http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/us/21voices.html?th&emc=th

August 20, 2010

Looking for Trouble on ‘Highway’ for Manatees

By JOHN LELAND

For two sometime residents of Mobile Bay, Ala., the impact of the oil spill is still an unanswered question.

Bumpy and Bama are manatees who live in Florida most of the year but come to Alabama in late summer for reasons unknown. When oil first entered Mobile Bay in June, researchers feared it would contaminate the manatee habitats.

Though that has not come to pass, another danger is yet to come when the manatees return home in late fall, said Ruth Carmichael, who leads manatee research at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Dauphin Island, Ala. Researchers who model the spill’s progress expect subsurface oil to collect in the shipping channel, which the manatees use on their migration, Dr. Carmichael said.

“So far, they’ve been up to just being manatees, which is a good thing,” she said. “We’ve reported animals engaged in mating behaviors. We’re not seeing changes in behavior or habitat.”

“So we don’t have that level of anxiety that we had at the beginning of the spill,” she said. “But the reality is we just don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

In the past, researchers thought the manatees avoided the shipping channel.

But in spring, using data from a radio transmitter tag attached to Bama, they learned the manatees use the channel “like a highway,” Dr. Carmichael said.

Both animals are still in Florida, where Bama slipped her transmitter tag in July and has not been retagged. Bumpy, who still wears a tag, has teased the researchers, making a sharp push westward on Aug. 9, as if he were heading for Alabama, but then returning to Apalachicola Bay in Florida. So far, the late migration has been to his benefit, because some of the oil in Mobile Bay has dispersed.

“I’m less concerned about them popping up in a habitat that’s covered with surface oil,” Dr. Carmichael said. “But I’m more concerned with what we don’t know. We don’t know what’s in the oil. We don’t know what to sample for.”

One worry is that subsurface oil will remain in the grasses the manatees eat.

“For years, it’s likely to be in their food supply,” she said. “You don’t see it, so it’s easier for people to say it isn’t there.”

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

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