Pollution and strandings - Is there a link? - WDC Blog - From the Front Line

These are the views of the individuals concerned and may not represent the views of WDCS

Pollution and strandings - Is there a link?

Author - CEO

Pollution has long been known to affect marine life with disasterous effects. The oil spill in the Timor Sea is a direct and current example. Algal blooms have been suspected of being linked to pollution by some scientists, but it would seem that algal blooms are having a very real affect on marine mammals.

It would seem now that the toxins produced in algal blooms have been shown to affect the hippocampus in sealions. The hippocampus is responsible for our animal's spatial awareness and it may be this impact on the hippocampus is causing sealions to get lost and stray into unusual places.

I wonder how much pollution is having an affect on cetaceans? Can we make the leap and suggest that pollution may be affecting the hippocampus of other marine mammals we see in strandings?

Strandings have a large number of causal factors but maybe this work takes us another step towards understanding the role pollution plays.

This entry was posted by Chris Butler-Stroud on Sunday, October 25. 2009 at 07:48. and is filed under Author - CEO. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own blog. All new comments are subject to moderation before being displayed.

Defined tags for this entry: Pollution, stranding, strandings

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