possibly, by extension, the great whales.

In the Environmental Pollution study mentioned at the beginning of this article, researcher Eric Montie and his associates looked for the first time at the brains and surrounding fluid of eight stranded Atlantic white-sided dolphins and found “exceptionally high” levels of flame retardant chemicals. In addition, more than 170 chemical contaminants were found in a dozen marine mammals that stranded near Cape Cod. According to Montie, “That’s so worrisome, you rarely find parts per million levels of anything in the brain.”

The study also highlights the chemical cocktail to which marine animals are exposed and, Montie said, now we must consider the potential additive or synergistic effects of this unpredictable mix of toxic chemicals on the animals’ nervous systems.

The next question, of course, is what are these chemicals doing to us? The pentaBDE issue is particularly worrisome because 98 percent of this toxic flame retardant in use in 1999 was in North America and now it’s a global pollutant.

Céline Cousteau free dives with dolphins off Hawaii’s Kona coast during the America’s Underwater Treasures filming expedition. Decades of research in the wild reveal a profound human-dolphin connection. Photo: © Carrie Vonderhaar, Ocean Futures Society/KQED

This pollution came from a sincere attempt to safeguard the public.

California’s Technical Bulletin 117 was passed in 1975 to slow fires. But untested and toxic chemicals have been used at high levels in furniture and baby products to meet this standard ever since so that this well intended initiative has wreaked environmental havoc and will continue to do so for at least the next 30 years. And there is no data to show TB117 has prevented any fire deaths. Consumers outside California, the only state where such toxic flame-retardants are required, are advised not to buy products bearing a tag saying the product meets the California TB117 standard.

We no longer have the luxury to be ignorant about the chemicals we are unleashing into the environment or into our children. I’m afraid the evidence will continue to pour in that PBDEs are dangerous to dolphins, all sea life and ourselves.

Another view of the seriousness of our actions comes from a completely different arena of research, from a book called In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier, by philosopher Thomas White.

He argues that scientific evidence supports the claim that dolphins are, like humans, self-aware, intelligent beings with emotions, personalities and the capacity to control their actions. Because of this, he claims dolphins should be considered “nonhuman persons” and that from an ethical perspective, the injury, death and captivity of dolphins at the hands of humans is wrong. We may now have to add chemical contamination to that list of abuses to be discontinued.

Having held an ailing dolphin, even so many years ago, I can only agree.

For information on the Ocean Futures Society campaign to inform the public on the risks of PBDEs go to: www.toxicflameretardants.org

Shocking Results The results were fascinating: with a solid database, trends can be detected with only a few strandings, as has been the case with mass strandings of dolphins from toxic algae blooms off Florida. For the past 25 years, the federal government has tracked what has become a steady upswing in mass die-offs of marine mammals on U.S. coasts.

FROM LEFT: Harbor seals are indicators of containments in the marine environment and they’re more accessible than other marine mammals. Scientists are finding that PBDEs may cause the same disturbing conditions in harbor seals and children. Sightings of False Killer Whales, like these in Papua New Guinea, are a rare and special occurrence. In filming Call of the Killer Whale, the Ocean Futures team learned that even such remote locales are now contaminated with PBDEs, or toxic flame retardants. California sea otters are a keystone species and influence their kelp forest ecosystem. Currently listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, this species is directly affected by land-based pollution. Photo: © Carrie Vonderhaar, Ocean Futures Society/KQED

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