A decade of declines in toothed whale densities following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Abstract

Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill began in April 2010, a widely spaced passive acoustic monitoring array was deployed in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico to document the impacts of this unprecedentedly large and deep offshore oil spill on oceanic marine mammals. The array was subsequently maintained for over a decade. Here we document decadal density declines for seven of eight monitored species groups, including sperm whales (up to 31%), beaked whales (up to 83%), and small delphinids (up to 43%). Declines were observed both within and outside of the surface oil footprint. Though not conclusively linked to the oil spill, the broad spatial and temporal scale of these declines observed for disparate marine mammal species is consistent with Deepwater Horizon impacts. These declines have exceeded and outlasted post-spill damage assessment predictions, suggesting that the offshore ecosystem impacts of Deepwater Horizon may have been larger than previously thought. Whale and delphinid numbers in the Gulf of Mexico have declined by up to 83% in the ten years following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, according to analysis of passive acoustic monitoring data.