02 October 20
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Andy Borowitz | Rule Change for Second Debate Forbids Trump From Attending
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "In a rule change announced on Thursday, the Commission on Presidential Debates said that Donald J. Trump will not be permitted to attend the second debate."
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
n a rule change announced on Thursday, the Commission on Presidential Debates said that Donald J. Trump will not be permitted to attend the second debate.
“We took a look at the first debate and decided that we needed to tweak the format a bit,” Harland Dorrinson, a spokesperson for the commission, said. “We think this rule change fixes everything.”
Anticipating criticism that a debate must have at least two participants, the spokesperson said, “There will be, if you count the moderator.”
To enforce the rule change, the commission will post a photo of Trump at security, but Dorrinson said that he hoped that such a measure would not be necessary.
“If President Trump is listening, we are asking him to stand back, but don’t stand by,” he said.
Melania Trump. (photo: Getty
Leaked Recording of Melania Trump: 'Who Gives a F**k About Christmas Stuff?'
Matt Stieb, New York Magazine
Stieb writes: "On Thursday night, CNN's Anderson Cooper broadcast a leaked phone recording of First Lady Melania Trump in which she vented to her former friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff in July 2018 about the White House Christmas display and her infamous trip to the border during that summer's migrant-family separation crisis."
n Thursday night, CNN’s Anderson Cooper broadcast a leaked phone recording of First Lady Melania Trump in which she vented to her former friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff in July 2018 about the White House Christmas display and her infamous trip to the border during that summer’s migrant-family separation crisis. In the recording, Trump says she doesn’t care for having to put together the holiday displays: “Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff?” Discussing her frustration with critics who wanted her to do more about the administration’s family separation policy, the First Lady said, “‘Oh, what about the children that were separated?’ Give me a fucking break.”
The recording was provided to the network as part of Winston Wolkoff’s press tour for her book detailing her close friendship and falling out with the First Lady, which occurred as part of the scandal surrounding questionable spending during Trump’s inauguration.
Though the First Lady has largely managed to stay out of the campaign spotlight, the audio is an inconvenient contrast to the president’s annual grumbling about the “war on Christmas.” And while Melania appears to be complaining about her lack of options in the face of criticism surrounding child separation, it’s unlikely to win over anyone who was outraged by her decision to wear a jacket with an openly callous message on her 2018 trip to the border.
Trump Rally at Smith Reynolds Airport. (photo: Andrew Dye/Winston-Salem Journal)
The White House Knew Trump Had Likely Been Exposed to the Virus. He Traveled and Held Events Anyway.
Elliot Hannon, Slate
Hannon writes: "After months of coronavirus recklessness, President Donald Trump revealed early Friday morning he had tested positive for COVID-19."
fter months of coronavirus recklessness, President Donald Trump revealed early Friday morning he had tested positive for COVID-19. The White House—or at least Trump himself—seems pretty certain the president contracted the virus from one of his closest advisers, Hope Hicks. We will never know for certain exactly how the president—or Hicks—contracted the virus, but we do know how the president acted after knowing he had been in close contact with someone exhibiting symptoms of the virus that has killed more than 200,000 Americans during his presidency.The New York Times reports Trump advisers knew it was likely that Hicks had contracted the coronavirus Wednesday when she publicly began exhibiting symptoms during a presidential campaign trip to Duluth, Minnesota. After the rally, Hicks reportedly quarantined for the return flight to Washington on Air Force One, and on Thursday, a test officially confirmed what senior White House officials already believed to be the case. The White House, however, hoped it could keep Hicks’ diagnosis from becoming public, Trump aides told the Times. It’s hard to overstate how closely Hicks works with the president and how intertwined their days reportedly are. Instead of taking precautions to protect those around him, however, Trump basically did nothing different. Instead of laying low, he traveled; instead of isolating, he met with people at campaign events; instead of protecting those around him, he knowingly risked spreading the virus further. [CNN and the Wall Street Journal both confirmed the White House was aware of Hicks’ positive test before Trump traveled Thursday on campaign business.*]
From the Washington Post:
After White House officials learned of Hicks’s symptoms, Trump and his entourage flew Thursday to New Jersey, where he attended a fundraiser at his golf club in Bedminster and delivered a speech. Trump was in close contact with dozens of other people, including campaign supporters, at a roundtable event.
The president did not wear a mask Thursday, including at the events at his golf course and on the plane, officials said. He was tested after he returned to the White House, but he also appeared on Sean Hannity’s TV show from the residence by telephone.
It wasn’t just Trump who carried on, potentially harming those around him—it was the rest of his staff, too. And they knew about Hicks; they knew what was coming. Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who was also on the plane to Minnesota with Hicks, held a briefing with reporters without wearing a mask as if nothing was wrong. The utter carelessness of it all is staggering. And it obviously starts at the top with a president that derides mask-wearing as a sign of weakness.
Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and John Legend. (photo: Miami Herald)
Florida GOP Pulls Every Trick in the Book to Keep Ex-Felons From Voting
Fabiola Santiago, Miami Herald
Santiago writes: "Perhaps it's news to Florida's GOP, but some ex-felons are Republicans. Or, have no party affiliation for that matter."
Yet, there’s only one reason why the state’s Republican leaders are using every trick in the book — against the will of voters — to keep nonviolent ex-felons who have served their sentences from voting in 2020: They suspect the majority of the 774,000 ex-felons granted the right to vote but with outstanding financial obligations — mostly, poor African Americans and Latinos — will register as Democrats.
And the GOP’s goal is to deliver crucial swing-state Florida to President Donald Trump. At all costs.
That party leaders such as Gov. Ron DeSantis and House Speaker José Oliva resurrected the ugly ghost of Jim Crow laws — what amounts to a poll tax — to disenfranchise minorities didn’t matter.
That they packed the Florida Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals with conservatives who ruled in their favor didn’t matter. Not as long as they got what they needed: the legal right to force people to pay the state money to become eligible to vote.
And, that they used Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody to pursue more disenfranchisement by demanding the FBI investigate donations to pay those debts doesn’t matter, either.
They feel no shame in coming after the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, the non-partisan grassroots organization helping ex-felons fully exercise their rights as Americans.
The group has successfully fund-raised to pay off debts with the help of singer John Legend and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who told The Washington Post he has raised $16 million and paid the obligations of 32,000 people.
The unfounded accusation: Advocates are paying ex-felons to vote.
But it’s only another ruse to get away with obstructing a group of voters they find inconvenient.
“I have not seen any evidence that anyone is making the donation of this money contingent on someone registering to vote, or to vote in certain way,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, deputy director of voting rights and elections at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The Rights Restoration Coalition has been aggressively non-partisan.”
Running roughshod over voters who approved Amendment 4 in 2018 may seem like a small price to pay for the GOP, but what about the assault on democracy?
Remember that when you vote, Floridians.
Floridians want ex-felons to vote
Two-thirds of Florida voters decided in a statewide referendum two years ago that nonviolent ex-felons deserved to have their voting rights restored. People saw it as another step in their rehabilitation, in becoming full citizens with all the rights and obligations.
But people couldn’t celebrate the passage of Amendment 4 for too long before Republicans went on the attack.
They have so little respect for African Americans and Latinos that they think they can only be one thing: suspects.
In this case, suspected of not being Republican enough, of not being Trumpian enough.
The battle has made national headlines for voter disenfranchisement.
The state’s voting ban on ex-felons was enacted three years after the Civil War and was one of many Reconstruction-era tactics designed to undermine the political rise of former slaves.
“Florida is at a whole different level,” Morales-Doyle told me. Not only for the sheer number of people affected by the policy of forbidding from voting people convicted of felonies who have fully served out their sentences — 4.6 percent of the state’s voting-age population — but also now for resuscitating the pay-to-vote rule.
“Because it so closely resembles a poll tax, also a very well-known Jim Crow policy written out of existence some 50 years ago, it’s in some ways the most blatant example [of voter suppression in the country],” Morales-Dolye said. “Other [state] policies are more creative or it’s hard to tell what they’re trying to get at.”
Thanks to advocates’ efforts, the GOP won’t get away with disenfranchising ex-felons completely.
But the deadline to register to vote in Florida is upon us, Oct. 5. That’s both for mail-in registrations, which must be postmarked by that date, and those done online.
The GOP’s challenges to Amendment 4 have bought Republicans enough time to keep the number of people of color able to vote lower. It’s especially useful when there’s a Black woman on the Democratic presidential ticket, Kamala Harris, in what’s expected to be a very tight election in must-win Florida.
The state’s Republican Party could get away with voter suppression this year. All very legal in their eyes only.
Too many local police don't take the far right seriously. (photo: Steve Skinner/Getty)
The FBI Warned for Years That Police Are Cozy With the Far Right. Is No One Listening?
Mike German, Guardian UK
German writes: "For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has routinely warned its agents that the white supremacist and far-right militant groups it investigates often have links to law enforcement."
I was an FBI agent who infiltrated white supremacists. Too many local police don’t take the far right seriously – or actively sympathize
Yet the justice department has no national strategy designed to protect the communities policed by these dangerously compromised law enforcers. As our nation grapples with how to reimagine public safety in the wake of the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, it is time to confront and resolve the persistent problem of explicit racism in law enforcement.
I know about these routine warnings because I received them as a young FBI agent preparing to accept an undercover assignment against neo-Nazi groups in Los Angeles, California, in 1992. But you don’t have to take my word for it. A redacted version of a 2006 FBI intelligence assessment, White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement, alerted agents to “both strategic infiltration by organized groups and self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to white supremacist causes”.
A leaked 2015 counter-terrorism policy guide made the case more directly, warning agents that FBI “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers”.
If the government knew that al-Qaida or Isis had infiltrated American law enforcement agencies, it would undoubtedly initiate a nationwide effort to identify them and neutralize the threat they posed. Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the US over the last 10 years than any foreign terrorist movement. The FBI regards them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action is even more critical.
In recent years, white supremacists have engaged in deadly rampages in Charleston, South Carolina, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and El Paso, Texas. More ominously, neo-Nazis obtained radiological materials to manufacture “dirty” bombs in separate cases in Maine in 2009 and Florida in 2017, which were only avoided through chance.
But in June 2019, when Congressman William Lacy Clay asked the FBI counter-terrorism chief, Michael McGarrity, whether the bureau remained concerned about white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement since the publication of its 2006 assessment, McGarrity indicated he had not read it. Asked more generally about this infiltration, McGarrity said he would be “suspect” of white supremacist police officers, but that their ideology was a first amendment–protected right.
The 2006 assessment addresses this concern, however, by summarizing supreme court precedent on the issue: “Although the First Amendment’s freedom of association provision protects an individual’s right to join white supremacist groups for the purposes of lawful activity, the government can limit the employment opportunities of group members who hold sensitive public sector jobs, including jobs within law enforcement, when their memberships would interfere with their duties.”
More importantly, the FBI’s 2015 counter-terrorism policy, which McGarrity was responsible for executing, indicates not just that members of law enforcement might hold white supremacist views, but that FBI domestic terrorism investigations have often identified “active links” between the subjects of these investigations and law enforcement officials. But its proposed remedy is stunningly inadequate. It simply instructs agents to protect their investigations by using the “silent hit” feature of the Terrorist Screening Center watchlist, so that police officers searching for themselves or their white supremacist associates could not ascertain whether they were under FBI scrutiny.
Of course, one doesn’t need access to secret FBI terrorism investigations to find evidence of explicit racism within law enforcement. Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, among other states. Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist and sexist social media activity, which demonstrates that overt bias is far too common.
Law enforcement officials actively affiliating with white supremacist and far-right militant groups pose a serious threat to people of color, religious minorities, LGBTQ people and anti-racist activists. But the police response to nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, includes a number of law enforcement officers across the country flaunting their affiliation with far-right militant groups.
A veteran sheriff’s deputy monitoring a Black Lives Matter protest in Orange county, California, wore patches with logos of the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers – far-right militant groups that often challenge the federal government’s authority – affixed to his bullet-proof vest.
A 13-year veteran of the Chicago police department with a long history of misconduct complaints was investigated for wearing a face covering with a Three Percenters’ logo while on duty at a recent protest. A supervisor pictured with him at the scene apparently did not order him to remove it.
In Philadelphia, police officers failed to intervene when mostly white mobs armed with bats, clubs and long guns attacked journalists and protesters. The district attorney has vowed to investigate the matter. The following month, however, Philadelphia police officers openly socialized with several men wearing Proud Boys regalia and carrying the group’s flag at a “Back the Blue” party at the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge.
Police officers casually fraternizing with armed far-right militia groups at protests is confounding because many states, including California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, have laws barring unregulated paramilitary activities and far-right militants have often killed police officers. The overlap between militia members and the Boogaloo movement – whose adherents have been arrested for inciting a riot in South Carolina, and shooting, bombing and killing police officers in California – highlights the threat that police engagement with these groups poses to their law enforcement partners.
Law enforcement agencies must do more to strengthen their anti-discrimination policies, improve applicant and employee screening, establish reporting mechanisms, and protect and reward officers who report their colleagues’ racist misconduct.
Prosecutors also have an important role in protecting the integrity of the criminal justice system from the potential misconduct of explicitly racist officers. Prosecutors keep a register of law enforcement officers whose previous misconduct could reasonably undermine the reliability of their testimony and need to be disclosed to defense attorneys. This register is often referred to as a “Brady list”.
The Georgetown law professor Vida B Johnson has argued that evidence of a law enforcement officer’s explicitly racist behavior could reasonably be expected to impeach his or her testimony. Prosecutors should be required to include these officers on Brady lists to ensure defendants they testify against have access to the potentially exculpating evidence of their explicitly racist behavior.
My 1992 undercover investigation didn’t reveal any connections between the neo-Nazi bombmakers and weapons traffickers and law enforcement. In fact, the local law enforcement officers that worked with me on the investigation were consummate professionals who I literally trusted with my life. There are many more just like them.
But, however small, the presence of active white supremacists in law enforcement must be treated as a matter of urgent concern. As Professor Johnson has argued, the criminal justice system “can never achieve its purported goal of fairness while white supremacists continue to hide within police departments”.
Puerto Ricans protest on January 23, 2020, after a warehouse full of relief supplies, reportedly dating back to Hurricane Maria in 2017, were found having been left undistributed to those in need. (photo: Ricardo Arduengo/Getty)
The Trump Administration Lost Millions of Dollars of Food and Water Meant for Puerto Rico After Hurricane Maria
Nidhi Prakash, BuzzFeed
Prakash writes: "President Donald Trump has, in recent weeks, claimed that he is 'the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico,' in an effort to win over Puerto Rican voters in Florida. But a new government report shows his administration lost track of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of potentially lifesaving food and water, as thousands died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria."
Trump has recently tried to rewrite the history of the US’s bungled recovery efforts in Puerto Rico.
resident Donald Trump has, in recent weeks, claimed that he is “the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico,” in an effort to win over Puerto Rican voters in Florida. But a new government report shows his administration lost track of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of potentially lifesaving food and water, as thousands died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
“FEMA lost visibility of about 38 percent of its commodity shipments to Puerto Rico, worth an estimated $257 million. Commodities successfully delivered to Puerto Rico took an average of 69 days to reach their final destinations,” the report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General found.
For the past three years, Trump has consistently blamed local authorities for the inadequate response to Puerto Rico’s devastating hurricane.
Some FEMA supplies intended for Puerto Rico never even left Florida, according to the report.
Most of those supplies consisted of food and water deliveries, in addition to blankets, cots, tarps, and sheeting. The inspector general’s findings, released Thursday, are in line with what BuzzFeed News and others reported seeing on the ground in Puerto Rico after the hurricane: inadequate federal deliveries of basic supplies, long waits for any supplies at all to arrive, and a lack of accountability at every level on how those supplies were being distributed.
FEMA shipped 97 million liters of water to Puerto Rico between September 2017, when Hurricane Maria made landfall, and April 2018, according to the report. Of that 97 million liters, just 36 million liters definitely reached local distribution points. In those first eight months following the hurricane, FEMA shipped 53 million meals to Puerto Rico. Just 24 million verifiably reached local distribution points.
“The remaining commodity shipments for both water and meals that arrived in the Commonwealth either remained in FEMA’s custody were in contractor facilities, or had unknown destinations,” the report found.
Three years after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, Puerto Rico is still struggling to recover. In the months following the storm, at least three thousand Puerto Ricans died, many from a lack of access to clean water, food (harder to store because electricity on most parts of the island was down for several months), shelter, and timely medical care. Some residents of Puerto Rico lived with open roofs on their houses for months after the hurricane because emergency tarps had not reached them.
Last year, Trump fought against additional funding to help Puerto Rico recover from the disaster, repeating false claims that the island had already gotten more money than for any previous hurricane and blamed local officials for the US territory’s slow recovery. Trump claimed in 2018 that Puerto Rico’s death toll had been faked to make him look “as bad as possible.”
According to the report, FEMA knew from a 2011 exercise that Puerto Rico would need extra support from the federal agency to get supplies distributed throughout the island in an emergency. Despite that, the report says, the agency failed to prepare. The agency also failed to follow the regular standards of tracking deliveries and holding contractors to account by asking for documented proof of deliveries, the inspector general found.
“Given the lost visibility and delayed shipments, FEMA cannot ensure it provided commodities to Puerto Rico disaster survivors as needed to sustain life and alleviate suffering as part of its response and recovery mission,” the report says.
The issue was not just tracking the shipments after they’d reached the island — the report found that for these supplies, “FEMA headquarters did not record customer orders in a timely manner, or did not record them at all,” which lead to confusion and backing up of deliveries at the deployment point in Jacksonville, Florida.
“In response to the large volume of commodities ordered, FEMA had to open up two overflow sites in Jacksonville to store commodities awaiting shipment, as well as divert a significant amount of commodities to other locations,” the report says. “According to [FEMA] personnel in Jacksonville, some commodity shipments intended for Puerto Rico likely never left the continental United States.”
The supplies that did make it to Puerto Rico “sat in FEMA’s custody at various locations on the island approximately 48 days,” followed by another week of delivery time on average before reaching local distribution centers, according to the inspector general.
“Water and food, two of the most important life-sustaining commodities, experienced average shipping delays of 71 and 59 days, respectively,” the report says.
The end result of a shortfall in supplies and some of the available supplies never arriving was that after waiting at least ten days for any kind of assistance to arrive, just 20% of municipalities on the island received enough food and only 27% of municipalities received enough water to supply survivors of the hurricane.
There were also problems with the food that did arrive — 40% of the municipalities said they received expired food and some “‘meal’ boxes ... included junk food such as Oreos, candy, cereal bars, and other similar items that lacked sufficient nutritional value.”
Some of the inspector general’s findings repeat what FEMA’s own internal post-disaster report revealed in 2018. The agency’s resources were already drained and in a state of disorder from responding to other high-intensity hurricanes that hit the US in 2017 by the time Hurricane Maria swept through Puerto Rico, from Hurricane Harvey in Texas to Hurricane Irma, which hit the Florida panhandle and Puerto Rico.
Compounding the breakdowns in federal record-keeping and accountability, the inspector general found that Puerto Rican government staff used manual records haphazardly filed in random locations rather than having a formal system to keep track of food, water, and other supplies received from FEMA and distributed to local authorities.
“For example, we requested supporting documentation to verify commodity distribution numbers in the Puerto Rico government’s summary reports provided to FEMA,” the inspector general wrote. “Puerto Rico government officials could not provide the supporting commodity distribution records because they were dispersed throughout various locations on the island, including a personal residence."
Smoke envelops Mondos Beach near Ventura, California, in 2017. Dolphins and porpoises that swim just offshore are particularly vulnerable to breathing in smoke. (photo: Mark Ralston/Getty)
Wildfire Smoke May Harm Whales and Dolphins: Here's What We Know
Brishti Basu, National Geographic
Basu writes: "Little research has been done on how marine mammals are affected by prolonged exposure to the smoke and chemicals released during wildfires, but if the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico is any indicator, they could face serious health effects in the years to come."
As North America's West Coast burns, scientists are concerned marine mammals will be harmed by smoke inhalation, an unstudied phenomenon.
ittle research has been done on how marine mammals are affected by prolonged exposure to the smoke and chemicals released during wildfires, but if the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico is any indicator, they could face serious health effects in the years to come.
Ten years ago, as a first responder in New Orleans, veterinarian Cara Field saw for herself how the worst oil spill in U.S. history affected the region’s wildlife. The spill released 200 million gallons of oil into the ocean, much of which rose to the surface. As part of the cleanup, crews burned it off into the atmosphere. But research just five years later showed bottlenose dolphins that breathed the chemical-laden smoke developed severe lung diseases, were more prone to infections, and their offspring died at higher rates.
Field, now the medical director at the Marine Mammal Center, a conservation nonprofit in Sausalito, California, fears that marine mammals along the western coast of North America could be facing a similar fate, during a season of disastrous wildfires that have destroyed more than seven million acres.
Wildfire smoke is made up of a range of gases, including carbon monoxide; nitrogen dioxide; polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs; and hazardous particulate matter, which has been shown to increase risks of respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses in humans.
Because whales, dolphins, porpoises, and other marine mammals are adapted to life at sea, where there are fewer air pollutants than on land, they “would be expected to be more susceptible to injury from inhaled particulates,” Field says. That could have grave consequences for species such as sea otters and orcas, or killer whales, which are already in decline in the region. (Read how the Exxon Valdez spill devastated orcas.)
Because the effects of wildfire smoke on marine mammals aren’t well understood and the potential threat is high, Field is urging scientists along the West Coast to begin collecting data now on marine mammal health in areas affected by wildfires. Though there have not been reports of stranded marine mammals suffering from smoke inhalation this fire season, it’s still possible, Field says.
“Now is the time to get our baseline, pick what samples to look for, and start identifying species or populations that would be potential candidates to study,” she says.
Vulnerable anatomy
The anatomy of whales, dolphins, and porpoises makes them more vulnerable to the harmful effects of wildfire smoke, Field says. Because they exchange big gulps of air rapidly through their blowholes, they can easily inhale airborne smoke particles.
They also lack sinuses and other nasal structures found in land animals—physical barriers that trap particles in mucus and allow animals to sneeze or cough them out, so that fewer particles reach the lungs, says Stephen Raverty, a veterinary pathologist at the Ministry of Agriculture in British Columbia.
“With a more rapid inhalation and exhalation, lack of these protective structures, and large volume of lung exchange with each breath, whales, dolphins, and porpoises are at an increased risk” of smoke exposure, he says.
Necropsies of the 46 dolphins that washed ashore dead following the BP oil spill also offer some insight into how wildfire smoke injures marine mammals, Field says. (Read how the BP oil spill is affecting wildlife, 10 years later.)
The dead dolphins had severe lung disease and degenerated adrenal glands—organs that regulate hormones, the immune system, responses to stress, and more. Scientists concluded this could have been caused by exposure to hydrocarbons from the smoke, because, in lab animals, exposure to PAHs can lead to similar adrenal atrophy and harm their reproductive systems. In humans and animals alike, the chemicals have been linked to various forms of cancer.
Smoke signals
It’s impossible to tell what most hurt the dolphins in the Gulf: breathing in the smoke when the spilled oil was burned off, ingesting oil through the food chain, or a combination of both, Field says.
Regardless, dolphins and porpoises are more likely to experience irritation of their airways and absorb more hydrocarbons than whales, as they tend to stay closer to shore and breathe more frequently than deep-diving mammals.
“Given that we know dolphin airways are probably more susceptible…to inhaling these particulates, it’s very likely that inhaling ash and particulates is going to cause damage,” she says.
Scientists have also looked at the impact of smoke and chemicals on sea otters, an endangered species in California.
A 2014 study of 39 California sea otters found that exposure to wildfire smoke and runoff—a toxic mix of sediment, metals, and chemicals that flows into water bodies adjacent to forest fires—weakened their immune systems. A follow-up study showed that 15 months later, the otters’ immune systems seemed to have recovered.
But the number of animals in the study was small, Field says, and the long-term impacts to the species remain unknown. (Learn how nature can bounce back from an oil spill.)
Research challenges
Conducting research on this topic is difficult, for the obvious reason that scientists can’t easily study live animals while a wildfire is raging, Raverty says.
“We can’t go out and live-capture animals for a variety of ethical and logistical reasons, so we rely on dead, stranded animals,” he says. For instance, scientists in British Columbia have examined more than 6,000 stranded marine mammals over a decade as part of a long-term project that has yielded data about the animals’ overall health, such as the levels and types of pollutants found in an animal’s tissue. (Learn how new diseases and toxins are harming marine life.)
Due to climate change, wildfire seasons in the western U.S. will only grow more extreme, and Raverty expects scientists will launch similar studies to investigate how wildfire smoke affects marine mammals.
The key, Field says, is following the animals—many of which are long-lived species—for decades.
“Effects of wildfires are often cumulative,” she says. “Things may not be obvious for years, so you have to have the longevity to keep those studies going.”
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