Oil Spill in Sunderbans, Bangladesh. First dead dolphins.

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http://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/ ... in-spotted

With the ship’s salvage taking more than two days and authorities failing to clean up the spill – now spread over an 80km swathe of the Sundarbans – in over five days, the first of what is expected to be a myriad of dolphin corpses came to the surface yesterday.

Dhaka Tribune photojournalist Syed Zakir Hossain, who has covered a wide area of the forest in the last 24 hours, located the first dead body of an Irrawaddy dolphin in the Harintana-Tambulbunia channel of the Sela River yesterday, some 25km from where the tanker capsized.

Since the Sela River is a sanctuary of two types of dolphins, a major concern after the tanker capsized and went down with over 350,000 litres of oil was the well-being of these sensitive and rare marine creatures.

Reports of sightings of corpses of other wild animals were already coming in on Friday, but this is the first confirmed sighting of dolphin remains.

But the Shipping Minister Shajahan Khan was reported by BSS as saying: “I have discussed with the experts and they said that there will be no major damage.”

“It will not affect dolphins and other animals as the oil has not spread that much,” UNB quoted the minister as saying on a visit to Chandpai in the Sundarbans.

Monirul H Khan, professor of zoology at Jahangirnagar University, told the Dhaka Tribune: “Generally, dolphin corpses do not come to the water surface. The fact that one of them has floated to the surface should mean a number of dolphins have been directly affected.”

He said: “If large creatures such as dolphins could not survive, then smaller ones like otters and fish are in much bigger danger.”

However, Zahhidul Kabir, divisional forest officer in the Sundarbans, claimed that so far they had not found anything other than the dead bodies of some small fish and crabs which, he said, could not be linked to the oil spill.

There are three dolphin sanctuaries – Chandpai, Dhangimari and Dudhmukhi – across 33km of the Sundarbans. Of them, Chandpai is the largest, covering 15km of the Sela River.

A Dhaka Tribune team which has been patrolling the area for three days did not see a single dolphin in the Chandpai sanctuary near where the tanker sank.

However, in Dhangimari sanctuary they counted 13 dolphin sightings in five minutes, though they could not determine the number of individual animals present.

Oil tanker Southern Star 7, carrying 357,664 litres of furnace oil, sank in the river at Mrigamari under the East Zone of the Sundarbans after being hit by a cargo vessel around 6am on Tuesday

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