A huge oil slick in the Southern Atlantic is threatening to wipe out the world’s largest colony of the endangered Northern Rockhopper penguin and other rare species, including the Speckled petrel.
The slick was caused last week when the oil tanker the MS Oliva ran into Nightingale Island, part of the Tristan da Cunha archipelago and a World Heritage Site. The tanker has since broken in two and the slick has completely surrounded Nightingale and Inaccessible Islands, both of which are of international wildlife importance.
The greatest issue for the penguins is that they’ve recently finished their yearly moult. During this time they fast and so are dangerously underweight and only now returning to the waters to feed again. However, only one swim will cover them in oil, making any further feeding almost impossible.
Furthermore, the ship was carrying a large population of rats which have since escaped into the islands. Because of their remote position, the islands are rodent-free and the rats will have no natural predators. Come the breeding season, however, they will feast upon the eggs and young chicks of the islands’ ground-nesting birds, including the penguins.
Being able to save the birds has been described as requiring a superhuman effort. The islands have no runway and the nearest land mass is South Africa, over 1,700 miles or up to 7 days away by sea. Only one ship has reached the islands since the MS Oliva ran aground, with an oiled penguin rehabilitation team due to leave South Africa any day now.
In the meantime, up to 20,000 penguins are reported to have become oiled, with many more suspected but not yet confirmed. Reports of other oiled birds and sea mammals are also starting to come in.
The Ocean Foundation has established a rescue fund. Click here to donate. Thank you.
Picture Credit: Untitled by Kieren Aris under a Creative Commons No Derivatives License.
About Chris Milton
This is terrible!
How many millions of years of biological evolution and balance will be destroyed when this selfish fantasy of perpetual growth and industrial expansion has imploded on global humanity? Nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, mass extinctions. Please people. Can we stop trying to dominate nature and live well with less?
Yes we can.
Thank you for you comments Julia and Rhonda.
More to the point, yes we MUST.
The environmental catastrophe that is unfolding in the middle of the South Atlantic is happening for our thirst for a finite resource, in this case oil.
As though that’s not enough to show how skewed our perspectives have become, at last sight I believe the owners of the MS Oliva *still* haven’t been identified, even a week after she ran aground on Nightingale Island, hundreds of miles off course.
Really, it’s an abominable set of priorities to working to.
I am absolutely amazed how only human or money related drama makes the news. I have not found anything related to this in the local South African press.
@William I have a long standing desire to start a blog called “News for Parrots”. It’s a Monty Python reference, which I won’t explain here and now.
Suffice to say, however, that our own national press only ever covers stories of direct relevance. So although the country nearest to this oil slick is South Africa, the territory is British and of whose national importance are the penguins?
So no parrots were harmed and therefore the story isn’t covered in the Parrot Press. In the meantime, the rest of us weep.
What is wrong with the oil companies? Why even navigate close to such a haven of biology in the first place? These past several years have been particularly horrible for the environment due to a series of easily foreseeable disasters, what has changed compared to the past hundred years? The oil companies surely aren’t running low on money to do basic planning, they have record profits! So why the constant mistakes and catastrophes? It’s almost like they are willfully murdering the Earth.
Aaron,the best information I have at the moment is that the MS Oliva was hundreds of miles off course.
There’s no public explanation for this but my guess (I emphasise MY GUESS) is that the captain was taking a routine shortcut in order to deliver his goods against what can at best be described as a very challenging schedule.
You are dead right that it is business which is cutting the corner this fine in order to bring us ever cheaper and cheaper goods. Sadly, in a consumer market, it is our responsibility to change this.
Thank you for your comments Aaron and William.