On the Hunt for Oil: Spill Spells Trouble for Wildlife
CHETRY: Fourteen minutes past the hour. Welcome back to the Most News in the Morning. For crews that are now trying to clean up the oil slick in the gulf, the time to act, of course, is now. It's because the calm winds and the waves are actually giving a bit of break and preventing the worst of the oil from drifting ashore.</s>ROBERTS: And while the fishes say that the slick should remain at sea for at least the next couple of days, already marine life is paying the price. Our David Mattingly is live in Venice, Louisiana, down the Mississippi Delta this morning. And, David, you saw firsthand the impact that this oil is having on the wildlife. What have you seen so far?</s>DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, John, we went out into the Gulf of Mexico yesterday looking for oil. We found it. But what we found in that oil made it even more disturbing. Take a look.</s>MATTINGLY (voice-over): Boat captains in port told us where to find it, an ugly reddish-brown wave of oil. A bumpy two-hour ride later, it was impossible to miss.</s>MATTINGLY (on camera): Finally, here we are, 15 miles out. We've slowed down. The seas are still pretty rough, as you can see, but I don't know if you can see it or not, but just right here in front of us -- which looks almost like a red, muddy line through the water. That is the oil.</s>MATTINGLY (voice-over): National Wildlife Federation president Larry Schweiger believes the impact on wildlife is inevitable.</s>MATTINGLY (on camera): You can see it's been treated, so it's breaking up and it's dispersing into the water column.</s>MATTINGLY (voice-over): It looks like tea-sized blobs in the water, millions of them, all the way down.</s>MATTINGLY (on camera): OK. I'm going to grab a towel here. This stuff is rubbing up against the side of the boat. There it is. That's what's in the water. That's sticking to the side of the boat right there. If this is doing this to the boat, what is it going to do to anything that lives in this water?</s>LARRY SCHWEIGER, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION: It's going to be very, very hard on the fish and shellfish.</s>MATTINGLY (voice-over): And the oil seems to go on forever.</s>MATTINGLY (on camera): Over here, as far as the eye can see, there is like a red line of that oil going right across the Gulf of Mexico. It is endless.</s>MATTINGLY (voice-over): And as bad as it looked, it was about to get worse.</s>MATTINGLY (on camera): This is something we didn't expect to see. This is a sea turtle. It's right here in the water. It's right near the top. It's swimming right in the middle of all that oily mess out there. We're going to try and get as close as --</s>SCHWEIGER: And he's -- he's having trouble, that's why he's doing that. He should not be doing that.</s>MATTINGLY: Clearly in stress. The turtle has to come up for air?</s>SCHWEIGER: The turtle's coming up for air, and when it does it's gulping the surface, so it's picking up that oil that's floating on the surface.</s>MATTINGLY: So it's taking it into its body?</s>SCHWEIGER: So it's taking it into its body. And, of course, if you're -- if you're drinking oil, it's not -- not good for the digestive system. So he's -- he's in distress.</s>MATTINGLY (voice-over): It seemed to be having breathing problems. After a few moments, it disappeared into the reddish, oily muck.</s>MATTINGLY (on camera): OK, we're about to take off. Didn't want to leave without getting a souvenir. There it is, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. That's just one leading band of it, and see how it's floating to the top and how nasty it is. And all of this is going that way, back towards shore.</s>MATTINGLY: And this is what it looks like almost 12 hours later. You see how this is all separated after this oil has come in contact with the dispersant. It's coming down to the bottom of the -- of the bottle here. The rest of it's still kind of cloudy, and up here that nasty oil film, almost a very small microcosm of what we saw going on out there in the Gulf of Mexico -- John, Kiran.</s>ROBERTS: You know, David, eventually the oil does break up and -- and microbes eat it. So, how long does that process take? Do you have any idea?</s>MATTINGLY: We keep hearing different things. There are people who say it's going to sink to the bottom and stay in the environment, possibly for years before it disappears. Now, the concern is right now, what the marine wildlife that is out there that -- particularly the turtles and the mammals that have to come up for air, they encounter that slick, that -- that sheen that's on the top. And then they also have to encounter this material that's floating in the water column. And there we'd see these tiny little pellets, and when -- when you look down in the water, they -- they go down just as far as you could possibly see. And that turtle that we saw, he was coming up multiple times, a clear sign that it was in distress. It was almost like it was gasping for breath as it would come up and swimming very erratically. So you could tell it was very distressed at the time. No telling what might be happening to it today.</s>CHETRY: It's just -- it's heartbreaking to watch all of that happen and know that there's nothing they can do at this point to even plug the -- the gushing leak from the well. David Mattingly for us. Thanks so much. It's 19 minutes past the hour. Coming up next on the Most News in the Morning, we're talking more about the oil slick in the gulf. It's expected to also have a huge financial impact, but it could also impact your wallet. Christine Romans, "Minding Your Business" next.