A massive amount of crude oil lurks off Gulf Coast shores, threatening to devastate ecosystems to livelihoods from Louisiana to Florida. What began as an oil rig explosion has turned into a potential environmental disaster of epic proportions.

A fact sheet on the company website says BP takes responsibility for cleaning up the spill and will pay compensation for “legitimate and objectively verifiable” claims for property damage, personal injury and commercial losses. President Barack Obama and several attorneys general have asked the company to explain what exactly that means.

People like Dana Powell, manager of the Paradise Inn in Pensacola Beach, Fla., have feared what will happen to the Gulf Coast’s staple industries such as tourism and commercial fishing.

“Now when there’s a hurricane, we know it’s going to level things, devastate things, be a huge mess and it’s going to take several years to clean up,” she said. “But this? It’s going to kill the wildlife, it’s going to kill lifestyles — the shrimpers, the fishermen, tourism. Who’s going to come to an oil-covered beach?”

BP CEO Tony Hayward said Monday on ABC’s Good Morning America that BP was not responsible for the accident. He said the equipment that failed and led to the spill belonged to owner Transocean Ltd., not BP, which operated the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Guy Cantwell, a Transocean spokesman, responded by reading a statement without elaborating.

“We will await all the facts before drawing conclusions and we will not speculate,” he said.

A board investigating the explosion and oil leak plans to hold its first public hearing in roughly two weeks. The cause of the April 20 explosion, which killed 11 workers, has not been determined.

Coast Guard Capt. David Fish, chief of the Washington-based Office of Investigations and Analysis, said the six-member board — three from the Coast Guard and three from the U.S. Minerals and Management Service — will likely meet in the New Orleans area and take testimony from experts and workers who survived the disaster.

“We want to get it public because that’s just what our rules are and while everything is fresh in everyone’s mind, particularly with the witnesses,” he said.

Meanwhile, Hayward said chemical dispersants seem to be having a significant impact keeping oil from flowing to the surface, though he did not elaborate.

The update on the dispersants came as BP was preparing a system never tried to siphon away the spill of crude from a blown-out well a mile underwater. However, it will take at least another six to eight days before crews can lower 74-ton concrete-and-metal boxes being built to capture the oil and siphon it to a barge waiting at the surface.

That delay could allow at least another million gallons to spill into the Gulf, on top of the roughly 2.6 million or more that has spilled since the April 20 blast. Those numbers are based on the Coast Guard’s estimates that 200,000 gallons a day are spilling out, though officials have cautioned it’s impossible to know exactly how much is leaking.

By comparison, the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons off the Alaska coast in 1989.

Crews continued to lay boom in what increasingly felt like a futile effort to keep the spill from reaching the shore, though choppy seas have made that difficult and rendered much of the oil-corraling gear useless.

In Pensacola, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist characterized the spill as “sort of an underground volcano of oil.” He said Monday that BP was responsible for the cleanup and added “we’ll be more than happy to send them the bill.”

Everything engineers have tried so far has failed to stop the leak. After the explosion, the flow of oil should have been stopped by a blowout preventer, but the mechanism failed. Efforts to remotely activate it have proven fruitless.

The oil could keep gushing for months until a second well can be dug to relieve pressure from the first.

Besides the immediate impact on Gulf industries, shipping along the Mississippi River could soon be limited because the slick was precariously close to a key shipping lane. Ships carrying food, oil, rubber and much more come through the Southwest Pass to enter the vital waterway.

Shipment delays — either because oil-splattered ships need to be cleaned off at sea before docking or because water lanes are shut down for a time — would raise the cost of transporting those goods.

“We saw that during Hurricane Katrina for a period of time — we saw some prices go up for food and other goods because they couldn’t move some fruit down the shipping channels and it got spoiled,” PFGBest analyst Phil Flynn said.

The Port of New Orleans said projections suggest the pass will be clear through Tuesday.

Obama toured the region Sunday, deflecting criticism that his administration was too slow to respond and did too little to stave off the catastrophe. The administration has also strongly defended any comparison to the slow response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

A piece of plywood along a Louisiana highway had these words painted on it: “OBAMA SEND HELP”

The containment boxes being built were not part of BP’s original response plan. The approach has been used previously only for spills in relatively shallow water. Coast Guard Adm.Thad Allen said engineers are still examining whether the valves and other systems that feed oil to a ship on the surface can withstand the extra pressures of the deep.

BP was trying to cap the smallest of three leaks with underwater robots in the hope it will make it easier to place a single oil-siphoning container over the wreck. One of the robots cut the damaged end off a pipe at the smallest leak Sunday and officials were hoping to cap it with a sleeve and valve, Coast Guard spokesman Brandon Blackwell said Monday. He did not know how much oil was coming from that leak.

“We see this as an opportunity to simplify the seafloor mission a little bit, so we’re working this aggressively,” BP spokesman Steve Rinehart said.

A company official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the volume of reserves, confirmed reports that tens of millions of barrels of oil were beneath the seabed being tapped by the rig when it blew up. Bob Fryar, senior vice president for BP in Angola, said any numbers being thrown out are just estimates at best.

On Sunday, fishermen from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Florida Panhandle got the news that more than 6,800 square miles of federal fishing areas were closed, fracturing their livelihood for at least 10 days and likely more just as the prime spring season was kicking in.

Peter Young has worked nearly 18 years as a fishing guide and said he’s afraid his way of life may be slipping away. The government has overreacted by shutting down vital fishing areas in the marshes, he said.

Until he sees oil himself, Young will keep fishing the closed areas.

“They can take me to jail,” he said. “This is our livelihood. I’m not going to take customers into oil, but until I see it, I can’t sit home and not work.”

Did You Know? The swing of a mantis shrimp is so powerful that one of its mighty blows counts as two strikes due to the impact of its appendage on the victim and the shockwave that follows. Even if it misses, the shockwave is sufficient enough to kill or stun its prey.

Mantis shrimp are generally solitary animals that live in burrows and only come out during feeding time or when they relocate. In order to obtain their food, they either wait for their prey to chance near them or they hunt, chase, and kill them. The type of mantis shrimp is dependent on their claw structure. Spearers contain spiny appendages that are attached to barbed tips and are used to stab and grab prey. Smashers, on the other hand, contain a more complex club used to smash their meals apart. These appendages also possess a sharp edge which can cut prey while the mantis shrimp swims. The strike of a smasher is so rapid that they may swing at speeds equal to that of a .22 caliber bullet.

GULFPORT, Miss. – Necropsies completed on five of the 25 dead sea turtles found along Mississippi beaches in the past few days show no evidence of oil killing the reptiles.
Brian Gorman of the National Marine Fisheries Service in Gulfport, Miss., said Monday that no evidence of oil or contamination has been found. But he says that doesn’t mean further analysis won’t reveal something.
The carcasses are badly decomposed. Gorman says necropsies on the remaining turtles will be performed later.
At least six of the 25 turtles are the endangered Kemp’s ridley, which breed nowhere else in the world but on beaches in Mexico and southern Texas. They’re considered among the most imperiled turtle species.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – A lungless frog, a frog that flies and a slug that shoots love darts are among 123 new species found in Borneo since 2007 in a project to conserve one of the oldest rain forests in the world.

A report by the global conservation group WWF on the discoveries also calls for protecting the threatened species and equatorial rain forest on Borneo, the South China Sea island that is the world’s third-largest and is shared by Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.

“The challenge is to ensure that these precious landscapes are still intact for future generations,” said the report released Thursday.

The search for the new species was part of the Heart of Borneo project that started in February 2007 and is backed by the WWF and the three countries that share the island.

The aim is to conserve 85,000 square miles (220,000 square kilometers) of rain forest that was described by Charles Darwin as “one great luxuriant hothouse made by nature for herself.”

Explorers have been visiting Borneo for centuries, but vast tracts of its interior are yet to be biologically explored, said Adam Tomasek, leader of WWF’s Heart of Borneo project.

“If this stretch of irreplaceable rain forest can be conserved for our children, the promise of more discoveries must be a tantalizing one for the next generation of researchers to contemplate,” he said.

The scientists’ discoveries include the world’s longest known stick insect at 56.7 centimeters, a flame-colored snake and a frog that flies and changes its skin and eye color. In total, 67 plants, 29 invertebrates, 17 fish, five frogs, three snakes and two lizards and a brand new species of bird were discovered, said the report.

Borneo has long been known as a hub for monster insects, including giant cockroaches about 4 inches (10 centimeters) long.

Notable among the species discovered are:

• a snake that has a bright orange, almost flame-like, neck coloration that gradually fuses into an extraordinary iridescent and vivid blue, green and brown pattern. When threatened it flares its nape, revealing bright orange colors.

• A frog that breathes through its skin because it has no lungs, which makes it appear flat. This aerodynamic shape allows the frogs to move swiftly in fast flowing streams. Although the species was discovered in 1978, it was only now that scientists found the frog has no lungs.

• A high-altitude slug found on Mount Kinabalu that has a tail three times the length of its head. They shoot calcium carbonate “love darts” during courtship to inject a hormone into a mate. While resting, the slug wraps its long tail around its body.

The Heart of Borneo, the core island area the conservation effort targets, is home to ten species of primate, more than 350 birds, 150 reptiles and amphibians and a staggering 10,000 plants that are found nowhere else in the world, the report says.

Scientists from Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport performed the tests as part of a project monitoring sources of whale meat offered for sale since 1993.

The peer-reviewed study appeared in Wednesday’s edition of the journal Biology Letters.

The study comes as the International Whaling Commission is considering legitimizing limited commercial whaling as a way of controlling it. Environmentalists fear that could open the door to more illegal trade.

Japan’s annual whale hunt is allowed by the commission as a scientific program, but opponents call it a cover for commercial whaling, which has been banned since 1986. Japan hunts hundreds of mostly minke whales, which are not an endangered species. Whale meat not used for study is sold for consumption in Japan, but international sales are banned.

The South Pacific Whale Research Consortium in New Zealand estimates 3,000 whales are killed for their meat each year.

“Since the international moratorium, it has been assumed that there is no international trade in whale products,” said Scott Baker, associate director of OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute and lead author of the study, in a written statement. “But when products from the same whale are sold in Japan in 2007 and in Korea in 2009, it suggests that international trade, though illegal, is still an issue.”

The International Whaling Commission meets again starting May 29 in Morocco and will consider allowing 1,400 gray whales to be hunted over the next decade.

Douglas DeMaster, the U.S. delegation’s deputy commissioner, said an advisory panel is developing recommendations on resolving the stalemate between nations over commercial whaling.

President Barack Obama’s administration is waiting to see the recommendations before taking a position, but DNA testing and an international registry of whale meat DNA, as suggested by the authors of the study, would be key to enforcement of controls on international trade, DeMaster said.

The study looked at 13 pieces of mixed whale meat sashimi purchased from an unnamed restaurant in Seoul, South Korea, during two visits in 2009. Four were from an Antarctic minke whale, four from a sei whale, three from a North Pacific minke whale, one from a fin whale and one from a Risso’s dolphin.

The species echoed those taken by Japan’s scientific whaling program, particularly the Antarctic minke whale, Baker said. To settle the question, he has asked Japan for access to records from the whaling program.

“It basically confirms these products are leaking out of the scientific whaling operating in Japan,” said Steve Palumbi, professor of biology at Stanford University and director of the Hopkins Marine Station at Monterey, Calif.

“That’s really important because although people have been very worried about scientific whaling, because there’s not much science involved, the other part of it is those whales are supposed to be for domestic consumption only,” added Palumbi, who was not part of the study. “Any international movement of them is prohibited.”

The authors said it was unlikely that the sei whale, the Antarctic minke whale and the fin whale came from bycatch from South Korean fishermen, which is legal. No sei whales have been reported as bycatch in 13 years of records submitted by South Korea to the International Whaling Commission, the study said. The Antarctic minke whale is not found in the Northern Hemisphere.

Testing showed the fin whale meat likely came from the same fin whale offered for sale at a Japanese market in 2007, which the scientists also tested.

The study also detailed DNA testing of whale meat that led The Hump sushi restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif., to close last month. The restaurant and a sushi chef were charged with illegally selling an endangered species product.

Taryn Kiekow, staff attorney for Natural Resources Defense Council, said the group is “very worried” that even limited commercial whaling would open the door to illegal trade in whale meat.

Did You Know? A Hagfish has four hearts and two brains.

Hagfish excrete a large amount of mucus which is used as a defense mechanism. When captured, they release the mucus substance and tie into a knot, which allows the mucus to drip down from head to tail until the Hagfish can slip out of the predator’s mouth.

Little is known about the Hagfish, although there are some thoughts of species being hermaphroditic and other species having a ratio as high as 100:1 in favor of females. Researchers believe that the ovaries remain stagnant until they have reached maturity and are around a particular environmental factor in the case of the hemophroditic species, however in other species; hagfish containing ovaries are given sperm by another containing testicles. In this case the females lay 20 to 30 eggs after both sexes mate.

Did You Know? A Hagfish has four hearts and two brains.

In an effort to clean up the spill as quickly as possible to prevent any effects on the reef itself, planes have been spraying chemical dispersants on the oil slick.  Currently, authorities do not know whether the spill will have any ill effects on the reef and the overall ecology, but everyone agrees that any pollution of the Great Barrier Reef is too much.  Human impact on the reef is already apparent due to climate change and toxic farm chemicals, and that is partly why authorities now take dangers to the Great Barrier Reef so seriously.

The Great Barrier Reef covers 133,000 square miles along Australia’s northeastern coast, and in addition to being the world’s largest living organism, it is also an important tourism generator for Australia.  These factors made this spill a huge issue to Maritime Safety Queensland, who are now considering requiring pilots throughout the entire shipping channel near the Great Barrier Reef. This is an effort to eliminate future spills.  Conservationists warn that there will be more spills, citing that last year there was a spill near Moreton Island and Sunshine Coast beaches, and with newly tapped natural gas and coal resources, more ships will be in this area than ever before. This will be putting this great natural wonder at higher risk. The Australian government will continue to monitor the oil slick and determine the best methods for safe removal, both for the ship and the Great Barrier Reef it endangers.

LOS ANGELES – Gazing past the rolling whitecaps in the middle of San Diego’s whale-watching season, boat captain Bill Reese was dismayed by what he wasn’t seeing.

“Where are the whales?” said Reese. “Where are the whales?”

Long held as an environmental success story after being taken off the endangered list in 1994, California gray whales draw legions of fans into boats or atop cliffs to watch the leviathans lumber down the coast to spawning grounds in Baja.

But whale-watching skippers became alarmed after sightings dropped from 25 a day in good years to five a day this season. Such anecdotal evidence has left conservationists and state officials worried about the whale’s future, especially now.

The federal government’s monitoring of the mammals has fallen off in recent years. And the International Whaling Commission in June will consider allowing 1,400 gray whales to be hunted over the next decade.

The decision will rely on a report that says the population is flourishing — a study critics say is spotty and outdated.

“If you count 2,500 animals, all you really know rock solid for sure is there are more than 2,500. Beyond that you’re using models and assumptions,” said Stanford University marine biology professor Steve Palumbi. “The problem comes when you say, ‘We do know how many whales there are and we’re going to start making unalterable management decisions on that basis.’”

The study draws on annual population estimates dating from 1967, but in the past decade only three census counts have been released, the most recent in 2006.

Since than, the estimated number of calves has plunged from more than 1,000 in 2006 to 312 in 2009. In addition, the species suffered a die-off of several thousand whales in 2000.

“You can’t set specific quotas for 10 years based on 2006 data,” said Sara Wan, a California Gray Whale Coalition member who is also a state coastal commissioner. “It’s irresponsible.”

In January, the California Coastal Commission pressed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for an updated gray whale study. The count is done but the analysis won’t be finished until long after the whaling commission’s decision.

NOAA scientists say their population estimates are reliable because the numbers have remained relatively consistent over time. They say the drop in calf numbers may reflect nature thinning out the herd.

The population is still more than double what it was in the 1960s and has been fairly stable of the past couple decades, said Paul Wade, one of the study’s co-authors and a member of the commission’s scientific committee.

“If it truly does go into an important decline, it’s not going to happen overnight. We’re going to see it,” he said.

The gray whale’s success has created a complex dynamic for NOAA researchers, who recently have focused on more threatened, less charismatic whales such as the North Atlantic Right whales, whose population may be as low as 30.

Over the years, scientists have been able to do a great amount of research on gray whales because they are so accessible and popular with the public. Any indication of trouble galvanizes countless fans.

“Gray whales are our pets, they’re in our backyard,” said David Rugh, a NOAA biologist who oversaw gray whale counts for years. “Of course we have a concern about them going through so many environments from Mexico to the Arctic but there are other species out there that we’re also concerned about.”

Gray whales migrate thousands of miles each fall from Alaska to Baja, then back north between February and May. They spend summers in the Bering Sea and Arctic.

Biologists sit in a little stand on California’s central coast, counting adult whales as they swim south. Calves are counted as the whales make the return trip north. The counts are used to extrapolate overall population and monitor reproduction.

When gray whales were listed as endangered in 1970, an estimated 12,000 remained. A moratorium on commercial hunting and close monitoring helped the population rebound to more than 20,000.

Deemed recovered, the whales only needed to be monitored every five years, instead of annually, and there was no longer dedicated funding for the whale, which cost about $170,000 a season to count.

The 2006 count yielded about 2,500 whales, leading researchers to calculate about 20,000 whales total. The most recent calf count of 2009, however, revealed the fewest since 2001.

“These are troubling numbers,” said Randy Reeves, chair of the Cetacean specialist group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. “If they’re being reinforced by comments from whale watching guys, then it gets that much more troubling.”

Wayne Perryman, who oversees NOAA gray whale counts, said he believes there is a correlation between lower reproduction rates and colder winters when lingering ice blocks whales from getting to feeding grounds. He also does not see reason to panic.

“I think it’s like in a room when someone yells ‘fire!’” Perryman said.

The whaling commission allows the Russian Chukotka people and the Makah Indian tribe in Washington to hunt 140 gray whales per year. While they typically revisit the issue every five years, the panel is considering limits through 2020.

Douglas DeMaster, the U.S. delegation’s deputy commissioner, the number is about half of 1 percent of the current estimated population.

“This is a very conservative number and provides subsistence needs to aboriginals,” he said.

But Liz Alter, a marine biologist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said, “Given that we have very little ability to predict what climate change, ocean acidification and other threats will mean to the whale population for the coming years, it seems reckless to me to set catch limits for that length of time.”

FRESNO, Calif. – For the first time in more than a century, a California condor chick successfully hatched inside a federal park that once was a domain of the endangered species.

Biologists at Pinnacles National Monument in Central California celebrated the milestone announced Wednesday in the slow recovery of the birds.

But their enthusiasm was tempered because the egg did not belong to any adult birds in the park.

A pair of condors there had conceived an egg in March that biologists then took for safekeeping and replaced with a plastic egg. Biologists later discovered the embryo had died seven days into its development.

“It wasn’t surprising the egg wasn’t viable,” said Daniel George, manager of the condor program at Pinnacles. “That can happen with first-time breeders.”

The pair in Pinnacle later hatched an egg that was slipped into their nest after being produced by a pair of condors in the San Diego Wildlife Park captive breeding program.

The chick emerged from its grapefruit-sized shell on March 24. Its sex will be determined soon with blood tests done when it receives its West Nile Virus vaccine.

“It’s a good step forward for the program,” said biologist Joe Burnett of Ventana Wilderness Society, a partner in the recovery program.

Removing new eggs from nests so the gangly birds with nearly 10-foot wingspans don’t accidentally destroy them is just part of the tedious recovery effort. Biologists don’t want this first generation of new birds to become discouraged if their mating efforts don’t pay off.

“It’s a tenuous process because you don’t know if they will accept it,” George said. “So far all of their instincts seem to be operating properly.”

Biologists and the public were able to monitor the progress of the birds’ 57-day egg-sitting from Scout Peak above the cliff-side nest. Tourists have flocked from as far as Kentucky to see the rare sight, which has not occurred in an area in free view of the public since the recovery program began.

Two days before the birth, visitors witnessed the sometimes-comical reaction of the birds as the egg began to move and emit noises.

“They’ll get up all of the sudden and look at it, then try to reposition it,” George said.

In 1982, the last 22 California condors were placed in captive breeding programs. Since then, hunters and lead poisoning from bullets left in carcasses have hampered the recovery of the birds, which currently number 350. Over the past decade, the birds have been released at three sites around California and one in Arizona. Without parents in the wild to teach them safe behavior, some of the newborns have been caught and placed in breeding programs after repeatedly perching on power lines or coming too close to people.

The birth announced Wednesday occurred after a male condor released in 2004 at Big Sur and a female released the same year at Pinnacles began exhibiting mating and nesting behavior last year. Condors generally mate for life.

So far, the new parents are adapting to life with child. George said they take turns nestling their offspring to keep it warm, just as they did the egg.

While one waits, the other forages for food. However, the potential that they could bring back bits of a carcass tainted with lead bullets is a threat to the survival of the youngster.

Of the 77 eggs laid in the wild since 2001, 33 lived for at least six months — long enough to fly. If the newest one survives, its wings will grow from their current thumb size to a span of at least 9 1/2 feet.

The young condor will live with its parents for a year. The adults will wait two years before producing another egg.

“For first-time parents they’re doing a good job,” George said.