'We're braced for a heavy impact and the food-chain collapsing' [View All]

[marmar]

from the Independent UK:



....(snip)....

We've been working there for 20-hour days. We're trying to work on this at a strategic level with a long-term conservation plan about how we maintain and protect habitats into the future as, hopefully, the leaking oil gets capped.

But we're bracing for a really heavy impact on the habitat and the birds. The area is incredibly rich. It's both rich in diversity but also in abundance. There are vast marshes and miles and miles of beaches and, at this time of the year, birds are just packed into those areas for breeding. The impact on the migrant birds will be very heavy, the breeding terns and the breeding marsh birds. We're mobilising volunteers to help with individual birds, planning and documenting the effects of the spill.

While there's this large mass of oil that we can see on the surface, there are untold volumes of oil under the surface. We could see the food chain collapsing, which could cause as much damage to the birds as the oil. We could see the young born early being fed with tainted fish or abandoned because the parents die and don't come back. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/melanie--driscoll-were-braced-for-a-heavy-impact-and-the-foodchain-collapsing-1981134.html