My buddy wrote this one…check the link for more pics, thats me in the kayak!
http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A39681
POSTED ON JANUARY 30, 2008:
Water, Water Everywhere
But is it so fresh and so clean?
By Stratton Lawrence
Rainwater picks up countless pollutants on its way to Charleston harbor
Stratton Lawrence
Few animals sightings evoke as much joy and excitement as the bottlenose dolphin. Tursiops truncatus, found in tropical and temperate waters around the world, is ubiquitous in Lowcountry waters, and any Charlestonian who spends time on the deep blue sea has likely had many close-up encounters with the well-loved marine mammal.
Dolphins predate humans in South Carolina by millennia, enjoying the safe and food-abundant habitat of our estuaries and tidal creeks. In the last few decades, however, our flippered friend has fallen on hard times.
The dolphins are sick.
“Dolphins are a top-level predator,” says Dr. Pat Fair, a research physiologist and the branch chief of living marine resources for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) here in Charleston. “Their extensive blubber layer accumulates pollutants like a sponge, so that combination and their long life spans make them an ideal sentinel for environmental perturbations.”
Fair has spent the last five years collecting blood and tissue samples from wild dolphins, documenting the contaminants they’ve accumulated by eating at the top of the food chain. Of 82 dolphins examined in the Charleston area between 2003 and 2005, 20 percent were found to be diseased, while 30 percent were deemed “possibly diseased.” Less than 50 percent were verifiably healthy, and many of those were female, who pass along much of their stored contaminants to their offspring during birth and lactation.
The primary illness found in Lowcountry dolphins is orogenital neoplasia, akin to the human papilloma virus (HPV) that’s become widespr