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Alum Talks About Long-Term Effects of 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

l Fourteen years after the infamous 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into a remote and spectacular area of Alaska's Prince William Sound, wildlife still has not recovered from the ecological disaster, according to CSU, Chico alum Dr. Stanley "Jeep" Rice.

In last semester's capstone Biological Sciences seminar Dec. 5, Rice, who received his M.A. from Chico State in 1968 and his doctorate from Kent State University in 1971, updated his audience on the "unexpected persistence" of toxic subsurface oil that continues to affect wildlife along 1,300 miles of Alaskan coastline.

Rice is habitat division program manager for the National Marine Fisheries Service at the Auke Bay Marine Laboratory in Auke Bay, Alaska, approximately 250 miles southeast of Prince William Sound, where the spill occurred. The spill was in a remote area and swept south and west from the Valdez, and most of his work has related directly to the spill effects.

Rice's talk was a preview of an article, "Long-Term Ecosystem Response to the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill," by Rice and six colleagues, subsequently published Dec. 19 in Science magazine. The authors assert that current practices for assessing ecological risks of oil and other toxic sources in the oceans should be changed. Previously, Rice said, it was assumed that the biggest worry was the immediate impact of the oil on fish and wildlife—the risk of death from ingesting the oil, smothering, drowning, hypothermia, etc. However, Rice's research team has shown that the health, growth, and reproduction of wildlife, shoreline plants, and ocean-floor invertebrates continue to show long-term effects.

To determine how much oil still exists and whether it is potentially harmful, the team dug 10,000 holes in beaches and boulder fields, and discovered that oil remains in 53 of 91 sites, despite the $2 billion cleanup efforts of 20,000 people. In fact, the research team concluded that cleanup attempts can be more damaging than the oil itself, with impacts recurring as long as cleanup continues. Macroalgae and invertebrates were destroyed not only by toxins and smothering, but also were washed away by high-pressure cleanup hoses.

The researchers also discovered that coarse-grained graveled shores trapped and retained the oil, poisoning mussel beds and subsequently the food chain, killing pink salmon embryos, and exposing fish eggs, sea ducks, sea otters, and shorebirds to toxins for years.

Sea otters have remained at half the estimated pre-spill numbers, far short of the expected recovery. Harlequin ducks were affected the most, with a sharp elevation in over-winter mortality rates, due in part to contamination of clams and mussels, their prey of choice.

Rice and his colleagues also encourage a change in risk assessment models to include delayed, indirect impacts, such as cascading effects throughout the ecosystem, instead of treating species populations as independent of one another, as has been the model in the past.

Rice was invited to speak by Professor Bob Thomas, Biological Sciences, who taught Rice at CSU, Chico and was an outside member of his Kent State Ph.D. committee. He has spent his summers and sabbatical leave time since 1972 working with Rice in Alaska on many different aspects of oil and marine pollution.

Thomas is preparing a paper for publication, which includes confirmation that mussels and clams are still showing DNA damage from the buried Exxon Valdez oil, and also that the toxins in crude oil thought to be most important before the spill are turning out to be less critical in the long term than other, more persistent compounds. "Persistent and long-term effects are not caused by the same toxins we were studying back in the '70s," Thomas said, "and they are being added to our environment from many different sources, not just the publicized oil spills."

The Biological Sciences seminars are a component of the Senior Seminar in Biology (BIOL 291), with the support of Omicron Theta Epsilon.

The next seminar will be on Feb. 13, "Riparian Landscape Ecology of the Sacramento River," with Steve Greco, Ph.D., Department of Environmental Design, University of California, Davis. For information about the seminars, visit www.csuchico.edu/biol/Seminar.html.

Francine Gair