Another science alphabet doodle. Maybe this will be turning into an Invertebrate Alphabet series. They are fun to do, even though they are a grand procrastination. I enjoy the hand lettering, exploring bits of my past.

As for the infra order Brachyura – these are the true crabs, with short tails folded under their bodies (Brachyura comes from the Greek brachys oura or “Short Tail”). There are over 6000 species of brachyura. Most are marine but there are about 1000 species that live all or a significant part of their lives in either freshwater or on land. They range in size from a few millimeters across to a leg span of 4 meters!

Brachyurans eat just about anything: detritus, seaweeds and sea grasses, mussels, fish, fresh carrion and each other. In turn they are eaten by pretty everyone as well: mainly other crustaceans and fish, but also birds, starfish, sea turtles and of course mammals including us. True crabs are a delicious and economically important food source—1.3 tons of true crabs were commercially captured in 2010.

The Aplacophora are a very interesting group of exclusively marine molluscs. These worm-like creature were once considered to be holothurians (sea cucumbers) but they were later identified as molluscs from their mantle and primitive radula (two key features of molluscs). Most have been found in very deep waters (as in 5km+ deep). Most of the discovered species live their life buried in the mud feeding on detritus and microscopic organisms in the mud. Some prey on cnidarians. Most are tiny (as in a few mm in length) but some tip the tapes in excess of 30cm long. All have no internal or external shell, though they do have calcareous spicules in their mantle. So far ~300 species have been documented. In the Mollusc Diversity Playing Cards the 2 of Spades is the large Aplacaphoran, Neomenia yamamotoi.

Desktop Sketching
Originally uploaded by eclectic echoes.

I’ve been doing more sketching so far this year, partly, because I realized I was getting massively burned out last year. I have always enjoyed art—drawing, textile design, type design—and a few years ago I was set to follow it full time. Then the opportunity to go back to school for marine science came up, and I had to jump at it. Unfortunately, being a full time student really reduced the time I had for other pursuits. Grad school squashed what time was available for artistic pursuits to nothing. For the past three years I have done almost nothing artistic. The last significant art project I worked on was the octopus scarf. The one exception is might be Science Deck cards, but I don’t count that because it is all digital design, and more and more, I need analog art mediums. I need to feel the art come to life in my hands.

This sketch was the first effort this year, born of frustration with progress in my writing and a burning need to find some way to detach from the thesis writing in an enjoyable, and dare I say it, me-centered moment or two. Fortunately, when I focus on art, I am pretty solidly focused, but it is a very different type of focus than writing or crunching numbers. Instead of a focus that becomes heavy over time, it is one that seems to make things lighter.

This year (and next) will be very stressful. Transitioning into a fast attack Ph.D. plan (total of 4 years of research/classes/study) quals, thesis writing, presentations, etc. To keep from going totally bonkers—a highly technical term—I absolutely need to have some down time nurturing the creative side. To further that end, I started making a concerted effort to sketch at least every other day. Not a resolution or a promise, but a goal, same as my goal of 120 dives and 120+ hours in the water this year. Doable, but if it doesn’t happen, it’s no big deal. Just something to aim for.

The sketch above was my desk at the time of the sketching. On the right is my Wacom tablet, to the left of it is the legal pad with notes for my thesis writing—yes, I write the first draft of each chapter longhand on legal paper. All my major note-taking methods (except drawing) are represented in the image:

1. Small Moleskines for taking daily notes.
2. A larger notebook (this one also a Moleskine on the left) with project notes, effectively my lab notebook.
3. Index cards above that for details about each video or photo frame (community composition, location, etc). Each card ends as a record (several records actually) in a database in the end.
4. A legal pad for writing manuscript rough drafts.

Scattered on the desk are several of my writing tools: a pair of Waterman Hemispheres and a Waterman Phileas. One of the Hemispheres has a matte black finish with a fine nib and is loaded with black ink. The other has a blue, marbled body with a medium nib and is filled with Noodler’s Polar Blue ink. The Phileas is a medium nib with blue Waterman ink, a real workhorse of a fountain pen, which was quite affordable in it’s day. It’s a little large for my hand, but still comfortable enough for hour long writing sessions. This one is now out of commission, as the end cap came off and got lost just the other day. I really like the Hemispheres. They are very nice pens. I do need to spend some time with the fine tipped one—a gift from Dad—to personalize the nib. It’s just a bit scratchy right now. Unfortunately, my favorite pen of all, a Parker Sonnet with fine nib, is not in the lineup since its nib met with the deck of the NOAA Ship Nancy Foster during the one evening of storm waves we had during our cruise last spring. It slipped longways off the desk and landed directly on the nib, doing quite a bit of damage. I’m hoping that the folks at the Fountain Pen Hospital will be able to affordably fix it by either replacing the nib or straightening it out.

I plan to post several new drawings and doodles here and at my Flickr Photostream.

If you like what they did (or even if you don’t) consider donating through them or directly to one of the marine conservation groups they support (my personal favorites include The Coral Reef Alliance and Shark Savers)

Going to visit my folks for the holidays is going to be great, don’t get me wrong, but going away for the holidays is also making like more complicated than it needs to be. Or is it that my normal levels of procrastination doing that? Or is it both?

As we get ready to head to Texas and celebrate Christmas with family, I am also in the process of:

• writing up 2 manuscripts,
• trying to put together a grant proposal
• finishing my plan of study
• studying for the General Exams (that will be coming as soon as I submit my plan of study)
• doing quality assurance on the video analysis that my interns did on the Crepidula project
• beginning work on the next set of ScienceDecks.com playing cards

Obviously this will be a working vacation. Gotta make sure that I have all the data files and GIS layers I need on the laptop, on an external drive and uploaded to Dropbox. All of the relevant reference papers are also going up to both Dropbox and Mendeley as well as being on the laptop.

Part of me is screaming to leave it all behind and just enjoy the next week or so with my family, but the realities of deadlines dictate otherwise. Still, I will be limiting myself to only 2-3 hours of focused work per day. 1-2 hours or so right after coffee and the balance right before bed. Maybe a bit of small task type editing during the inevitable downtime during the day when we’re between doing other things.

Edit: See SciCurius’ post on similar issue – Do you love Science? Well, that depends, do you like sleep?

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Open Water and Advanced/Technical/Science Dive Log Sheets - offered under Creative Commons By-NC-SA license. Please refer others to this page to share this version of the sheet.

• a header with cumulative dive number, date and location information
• A checkbox list of major dive types/activities
• Exposure protection & Weight
• Dive depth, duration, pressure group
• Start and end tank pressure
• Air, surface water and depth water temp
• Visibility, weather and REEF.org fish count information
• A generous comments section
• Buddies
• Cumulative dive times

The Open Water Log Sheets also offer:

• a small comment section to record dive boat, boat captain, dive master or similar information
• An instructor / buddy signature block

The Advanced Log Sheets also offer:

• Dive gas mode block to record dive gases used including size of tank and mix used
• Tally blocks to track cumulative stats (# dives and hours) for rebreather, the year, and science.

For those that own their own rebreather and want to track cumulative hours on that rebreather unit or cumulative hours since last major service I have a version that replaces dives for the year and sciece dives with cumulative unit rebreather dives and hours.

Both log sheet files print out 2 double sides log sheets per 8.5×11″ page (4 dives per page). The open water file prints 6 open water training dive logs then an additional 14 log sheets for normal dives, though more sheets can be printed easily. Please feel free to use these files for your own diving or diving program. I do ask that if you do use them, please leave a comment here, and if you find them really useful put a donation in the tip jar. I am willing to modify these files for special purposes, and as the files are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA license you may modify the files yourself as long as you share the resulting file yourself.

After working a bit from home, I got ready to bike in to campus and walked out the door at 10:40am for a 45 minute commute, taking the cyclocross route along the coast that I like best. I felt well rested and my legs were ticking over really well, but as I got down to Noank, which is about 5km in, I had a sinking feeling. Had I remembered my dive computer? A quick check of the panniers confirmed that I had not.

Longer, but more scenic commute to school

I decided I really wanted the computer, so I turned around and added an extra 15 minutes to the commute. Now I would, at best, be 10-15 minutes late. The rest of the commute was great, with a new personal best for the route, minus the false start. It was a bit late to see much wildlife on the route, but I did see several herons and one scrambling woodchuck.

Joe was waiting in the dive locker when I arrived 10 minutes late. The tanks were already filled, so as I verified the blend and fill of my tank, we talked about the amazing women’s world cup game from the day before. Before heading off to get some lunch, we went up to see our dive safety officer (DSO) who had just gotten back from vacation. While he was away we had several dives and on one of them I flooded one of the locker’s canister lights. I wanted to tell him in person and find out what needed to be done to get it fixed.

Unfortunately, it was not just any light. It was his favorite light from Salvo (now Light Monkey) with a custom made cable so it would fit his rebreather rig perfectly. Ouch.

WLIS MySound Data Buoy

After taking my ass-chewing for flooding the light, I called Light Monkey, who set up a repair for us. They told me they could turn the lights around in one day. No way we could get them back in time for the WLIS dive, but we should still have them back by the end of the week. I boxed up the flooded light and a second light with a shorter cable that also needed some routine attention. Dive lockers are notoriously hard on gear! After almost 3 hours we managed to get everything taken care of and the lights off to Florida with express service.

Finally, we could get back to the dive. Instead of our original noon start time, we crawled over the seawall by the dive locker (that’s a real joy in doubles, mind you!) and into the water at 3:04pm. It was a great dive too. Visibility in the cove was about 5′ and filamentous algae covered the bottom. But as soon as we got out of the shallows, vis opened up to maybe 10′ and the filamentous algae disappeared, revealing a thick carpet of macro algae and sea grasses. It seems to be an especially good year for the sea grasses and kelp, denser and much larger patches than I remember any year before.

Beach to beach swim - Dive Locker on right side, sail boat launch beach on left.

The fish count went great. We saw fluke (a.k.a. summer flounder) (Paralichthys dentatus), cunner (Tautogolabrus adspersus), grubby sculpin (Myoxocephalus aeneus) and tautog (Tautoga onitis), as well as blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus), spider crabs (Libinia emarginata), and three horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus), including a very large male. There were many young of the year winter flounder (Pseudopleuronectes americanus), from a half an inch to 2 inches long.

As we were finishing our surface swim into the beach (too shallow to dive with the surge, too deep and rocky to walk), we noticed the DSO’s pickup truck parked right at the sea wall. As it was a bit late, we knew he was waiting for us. As we climbed up on the beach, he asked after the dive, what we saw etc., then casually asked who the lead diver was. Joe and I had never really settled who the lead diver was. He has ten times my experience, but I had suggested doing the dive, so I took the responsibility (knowing the other shoe was about to drop, most likely on my gluteus maximus). Sure enough, in all the confusion about the lights, I had forgotten to fill out the dive plan log on the marine operations bulletin board. We had fully briefed the DSO, but someone asked the marine operations manager if the divers off the Point were university divers. He didn’t know, but went down to the marine operations bulletin board to see. Ooops! Lesson learned and reinforced well.

Ass-chewings, by the way, do obey the laws of gravity, picking up momentum as they go downhill.

Grubby Sculpin

• Sergeant Major (Abudefduf saxatilis) – A post at Larval Images about one of my favorite ecosystems and one of the great juvenile fish that are commonly found there.
• Budget Hacking – A post here about the importance of NOAA for the myriad jobs they do, many of which are important for public safetly and economic security in addition to research. A post that I feel is a very important read, especially as the 2012 budget fight may still cut NOAA deeply, including the satellite’s needed to track and predict severe weather events as well as we do. Without NOAA’s work I think it is safe to say the Alabama death toll would have definitely  been significantly higher.
• Gulf of Mexico Dolphin Mortality Event – Posted as Scientist in Residence at Deep Sea News – in which I use the data from NOAA to take a more slightly more detailed look at deaths of dolphins since the oil spill in the Gulf, and explain the box and whisker plot.
• Dolphin Whiskers – now only Babies – published a few days later here, to address the concern that there is a higher that normal number of babies washing ashore, but the graph, as presented by NOAA and in the MSM, does not really support that claim. So again come out the box and whisker plots.
• My ‘Seascape of Fear’ – A second posting as  Deep Sea News Scientist in Residence, I discuss my recent trip to Belize as a teaching assistant for a coral reef fish ecology class and the arrival in Belize of the highly invasive Lionfish.
• How does a floating plastic duckie end up where it does? – A guest Blog post at Scientific American Part of a four post series on drifting junk in the oceans and how, sometimes, they can help us explore and learn more about the ocean currents. Other posts in the series include a review by Lindsey Hoshaw of the book Moby Duck (I’ll post my own review here later, I liked the book quite a bit more than Lindsey), an interview by David Manly with Moby Duck author Donovan Hohn, and a Matthew Garcia review of Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s bookFlotsametrics and the Floating World about tracing accidental drifters and the information they can give us.
• Is It Time to Relax Fishing Regulations? – Another Scientist in Residence post at DSN, this was a response to fisheries biologist Ray Hilborn’s recent op-ed in the New York Times advocating a relaxation of the current fishing regulations. (Enric Sala, Peter Singer, Daniel Pauly and Mark Kurlansky all replied to the paper.)
• Finally, Reflections, posted here, in which I examine where I have been, where I am and the options going forward.

Hopefully in the next few days we will have a guest posting or two here by Johann. Discussing some of his recent adventures and science from his point of view.

In addition to the postings there are several new YouTube videos I uploaded in the past weeks, mostly of the underwater variety.

One of the things I have to keep coming back to is “What do I want to be when I grow up”

But that has never been a simple question. When I was young I wanted to be a scientist and an explorer. I was excited and my imagination ignited by archeology, marine biology and the space program. I devoured national geographic magazines, Wild Kingdom and Jaques Cousteau’s specials. I remember reading and re-reading the articles by Dr. Eugenie Scott on the amazing fish of the Red Sea and sharks in general. I remember reading about Dr. Sylvia Earle’s descent to 1250m in a hard suit and her Tektite mission. I know it may sound crazy, but one of the highlights of my brief science career so far was to dive on the Aquarius site as a science diver… the descendant of Tektite, it was, part way to an old dream come true – to live and work in an underwater habitat studying the seas for hours and hours at a time. One day I still hope to make that dream come true.

Science diver approaching the NOAA/UNCW Aquarius Habitat off Key Largo, Florida

But my path took a strange turn and instead of going to Woods Hole or Scripts or Harbor Branch, I ended up in the Army working as an advanced communications specialist using, trouble shooting and fixing just about every type of communication technology in the Army, but specializing in satellite systems. It could be a challenging job, especially in remote combat deployments, but it really didn’t make me stretch. I spent my spare time reading and improving my animation skills as a form of entertainment. In Central America I learned to scuba dive and spent as much time on Roatan Island as I could, doing 3-4 dives a day. The more I dove, the more I needed to learn about the fish and invertebrates I was seeing. I subscribed to several diving magazines and bought every marine biology book my scuba instructor could get from the States. I invited my future wife to meet me in Roatan, unfortunately she declined.

Sunset on the Meso-American Reef. Copyright E. Heupel

After the army I worked in the computer industry in engineering and eventually web development until the bubble burst. When that happened I returned to school, studying computer systems and graphic design. Unfortunately returning to school also revealed that I had a memory issue. Tammy knew before, but I denied it of course. Unfortunately the tricks I had learned to use on the job, didn’t translate well to the academic environment. I struggled to find a new way of learning and studying, while my grades sank, eventually forcing me to admit defeat temporarily as I withdrew from school.

Fast forward to five years ago when I took advantage of an opportunity to again return to school. This time in Oceanography. I had since learned to deal with my memory issues with new strategies. I started slow, with only two classes, but soon took on a full course load completing the four year degree in three and a half years with a job, a family and still managed a 3.5 GPA. My old skills in electronics, optics, video production and web design all served me well working in labs and earning me opportunities to work with Remotely Operated Vehicles. At the end of undergraduate I knew I needed to take this further, I needed to revisit my old dream of being a scientist working in, on and under the ocean.

The motley crew of the SHRMP 2010 habitat monitoring program mission. Copyright E. Heupel

I was accepted to the graduate program and began learning more about sustainable fisheries and GIS than I thought was possible to learn (and yet I have still only learned a spall portion) . It has been a good run, but now it is almost over. I want to go on further, but I know I need a change in direction. My interests lay more with larval and juvenile marine organisms and their ecosystem roles (besides the stock answer I get from many: “as food” – too damn easy), or in the ecology of deep sea and mangroves and with invasive species in connection to any of the previous. I have at least a hundred questions banging around in my head, and I am loathe to even try to pick only one and say -> This is it.

One of my favorite fish of the mangroves is the juvenile sergeant major. Very cute, shy and nervous - darting constantly around the patch of mangrove they call home. Copyright E. Heupel

More than that there is the question of what good is a PhD, and is the cost too high to justify. I have put my family through a lot already. It has been financially very hard, and we have done without a lot. I have been fortunate that this program knows me, and knows the type of contribution I can make, and also understands that my family is the most important thing in my life. I will never be one of those scientists (or PhD students) so driven by the research that I sacrifice my family (which I have seem too much of in the past 5 years). Driven yes. If I had a spare $10,000 right now I would be on a plane to Belize to chase down one of my burning questions on invasive species and My Seascape of Fear (actually budgeted with no salary it a hair over 10,000). But I’m not going to throw my family under the bus to get there.

Which brings it once again back to what I want to do with the degree. I would like to be able to design and conduct my own research, which I would need a PhD for. I enjoy teaching small to medium size classes, as long as there is at least one or two kids turned on to learning. At a University or college a PhD is generally the ticket for admission to that. At community colleges, a PhD can be required, or a hinderance.

As for the most singlehandedly enjoyable thing I have done in the past 5 years – it would be the outreach efforts at Aquarius. Doing the science, putting on a live show, broadcasting it to kids in their classrooms and online – both doing science and helping to communicate it to a larger audience. That was for me a real rush. Many of the people involved in that team effort did not have PhD’s, but then again many did. I enjoyed the fact that we were communicating conservation, physics and biology directly and passionately to an audience eager to learn.

The marvelous crew of the Aquarius 2010 If Reefs Could Talk mission. Copyright E. Heupel

If I stopped right now, my ideal job, would be either as a freelance science communicator specializing in video and online production or it would be with one of the NURC centers or a similar scientific research organization or NGO where I can put my myriad skills to work – oceanography, diver, science outreach, video, animation, web, database, photography (normal and U/W) and ROV pilot (in training right now). But… likely I would not be able to do my own research, which is important to me.

If I were 23 and single, the answer for me would be easy – go for the PhD and study larval and juvenile ecology issues, especially in the mangroves and deep sea. But I’m not 23, or single. And I wouldn’t trade my family for anything, but it does mean I need to figure the 4-6 years of making (if I’m lucky) $30,000/yr while working very long hours into the equation.

…dolphin deaths are not that rare to start with and that this is the time of year for it (i.e. it’s not actually “unusual”, it’s “seasonally-appropriate”). Secondly, it means that it’s not much worse in magnitude than last year, albeit peaking a little earlier.

and

But in these cases, the devil IS so often in the details. I am not saying oil wasn’t involved; I’m just saying we can’t infer causality from correlation without a closer examination of the data.

Running the raw data through excel (to subtotal & clean) and R and I could see more of the information Para-sight warned was needed to get a better feel for the situation. And sure enough I was able to add to his observations that:

the pattern of the event does strongly suggest that the oil spill is related, but looking at the prior events, it is not outside the realm of possibility that this is not directly related to the oil spill. The best evidence to determine the involvement (or lack thereof) of the oil spill is going to be found in necropsy and toxicology reports of the stranded animals.

In the meantime however several people commenting on the original post pointed out that the biggest issue was with the a specific age class of dolphins. As “Dr. Ed Cake” commented:

…In the meantime, this year’s neonates continue to wash ashore dead in the BP spill zone and all potential mortality factors can be dismissed except the impacts of BP’s oil and Nalso’s Corexit dispersants.

and “Don” stated:

NOAA provides data specifically for “baby dolphins.” It shows a five-fold increase in mortalities in 2011 compared to 2010.

So that last bit especially really made me wonder. The more detailed data showed there was an unusual mortality event (UME) happening with cetaceans in general, though it is not clearly linked to the spill. But a five fold increase for one key age class??

So tonight I journeyed forth again to the NOAA website, and found on scanning down to the bottom of the page, there is a table of “baby dolphin” deaths as Don phrased it. It is more accurately “premature, stillborn, or neonatal dolphins”. NOAA used the cutoff of 115cm total length to split out these deaths and presented them as both a table and graph:

neonatal, stillborn and premature dolphin deaths

Graph of all neonatal, stillborn and premature bottlenose dolphins

However, here again we are given historic numbers solely as the average. As Para-sight warned, and we saw with the complete cetacean data set, that is a dangerous way to look at data like this.

But what about the “baby dolphin” data?

From the truncated graph NOAA presented it appears there may be a seasonal pattern (not unexpected) but it is hard to tell with out the complete year graphed. It is also not possible (again) to tell what the range of values is for each month. The numbers 100 and 2 average out to the exact same value as 52 and 50 do, but the range of values, and the story it tells, is quite different! Back to the data set, with definition in hand I extracted all bottlenose dolphin records with lengths of 115cm or less and duplicated the analysis I did on the full set over at DSN. The resulting table:

Gulf Coast Strandings of Bottlenose Dolphin <115cm

First thing to notice comparing the two tables is that yes February deaths were an order of magnitude higher than the historic range.

The second thing to note is — they don’t match. Not just that I included the entire year in the table, but the numbers for the averages in each month they did include don’t match. They only averaged 2002-2007 for their historic baseline. So I redid the table using only 2002-2007, still the numbers were slightly off. Using their dataset and the definition for premature / neonatal / stillborn they gave, I get different numbers than they do. Aggravating. I am comparing historic data to the 2011 data, I double checked all the subtotals are correct and redid the summary table creation three times each time with the same result. I have verified that the data in the table is true to the definition given by NOAA and the raw data NOAA has provided. I really don’t like omitting data without good reason (which was not provided by NOAA) so I finished the evaluation keeping the 2008-2009 data in:

Box and Whisker plot of Stranded Bottlenose Dolphins less than 115cm. 2011 data blue diamonds, 2002-2010 data boxplots with outliers as open circles.

So what does this one tell us? And is it different from the conclusions inferred from the NOAA graph?

Based on the NOAA graph and table one would assume that all months except April were UME months, and April, one could easily argue, is on it’s way to being a UME month as well, after all, that is only 10 days of April data. However, looking at the box plots only January and February really stand out as a UME(s). February is clearly an outlier, in fact the most deaths and the most radical outlier of the entire data set. January is an outlier but is it a UME? I guess that depends on the definition, but it is two standard deviations above the mean January number of deaths, so I would say it is a UME. While March is high, it is still within the range of expected numbers from the historical data. Granted March is right at the upper edge of that range, but it is within that range nonetheless. If we were using Para-sight’s suggestion of using values greater than two standard deviation above the mean as the definition of a UME then only January and February would be as well. However when taken with the previous two months I would suggest that March is a continuation of the same UME.

As for April, with only 10 days of data for the analysis, it is right at the edge of the expected range of values from the historic April data. One could argue, I suppose, that it will climb much higher, but without the actual numbers any discussion of that is pure speculation. I expect that it will climb as well, but we’ll just have to wait for the rest of the data to come in to really say anything about it conclusively.

What is more interesting to me though than the month by month numbers is the pattern, both historic and for this year. Historically, just as with the larger population, bottlenose dolphins < 115cm have a clear pattern of strandings. The late winter and spring (January through May) is the period of strandings, with most strandings clustered in the February through April period with the sharp peak in March. The rest of the year have much lower numbers. The box plot and the full table also reveal that each year it would be unexpected to find no strandings under 115cm but in the summer through early winter (June through December) it is actually an unusual event to find a stranding, let alone more than one.

This is a direct clue to the reproductive biology pattern of the Bottlenose Dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico. I have very little knowledge of dolphins so had to turn to some local experts for help (contrary to popular belief all ocean scientists DO NOT work on dolphins). Turns out that Bottlenose Dolphins generally mate from late March to May and have ~11-12 month gestation period. At birth a bottlenose dolphin is anywhere from 85-110 cm long (the reason for the 115cm cutoff). Looking at the length records the smallest animal found was a January 2006 stranding at 40cm. Fully 83% of the strandings were of individuals between 85 and 110cm which combined with the seasonal pattern would corresponds essentially to very late term neonatal or newborn aged individuals. Examining the length vs. month of death did not provide any real patterns except that March had the widest range of sizes in the strandings, which is not too surprising as March had significantly more deaths than any other month in the aggregated data.

This year however the peak is clearly in February. Why? Unfortunately I did not see any length data for this year, just summary numbers. Were these individuals mostly less than 85cm? That would infer prematurely born babies or late term miscarriage. If they were mostly in the 85-110cm range? That would suggest they were from the early mating season, likely conceived before the oilspill, and at full term.

So, yes , there is a major unexplained mortality event that is causing a significantly higher number of neonatal, stillborn and premature Bottlenose Dolphin strandings. February’s mortality is the worst event for individuals under 115cm on record, by a fair margin. I expect the number for April will go higher, quite possibly being an outlier. From the timing, the oil spill is certainly a suspect for being a cause. That does not however mean it IS responsible. There is still no way to know the oilspill’s relation to these deaths without detailed necropsy and toxicity study results.